Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 Part 20

Often we even find ourselves light-years ahead, in danger of losing sight of science all together.

The distance that separates the dreamers and the facilitators hardly matters. What matters is our role in this relationship. And the part we have chosen to play is that of prophet. With our stories, we walk before science with a metaphorical lantern, guiding, inspiring, illuminating the possible destinations. And then, spurred by these seductive vapors, science does go on, choosing some of our possible futures to make real, discarding others as-at least for now-either impossibly ridiculous or sadly out of reach.

Some of the paths turn out to be dead ends. But others lead to the Moon.

How the world loves science fiction at times such as those, when we turn out to have been right! The world sure does love its winners, and we've hit the bull's-eye many times. Hugo Gernsback would have been proud of us. But to be embraced only when science delivers on science fiction's predictions seems a little hollow to me, as if the general public needs to be bribed with successes in order to give us their love. In literature, as in life, I'd prefer my love to be a little less one-sided and a little more unconditional.

I don't want science fiction to be loved only when we look forward with it, before we can possibly know which stories got it right and which did not, but also when we're looking back at it from a further future.

But how can we create a work that is not just for its own time but also for all time, when so many generations have gotten it wrong? At one time, phlogiston was widely believed to be the true matter of the universe, and atomic theory was seen as just a myth. How are we to know at any given moment whether, by arming our futures with technological and scientific details, we will be seen by later generations as prescient-or just plain silly?

We can't. As much as we dream of time machines, we are too much of our own time. Which means that like it or not, some of our hardest science fiction will ooze to mere putty in the hands of the future.

Some will call it heresy, but I've come to see that the only futures that the future will be able to stomach will be the soft ones. Rigorous, but soft nonetheless.

So I say, All hail the black box. What powers the ships hurtling across the galaxies, the engines that keep towering cities floating high above the alien seas below, or the mechanical brains that motivate a race of robots? Does it truly matter? The hardest of SF writers want to worry about how they and other miracles work. But those who worry instead about how what works affects us are likelier to last into the future as more than museum curiosities. That is why though I enjoy hard SF, and have certainly bought much of it as an editor, I worry that it can only be written for the writer's generation alone, and so I do not practice it when I wear my own writer's hat.

That is why I choose the black box. What's inside? Who knows? Each generation will choose differently in filling it. Sometimes there have been wires inside, or vacuum tubes, or printed circuitry. Who knows what the future will bring and with what technology our descendants will choose to inhabit the black boxes that we build in our stories? That is why I only need to be made to believe. I do not need so much information as to be capable of building it. Verisimilitude should be enough, for, after all, we do not seek out reality itself in fiction but rather the semblance of reality.

We cannot truly blueprint the future, only dream it. And that in itself should be enough of a reward. Or else we will end up speaking a language that will be coherent only to the people already in the room.

There is, of course, a downside for those who choose to write other than the hardest sort of SF. Thispitfall comes from certain subsets of our audience and of our peers. There are those who will say that by focusing on the affect rather than the effect, we are embracing ignorance, that we are "less than," or indeed, not writing science fiction at all.

But that is a small price to pay for the accompanying joys.

This I know: The future will bring miracles, and the world will change because of it. And the world will change whether those miracles come powered by steam or electricity or atomics or some method as yet unknown. The miracles themselves are only the catalysts for the sense of wonder that future folks will feel. And it is that which we must examine.

Or else we shall suffer as most of our spiritual forebears have done, and our ghosts will watch as all the fruits of our field turn into artifacts that to our children are nothing more than quaint.

SF HUMOR: A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS.

(condensed fromWriters Bootymagazine)

Terry Bisson Terry Bisson is a multiple award winner for his quirky, intelligent SF.

For only pennies a day, you can be writing and selling SF humor from your own home. Sound too good to be true? Read on! A necessarily partial phone survey (11.43 percent don't have working phones, and 8.54 percent don't answer intelligibly) of SFWA's humor writers shows the top five earning considerably more than a dollar a day (how does $1.39 sound to you?) while the average ($0.39) still holds a comfortable lead over the related but low-paying genres of Industrial Erotica, Adventure Travel, and Trash.

