Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 - By Bill Fawcett Page 0,3

Milne Farley wrote a series of immensely popular novels featuring Myles Cabot, The Radio Man. A scientist sent via “radio waves” to the planet Venus, Cabot battled giant intelligent ants and rescued the inevitable beautiful princess. In the 1930s, Farley wrote The Radio Flyers and The Radio Gunrunners, although neither novel took place on Venus or involved Myles Cabot.

Abraham Merritt was perhaps the only writer of fantastic fiction whose popularity rivaled that of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Merritt wrote lost-race novels filled with exotic crumbling civilizations and near-magical super science. His heroines were not only beautiful but sensual, a remarkable achievement in otherwise prudish pulp magazines. A master of purple prose, Merritt created some of the most memorable villains in the pulps, ranging from Nimir, a gigantic stone face that dripped tears of gold, to Khalk’ru, an octopoid monster-god from another dimension that fed on human souls. Except for two short stories, all of Merritt’s fiction appeared in the Munsey pulps.

Along with Frank A. Munsey and Edgar Rice Burroughs, a third figure important to the development of pulp science fiction was Hugo Gernsback. An immigrant from Luxembourg, Gernsback started the world’s first mail-order business selling radio parts. By 1908, his catalog had evolved into the first real magazine about electronics and radio, Modern Electrics. In 1911, Gernsback serialized his magnum opus, a science fiction novel, Ralph 124C41+, in Modern Electrics. In the story, Gernsback made numerous predictions about future inventions, including a description and diagram of radar, a quarter-century before its actual appearance. In 1913, Gernsback began publishing Electrical Experimenter magazine, which in 1920 evolved into Science & Invention . The magazine ran one science fiction story per issue, with art done by Frank R. Paul, an architectural artist discovered some years earlier by Gernsback. The August 1923 issue of Science & Invention was dubbed “the scientifiction issue” and featured several science fiction short stories and serials, along with a space-suited man on the cover. The issue served as a trial balloon for Amazing Stories, the first all science fiction magazine, which Gernsback launched in April 1926.

The new magazine was a major success even though during its first two years Gernsback filled the issues mostly with reprints of stories by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Slowly, ever slowly, Amazing began to print new material. However, it wasn’t till his magazine published “The Skylark of Space” by E. E. Smith, Ph.D., that Amazing reached for the stars.

Dr. Smith wrote “space operas” filled with smart heroes, beautiful heroines, evil villains, and lots of spaceships. More important, Smith’s stories soared to distant planets, far outside the solar system. He was the author credited with opening the universe for science fiction.

The success of Amazing led to competition. Clayton Magazines began publishing Astounding Stories in January 1930 and attracted top authors with their word rate of two cents a word, three or four times better than what Gernsback offered. When Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, he immediately started two other SF pulps, Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories. Notable authors working for the early SF pulps included John W. Campbell Jr., Nat Schachner, John Taine, and Murray Leinster. All survived to contribute to the onrushing “Golden Age” of SF. Unfortunately, Stanley Weinbaum did not.

Weinbaum’s first story, “A Martian Odyssey,” was published in Wonder Stories for July 1934. The story, which told of a trek across the surface of Mars by a human astronaut accompanied by Tweel, an intelligent ostrichlike Martian, was written with style, grace, and humor. The aliens encountered on Mars were truly alien, and Tweel was a believable but definitely nonhuman character. Weinbaum was hailed as the first science fiction writer to write literate, intelligent science fiction. For the next two years, Weinbaum stories, each as good as the one before, poured from the writer’s typewriter in Milwaukee and into the pages of Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories. And then there was nothing.

Stanley Weinbaum died in surgery on December 14, 1935.

Childhood days were over. It was time for science fiction to grow up.

NEBULA AWARD BEST NOVELLA

THE SPACETIME POOL

CATHERINE ASARO

This is the second time Catherine Asaro has won a Nebula Award. The first was for her novel Quantum Rose. A dancer, Harvard Ph.D., and endlessly creative, Catherine combines physics and just about everything else in her many books and stories. She is always testing the boundaries in her writing and her winning novella, The Spacetime Pool, is no exception.

I

APPALACHIA

The hiker vanished.

Janelle peered at the distant hill. She could have sworn