Sunday, March 27, 2005

Gernsback and I, and the Call of Nature

My odd little metafiction, "Biographical Notes to
'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum", is on the Hugo ballot. It's competing with amazing works by Chris Rowe, Kelly Link, and Paolo Bacigalupi. (The Flynn may be amazing too, but I haven't read it; actually, I haven't read the Link either, but I can say with confidence that it's amazing because everything Kelly writes is amazing).

(And David Moles -- who nagged and cajoled me to write and then submit that story, and did brilliant editing on it, including goading me to create the attempt at a Hegelian synthesis (or third alternative?) of worldviews at the end, is up for the Campbell award as well. Shout-outs also to Mr. Kelly and Mr. Denton on that ballot, both of whom have kindly taken me under their broad, pterodactyl-like wings on many occasions. And to the incomparable Mr. Stross, the mighty Ms. Bear, the surreal Mr. Picacio, the doughty Mr. Robeson, and Morgan, Datlow, Dozois, Van Gelder and Groppi... at this rate I will know everyone on the ballot in a few years...)

Also, the British science magazine Nature asked me to write a very short story (800 words), of "technological SF, set in the next 50 years", for the last page of the magazine (they're running a series of them). I sent 'em one, and they accepted it.

I am fascinated by my psychological reaction: this much success is making me acutely nervous. I was very comfortable with the notion of someday being on the Hugo and Nebula ballots as kind of a vague, happy ambition, which could hover in the future, casting beams of beatific light on the present, and where I could imagine it as a blissful return to the unmarred integrity of Being, to when I was, say, four years old and the most important creature in the universe and everyone I knew adored and celebrated me. (And Nature, you know, never occured to me)

Now that I am actually living through my fifteen minutes, I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I mean, holy crap. The Nebula ballot was one thing; I could just barely enjoy that, though it was on the border of painful. But this! Come on now! Stop this carousel, I want to get off!

I hope I will soon calm down enough to actually enjoy it.