SF is unique among America's low-flying lits in that it is almost one-fourth humor: 23.45 percent funny, to be precise. This is considerably less than Romantic Sports which is almost 30 (29.23) percent funny, but well above both Romance (18.24) and Sports (15.32). Humor itself, the flagship as it were, is only 51.76 percent funny, and that average is artificially inflated by Mark Twain, who would be a SFWA member if he weren't so dead.

Much of SF's considerable smile factor is due to the high-spirited young writers it attracts. SF and Fantasy together induct an average of almost sixteen new scribblers a year (15.42), of whom more than six (6.19) are funny. Let's look at a typical year-2001. Nationally, 118 writers went pro that year, an above-average eighteen of whom were picked up by SFWA, which handles the draft for the related fields of SF, Fantasy and Low Slipstream. Of these rookies, seven were funny, four almost funny, and two were just weird. By way of comparison, the mainstream gained forty-one new pros, of whom only six were a little funny and two were actually depressing.

Who says you can't tell a book by its cover? The high risibility-index of SF is due in large part to appearances. Many (254 total) SF writers dress funny, often intentionally. There are no gender distinctions here with the women being fully (99.44 percent) as funny-looking as the men. Author photosare of course the "wings" that bring these laughs to the readers, which is why trade books are not as funny as hardcovers, and ma.s.s market paperbacks get less funny every day.

It's not all personnel, however. The impressive display of humor in modern SF is due in large measure to tradition. From the high comedy ofFrankenstein to the rollicking chase scenes ofDune (who can forget those goofy worms?), humor has played an important role in SF. And it's becoming more rather than less important: of the 1,786,873 dialogue interchanges added to the literature sinceApollo 11 , fully 987,543 have contained puns, jokes, or wry rejoinders, and this is discounting the narrative drollery (more troublesome to quantify) that is a staple of the field.

But tradition, though honored, can play only a supporting role in an innovative genre. Many of the laughs in SF (33.78 percent of the total) have to do with the material itself. SF is quite correctly considered a literature of ideas, and ideas are funny, at least some of them; and even the ones that aren't funny are funnier than manners, morals, or money, the mainstream obsessions that still (go figure!) account for 64.87 percent of America's printed matter.

It must be noted that within the linked fields of Fantasy and SF, the playing field is far from level. Robots and rocket ships are almost always funny (68.98 percent of the time), but monsters? Not! Elves are not funny at all (perhaps because they try so hard). Aliens are funnier than unicorns by a factor of ten, and castles are funny only to those who have not lived in them for five or more consecutive days.

Of course, a career in SF doesn't automatically bring laughs, except from the immediate family. If a robot whines in the forest and no one laughs, is it funny? The SF humorist needs an agent, and SF agents are a special breed (65.67 percent special, in fact) known for their ability to laugh at as well as with their clients. The best of them (32.65 percent) actively seek sarcastic rejections, and the worst (27.87 percent, allowing for overlap) like to receive small dead animals in the mail.

These agents can't afford to waste their time on the trade mags likeLocus andSF Chronicle , which rarely print humor (1.456 laughs per page, not counting ads), nor on the all-humor mags likeThe New Yorker anda.n.a.log , which are written in-house by lunatics. For speedy, top-penny sales, SF deal-makers go straight for the prestige 'zines likeAsimov's ,F&SF , andSciFiction, whose editors are so eager to please that they have been known (987 doc.u.mented incidents) to laugh at their own jokes.

Agents can't do it all, though, which brings us to the most powerful weapon in any SF writer's a.r.s.enal: the personal touch. Successful SF and Fantasy pros understand that the best time to make an editor laugh is after midnight. Between ten and two a.m. is best, when all but the most hopeless (three at last count) are home in bed. Remember to keep it light: the last thing an editor wants is a collect call from a writer who runs out of funny stories after only twenty minutes on the phone!

So now you know the ropes. Isn't it about time you put on your funny hat, powered up your word processor, and joined the ranks of the SF pros who are turning laughs into dollars at the rate of pennies a day?

CONTEMPORARY FANTASY.

Andy Duncan Andy Duncan's story "The Chief Designer" won the 2002 Sturgeon Award.

