"01 - Introduction A Guide to the Perplexed by Frederik Pohl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

INTRODUCTION:
A GUIDE TO
THE PERPLEXED

The business meetings of the Science Fiction Writers of America only happen a couple of times a year, and don't last more than two or three hours when they do. This is a good thing. They are pretty exhausting experiences.

It isn't because the people involved are so stubborn and individualistic . . . well, they are-but they're also pretty good people. Although the members of SFWA are scattered over dozens of states and a number of foreign countries, and it's rare for more than ten percent of them to turn up in one place at one time, still, you can usually find Joe Haldeman chain-smoking his Gauloises in about the third row, said Robert Silverberg sprawled gracefully over two or three seats near the door. The current president will be up at the lectern, getting ready to press the crown of thorns to his brow one more time and counting the days till his sentence expires. Right now the incumbent is gentle, wise Jack Williamson, but a dozen others have taken their turns in the barrel over the years. Most of them will be sitting somewhere toward the rear, smiling their contented smiles, knowing they won't have to chair an SFWA business meeting again. Grand Masters Heinlein, Simak and de Camp sit ready to offer elder-statesman wisdom when the young bloods get too feistily ensnarled in bickering and legislation. Some of us drum our fingers, waiting for the coffee urn to arrive. Others fiddle with papers, getting ready to deliver reports or demand them. There is a lot of sturdily warm friendship among SFWA members, and a lot of kidding around; but there's also a fair amount of tension as the standard scenario
unfolds: Committees report. Grievances are aired. The perennial troubling question of SFWA finances gets its regular discussion. Science fiction writers, by and large, are terrible bookkeepers-their gifts do not include fiscal administration. And then someone clears his throat, asks for the floor and proposes that it is really, after all, about time we made a few little changes in the rules for the Nebula Awards. All sorts of changes. Covering every aspect of them. And everyone groans, and we settle in for another round of the endless debate.

Of all time spent in SFWA meetings, and space used in SFWA publications, undoubtedly more has been devoted to the Nebulas than to any other single subject. The arguments have strained some of those sturdy friendships and alienated some useful members.

The award process itself is neither quick nor easy. All through the year SFWA members make recommendations of stories they've liked and think others should consider. Someone has to tabulate these and print the results in the ~SFWA Forum. Someone has to prepare ballots-two rounds of them, going out in time to reach SFWA members spread out over several million square miles of the Earth's surface. Someone has to prepare the handsome crystal awards themselves-they are expensive things, and tricky to handle. You can't ship them by air, because pressure differences can make them crumble. The collective expenditure of man and woman-hours that goes into each year's Nebula Awards could easily produce two or three extra science-fiction novels; and the endless worrying over the details of the rules uses up a lot of meeting time that could be spent much more pleasantly in conviviality.

So why do we do it?

Next time you find yourself chatting with an SFWA member you might ask him that question. Odds are he'll groan, and maybe swear a little, and at last say, "As far as I can tell, we don't have any choice."

The notion of handing out annual prizes for the best science-fiction stories has only been real for the past couple of decades. No one marked the great stories of the early Campbell years, or of Gernsback's pioneering era. Well, this is not really true, since certainly the readers did, and so did all the other writers who learned from them and grew

thereby. But there was no trophy to put on -Doc Smith's mantle for The Skylark of Space, or on A. E. Van Vogt's for Slan. There weren't any trophies to give, any more than there were Nobel Prizes for Shakespeare for Hamlet, or for Mark Twain for Huckleberry Finn.

There have always been some stories that stood out above the others, but usually that fact does not become evident at once. There is little doubt that the test of time is the truest measure of worth. Unfortunately, it does not become operative until a good deal of time has passed. Sometimes a great deal of time. Sometimes so much that the author has passed the point of being able to enjoy the results. (Or even of being alive.) From an author's point of view, that is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. It isn't all that good from the reader's, either. He would like some measure of which out of the flood of new books and stories are worth his attention, and that is not always easily determined.

To remedy these evils, awards were instituted among writers. * The Nebula was not the first science-fiction award. The Hugo, which is given each year by the World Science Fiction Convention, was inaugurated a decade earlier. But the Hugo is a fan award, and the writers wanted to do honor to their colleagues with one of their own. Taken together, the Hugos and the Nebulas are science fiction's equivalent of the Academy Awards and the Pulitzers. Sometimes they agree on which are the "best" stories. Just as often, they do not. But they are a quick test of which stories are, at least, worth considering seriously.

And such a guide is really needed, especially now. There are about a thousand science-fiction books published each year in America alone. No human being would want to read all of them. Some sort of clue as to merit is very important.

I should say that it seems particularly important to me because I am mindful of history. A quarter of a century ago, before Nebulas, before even the Hugo was well established, there was a publishing boom in science fiction. There were something like thirty-eight science-fiction magazines on the stands. Some were good, some were not, but they all looked more or less the same on the newsstand.

*For interested parties, there is no better source on Nebulas, Hugos and International Fantasy Awards than the annual history published and revised each year by Howard DeVore, the We of Dearborn Michigan.
It was a time, not unlike the present, in which a great many new people were discovering science fiction. Typically, old fan A would read a story and mention it to his non-fan friend B, who would perhaps himself read it, and like it and decide that maybe science fiction was worth reading.

So B would go to his corner newsstand, and behold! -there were all those magazines. Which one to buy? B usually was not sophisticated enough to know. He had not learned to distinguish the Analogs and Galaxys and F&SFs from the derivative, often meretricious Brand Xs. A lot of the Brand X magazines were pretty poor. Many of them were made up out of rejects from the good ones. Some were even worse, written by contract on a gross-weight basis, with editors who had never heard of science fiction until their publishers noticed the sales figures of the established magazines-and often did not care to learn. So if new convert B happened to pick up one of the sleazes, the chances were good that he would not like it at all. And there, all too often, went a new convert.

The same risk exists today, and one of the safeguards for readers lies in the Nebula process. If you see that a book has won a Nebula or a Hugo, you can't really be sure that you will rate it as high as the award voters did. Tastes differ. But you can at least be sure that there is something about it that is special. It may be the idea, the literary style, the effective use of innovative techniques. It may even simply be that the voters feel that the book's author has been long overdue for an award. But it is at least some guide for the perplexedand it is to provide that guide, even more than to honor. our own colleagues, that year after year we go through the same labor and the same strife to achieve some sort of consensus.

The stories in this volume represent this year's consensus. I hope you'll enjoy them.

-Frederik Pohl

Red Bank, New Jersey