For me, the great lure of fantasy as a reader and as a writer, is the chance to explore the trulyweird -weirder even than the most way-out science fiction stories, which must necessarily ride, in relativecomfort, the rails of scientific, technological, and social extrapolation. By contrast, the fantasy story is free to set off on foot without a map, whistling a jaunty tune as dark clouds roll in from the west, shadows reach out from alleyways, street signs become few and far between, and the first fat drops splash down the back of the neck: unnerving, yes, but exhilarating, too.

The two great fantasy magazines of the early twentieth century got it right in their very t.i.tles:Weird Tales andUnknown . The t.i.tles of three terrific recent collections nail it, too:Stranger Things Happen, Tales of Pain, andWonder, andMagic Terror . And all of the above exemplify a relatively new approach to fantasy, finding the uncanny not just in the pastoral long ago and far away but also next door, down the street, around the corner, the day before yesterday.

Today, the field of contemporary fantasy is full of wild talents, visionaries, writers of the marvelously and necessarily weird-and in lo, what numbers!Never before have first-rate contemporary fantasists so many and so varied written at the peak of their powers simultaneously . To name a few favorites among them is to leave out too many, but even the most preliminary list indicates that these are extraordinary times in the field of contemporary fantasy, as in the world at large.

Consider the past few years. Kelly Link's marvelous and indescribable collectionStranger Things Happen declares a new genre, one so far occupied only byStranger Things Happen and perhaps by nothing else, ever, at least until Link's next book comes along. FromThe Sandman throughAmerican G.o.ds , Neil Gaiman has demonstrated an uncanny ability not only to channel and revive old myths but to create new ones. The novels of Jonathan Carroll-The Wooden Seabeing a recent example-never stop opening doors in the reader's head, not even after the book itself is closed.

The artists, aesthetes, and angst-ridden adolescents who compellingly people Elizabeth Hand'sBlack Light andLast Summer at Mars Hill are as fabulous as gryphons and as timely as the tabloids. John Crowley, who tempts even the hardheaded to retrieve the wordgenius from the dustbin, wroteLittle, Big and then, instead of resting on the seventh day, just kept going, into the majestic series that includes, most recently,Daemonomania . Tim Powers'sDeclare reads like an Indiana Jones vehicle written by John Le Carre or, in other words, like nothing else in this world, but it also manages to be an epicZhivago -style love story chockablock with jaw-dropping notions, my favorite being the revelation of a sinister second Ark that shadowed Noah's. How's that for High Concept?

Peter Straub is the best horror writer since Herman Melville. "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff," the highlight of his collectionMagic Terror , demonstrates anew that fantasy need not include a single supernatural element. Don't ask me; askhim . Caitlin R. Kiernan, author ofTales of Pain and Wonder , is a mesmerizing stylist with an unerring sense of place;Anne Rice's New Orleans has nothing on Kiernan's Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan is also a Goth queen and a mosasaur expert. How cool is that? Another prose magician is Jeffrey Ford, who managed to get his collectionThe Fantasy Writer's a.s.sistant and Other Stories and his novelThe Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque published at the same time, the show-off.

See what I mean? I'm running out of s.p.a.ce, and I haven't even mentioned Graham Joyce, Nalo Hopkinson, Ray Vukcevich, Glen David Gold, Philip Pullman, China Mieville, Ted Chiang, Alan Moore, Louise Erdrich, Steven Millhauser, Lisa Goldstein . . .

(many more names go here) . . . or J. K. Rowling, whose multivolume Harry Potter saga, when complete, will make all the grumblers, potshotters, and naysayers look even sillier than they look now.

Whence this explosion of cutting-edge contemporary fantasy, this embarra.s.sment of riches? Well.

Tolkien famously argued that a chief function of "fairy-stories" was Escape, which he both lauded as aheroic act and capitalized, as he did "its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt." Most of us don't share Tolkien's Disgust at the modern world; he went on, in the next paragraph of that famous essay, to Condemn electric streetlamps. But as I write this in summer 2002, I can think of any number of things we writers and readers might justifiably be Escaping from these days-into the pastoral long ago and far away, no doubt, but also into more contemporary realms: our world, straight up, with a twist. The long-term benefits of this literary and psychological trend, if it continues, are interesting to contemplate, but it's late, and I'm sleepy. After a good night's rest and a great many dreams, informed by all those writers named above, I will rise and mow the lawn, and then come inside and do my part: I will write a fantasy story.

TRADITIONAL FANTASY.

Mindy L. Klasky Relative newcomer Mindy L. Klasky has been making a splash in fantasy with herGla.s.swright series.

"Traditional fantasy": Readers outside of the speculative fiction crowd often regard the phrase with suspicion, their reactions ranging from polite confusion (from people who have no idea what is included in the genre) to knowing leers (from people who a.s.sume that "fantasies" are hidden in plain brown wrappers, available only behind the sales counter). Nevertheless, the past few years have introduced millions of people to traditional fantasy through the cinematic blockbusters ofHarry Potter andThe Lord of the Rings . As if in reaction to those media visions (and, in some cases, the traditional novels on which they were based), written traditional fantasy has pushed new boundaries, exploring intimate relationships between characters and focusing on s.e.xual ident.i.ty and power as major tools of storytelling.

The juggernaut of traditional fantasy rolls onward, continuing to appeal to children (both chronological youngsters and nostalgic adults). The first four books in theHarry Potter series proved so popular that theNew York Times Bestseller list created a new category of "Children's Literature" to open up slots for some other-any other-novels.The Lord of the Rings and its prequel,The Hobbit , have occupied four of the top ten slots onLocus magazine's ma.s.s market paperback bestseller list for the majority of the past few years. People who have never dreamed of reading in the speculative fiction ghetto have proudly boasted of their literary excursions into cinematic "novelizations"-novels that have, in some cases, been available for more than half a century.

The public seems to embrace these media fantasies for the archetypes they present-the struggles of good against evil, the stories of growth from childhood to adulthood, the hope of magic in our daily affairs. And yet many adults have a desire to push beyond those childhood dreams, to edge past the old struggles. There is a movement in print fantasy to confront new challenges, to address more complex problems, to create new solutions. Many of these novels address the uniquely adult world of complex s.e.xuality to explore their new parameters.

Anne Bishop'sBlack Jewels Trilogy exemplifies the new, adult aspect of traditional fantasy. The dominant race of her world, the Blood, are virile vampires, humanlike creatures whose s.e.xuality is central to their means of communication. Women often control men, holding them as s.e.xual slaves and forcing them to serve as unpaid gigolos. Men can be controlled by magical rings-channels that convey great pain-placed directly on their genitals. Witches-the strongest and most dangerous of women-can be destroyed if they are deflowered by brutal or careless men. Throughout the novels, s.e.xuality is the currency of power, a driving force that sweeps up characters, the plot, and the author's themes.

Similarly, in Lynn Flewelling'sThe Bone Doll's Twin s.e.xuality is twined about the core of power. In thatwell-received novel, a prophesied princess is hidden from her murderous royal uncle, disguised as a boy.

The disguise, however, goes far beyond the traditional fairy-tale vision of a girl wearing pants and clipping her hair. Flewelling's princess is physically transformed into a male child; in a blood rite, her body is manipulated through magic. The resulting tale traces the confused princess's friendships and feudal relationships, yielding a complex and fascinating examination of gender politics, all wrapped up in an ostensibly traditional fantasy story of succession, usurpation, and feudal loyalty.

Even fiction that is generally marketed to children in the United States has been shaped by the examination of s.e.xual roles and mores. Phillip Pullman's acclaimed trilogy, which began withThe Golden Compa.s.s and continued withThe Subtle Knife , concluded withThe Amber Spygla.s.s . In that novel, an alien race is dying because it has lost the secret of its reproduction. Two human children are enlisted in a battle between good and evil that spans several worlds. Their innocent discovery of their own s.e.xual natures is crucial to the resolution of the novel's intertwined plots.

In each of the examples cited above, s.e.xuality is a major element of the story, woven into the plot, the characters, and even the physical setting. It is not a fillip added to a tale to otherwise attract adult readers. It is not a lurid sidelight, designed to bring in a few prurient purchasers. Rather, it is a crucial element, vital and essential to the storytelling.

As in the past, traditional fantasy provides readers a chance to explore the meaning of their worlds through very different societies. Some aspects of the genre remain stable: the vast majority of novels are published in series. The vast majority of fantasy works contain magic, with strict rules about its application and usefulness. The vast majority of traditional fantasy explores essential conflicts between forces of good and forces of evil.

And yet the field is expanding, growing, defining itself to exist in a field separate from the media, separate from the exuberant-if occasionally simplistic-youthful audience attracted by cinema. Traditional fantasy is growing up, shaping itself for grown-up readers with grown-up concerns.

DARK FANTASY.

Ellen Datlow Venerable SF editor Ellen Datlow currently edits the online magazine SCI FICTION.

I've been interested in dark literature all my life. As a child I read everything around the house from Bulfinch's Mythology to Guy de Maupa.s.sant's and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction. I watched the originalTwilight Zone television series as soon as my parents would let me stay up late. Later, I readThe Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural with stories by Ray Russell, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Gahan Wilson, and a host of other names familiar to horror readers, and Richard Matheson's Shock collections. Those are the books that hooked me on horror.

I still read a lot of dark fiction-horror/dark fantasy-as my reading for the annualYear's Best Fantasy and Horror , of course, but also because I love this subgenre of fantastic literature. Just as in science fiction, there are arguments as to what const.i.tutes " horror"-is itonly supernatural fiction, or does it encompa.s.s psychological horror? And what about terror fiction, crime fiction? I and other aficionados of the dark literary tradition embrace a dictum comparable to Damon Knight's: "If I as an editor point to it, it's SF." My personal rule of thumb is, if it's dark enough-if I as a horror reader and editor read a piece of fiction that gives me a certain frisson, promotes a specific unease or feeling of dread while reading it-I'll call it horror. Horror is the only literature that is defined by its effect on the reader rather than onits subject matter. Which is why great science fiction cla.s.sics such asFrankenstein by Mary Sh.e.l.ley, "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, and great psychological horror works by Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson (both of whom also have published supernatural fiction) fit comfortably into the horror field.

Horror has gone through growing pains similar to SF's, although unlike SF it originally began as part of the mainstream, and in the 1980s, as a result of Stephen King's popularity, it was made into a marketing category. And because many publishers decided they needed a horror line with a set number of slots to fill, a lot of bad horror was written and published, saturating a market that really wanted more Stephen King but not necessarily more horror. The horror lines crashed and burned relatively quickly, and soon few commercial publishers would touch horror-overtly-although a flurry and then an avalanche of literary/crime/psychological horror novels were published throughout the nineties.

But unlike SF, horror has never really had more than one or two professional magazines.Weird Tales , although publishing dark fantasy for many years, does not publish what I consider horror. The difference?

A matter of degree.Twilight Zone Magazine and its sisterNight Cry existed for relatively short periods of time. Some of the SF magazines have published and continue to publish a bit of horror. But out of this vacuum the small press grew.

The proliferation of desktop publishing and the Internet have made it possible for anyone to self-publish or publish their friends on a shoestring budget. This innovation has produced some quality magazines and webzines and a lot of dreck. The worst problem facing the horror field today is being able to distinguish between quality and junk. I don't mean entertaining junk. I mean stuff like hairb.a.l.l.s caught in a cat's throat. A lot of small-press horror magazines are just abominable, though I know the editorsmust believe in what they're doing. But not everyone can or should be an editor. Editing is a calling-not something you just dabble in-if you want to produce anything of consistent quality. I think that the young and clueless are too caught up in the gore of it.

Here we come to the negative side of today's horror field. Although horror should elicit emotion from the reader, what's forgotten by the purveyors of a tiny subgenre that's been screaming for attention-gross out/extreme horror-is that they're taking the easy way out. Eliciting disgust and repelling readers might be a charge in the short run but in the long run it's self-defeating, a stylistic choice more than a thematic one-and a dead end. They've left behind the idea that the gore needs to be integrated into a story in which you care about what's happening. They've forgotten that gore for gore's sake becomes numbing.

This sort of horror has a limited audience within the horror community and an even tinier audience outside the horror community. I believe that most of the writers writing it now will tire of it and move on-or stop writing. And if they don't move on? That just means they have nothing to say.

But whenever I feel discouraged by the shouting, I know I can cleanse my literary palate by reading the work of newer writers who excite me-voices of the dark short story such as Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, Tia V. Travis, Marion Arnott, Tim Lebbon, and Gemma Files-and by reading the dark stories and novellas by some of my favorite writers, such as Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, Paul McAuley, Lucius Shepard, P. D. Cacek, Kim Newman, Terry Lamsley, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe, and a host of others who are creating chilling dark fiction with verve, a graceful use of language, and imagination. And over the years, while reading for theYear's Best Fantasy and Horror series, I've read brilliant horror novels by Stewart O'Nan (A Prayer for the Dying), Jack O'Connell (Word Made Flesh), China Mieville (King RatandPerdido Street Station ), Janette Turner Hospital (OysterandThe Last Magician ), and everything by Jonathan Carroll.

Whenever you have so many writers (and others who I didn't mention for reasons of s.p.a.ce) producing and publishing their best work, you've got a healthy field.ALTERNATE HISTORY Harry Turtledove Harry Turtledove has set his award-winning novels in many alternate times and places.

A friend of mine once claimed that alternate history was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don't know that I'd go that far-and I do suspect I could get my face slapped for experimenting-but the subgenre certainly does have its attractions.

First, of course, are the pleasures any good story offers: evocative writing, interesting characters, and a well-made plot. Right behind those is the peculiar fillip you get only from science fiction: seeing if the author's extrapolation from the change he or she has made to the so-called real world is plausible and persuasive. Though alternate history changes the past rather than the present or the future, it usually plays by the same sort of rules as the rest of science fiction once the change is made.

But alternate history also has a special kick all its own. It looks at the world in a funhouse mirror no other form of fiction can match. In it, we can look at not only fictional characters but real characters in fictional settings, bouncing what we already know about them off the paddles of a new pinball machine. If the Spanish Armada had won, what would have happened to Shakespeare's career? If the Union had lost, what would have happened to Abraham Lincoln's? If Muhammad hadn't founded Islam, what might he have done? And what would the world look like then?

Most science fiction projects onto a blank screen. You know only what the author tells you about the world and its inhabitants. Like mainstream historical fiction, alternate history a.s.sumes you know more; some of the people and situations involved will be familiar to you ahead of time. But, where historical fiction deals with pieces of the world as it was, alternate history demands more of its readers: it asks them to look into that funhouse mirror and see things as they might have been.

And it can do more than that. It can turn whole societies upside down. If a plague completely destroyed Western Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, what would the world have looked like afterwards?

Could there have been an industrial revolution? If blacks had enslaved whites in North America rather than the other way around, how might they have treated them? (Reversing roles and looking at consequences is one of the things science fiction does particularly well.) If fascism or communism had triumphed during the turbulent century just past, how might things look?

From a writer's point of view, there's one other joy to doing alternate history: the research. If you aren't into digging up weird things for the fun of digging them up, this probably isn't the subgenre for you. If you are, though, you can transpose Newton and Galileo into Central Asia, make obscure references that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your readers will never notice but that will horrify or crack up the hundredth, or make all your readers feel as if they're looking at a trompe l'oeil painting. Perhaps the finest compliment I ever got was from a reviewer who said a novel of mine made him think he was reading an accurate portrayal of a world that in fact never existed.

Jeremiads? What goes wrong in alternate history is the flip side of what goes right. Bad writing and inept characterization can and too often do afflict any fiction. But the subgenre's besetting sins are failure of research and failure of extrapolation. A few years back, there was a novel (marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF) that had to do with Jefferson Davis's reelection bid after a Southern victory in the Civil War. Lovely-except that the Confederate Const.i.tution limited the president of the CSA to a single six-year term. There's another book about a world where the Romans conquered Germany and theEmpire survived into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it's also a world where Roman society never changed even though the Empire had an industrial revolution . . . and a world where, despite the immense changes a successful conquest and a.s.similation of Germany would have caused, Constantine still gets born three centuries after the breakpoint and still plays a role recognizably similar to the one he had in real history.

Suspension of disbelief is probably harder to pull off in alternate history than in most other forms of fiction, not least because you're playing in part with what your readers already know. If they thinkShe'd never act that way, not even under those changed circ.u.mstances, because she did thus-and-so in the real world orEven if they had invented Silly Putty then, that doesn't mean we'd all be going around with hula hoops twenty years later , you've lost them. Once disbelief comes crashing down, a steroid-laced weightlifter can't pick it up again.

Done well, alternate history is some of the most thought-provoking, argument-inducing fiction around. It also often inspires those who read it to go find out what really happened, which isn't a bad thing, either.

Done not so well, it reminds people how painfully true Sturgeon's Law is. And I expect we'll all go on arguing about what is good and what's not so good and why or why not for a long, long time to come.

FILM AND TELEVISION.

Michael Ca.s.sutt Michael Ca.s.sutt successfully writes both SF and television scripts.

In my increasingly distant youth, a science fiction or fantasy film was a rarity, either a low-budget wonder that happened to sneak out of Hollywood early one morning or, like2001 , a major studio event that got made only because a powerful director wouldn't take no for an answer.

Now, a year into Kubrick and Clarke's millennium, five or six of the ten top-grossing motion pictures of all time are science fiction or fantasy, depending on what megablockbuster has opened lately. SF and fantasy are part of the motion picture landscape-a lucrative part.

Television is also our playground, if you believe a recentUSA Today poll, in which baby boomers named The Twilight Zone andStar Trek as two of their top three favorite series of all time. More recently, several generations ofStar Trek sequels have had long, loving runs-Next Generation, Deep s.p.a.ce Nine,Voyager, and nowEnterprise . Intriguing series such asBabylon 5 andMax Headroom have come and gone.The X-Files lasted for nine seasons.Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still kicking satanic b.u.t.t.

Farscape sails on through its peculiar universe, low-rated but critically approved.

What is there to complain about? Well, for one thing, most SF or fantasy films and television are still written and produced by mainstream talents, not by SF writers who have published in the magazines or written novels. (Babylon 5'sJ. Michael Straczynski is the notable exception.) Which means that the cutting-edge concepts on display inAsimov's ,a.n.a.log , orInterzone don't make it to the screen. Well, make that rarely: there was this movie calledThe Matrix . . .

It may be that cutting-edge SF is, by its nature, limited to a more elite (which is to say, smaller) audience.

Look at the finalists for the Nebula script category, as selected by the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:X-Men (based on the famed Marvel comic book), the wonderful Chinese fantasyCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , the Coen Brothers...o...b..other, Where Are Thou?and (fromBuffy the Vampire Slayer ) Joss Whedon's television script "The Body."

Four fantasies. If you wanted to be tough about it, you could saythree fantasies...o...b..other is a musical comedy that continues the Coen Brothers' exploration of the American yokel.

The Spielbergposthumous Kubrick collaboration,A.I. , based on material by Brian Aldiss and Ian Watson, and emerging from the core of traditional science fiction, didn't make the cut. Nor was it particularly successful, certainly not by Spielbergian standards. It's not hard to see why: the treatment of the subject matter was slow and obvious. Worse, Kubrick's cold, unflinching, and unforgiving view of human nature fits with Spielberg's warmth and sentimentality like a shot of gin with a slice of tiramisu.

Yuck.

Perhaps the most rigorously traditional and successful SF film or television production of 2001 was Sci Fi Channel's miniseriesDune , adapted and directed by John Harrison from the cla.s.sic Frank Herbert novel.

It was not as artistic as David Lynch's critically battered (yet, by some, secretly appreciated) 1984 feature film, but it made more sense, helped, no doubt, by a six-hour running time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only prime-time drama series to approach the very mainstreamWest Wing in having a clear writer's voice, suffered somehow in moving from the WB to UPN for fall 2001. It would require more moral character than I possess to give WB network execs credit forBuffy 's success; perhaps Whedon and his talented staff are tired or, with the spin-offAngel series, stretched too thin.

Enterprise, which is simultaneously a follow-on toVoyager and a prequel to the original series, premiered strongly in fall 2001, though it has yet to become "appointment" television. Well,Next Generation andDeep s.p.a.ce Nine took two seasons to find themselves.Enterprise has the outlandish luxury of a five-year, 120- episode commitment.

Syndicated science fiction continued to fill Sat.u.r.day afternoons, with varying degrees of success.Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda prospered in its second season;Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict , ran out of gas in its fifth. The superhero series.m.u.tant X arrived, aimed squarely at the audience that enjoyed theX-Men movie but was impatient for the sequel.