MOM SAID IT WAS OKAY

Guest grump Sue Denim vents her spleen on the crop of '83:

This year's Nebula Ballot looked like a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read. Mom and Dad really liked Connie Willis' "Firewatch" last year; it's about this student that gets all self-righteous and rebellious and everything, but it turned out Father knows best after all.

This year Mom and Dad really like STARTIDE RISING by David Brin and Greg Benford's AGAINST INFINITY. STARTIDE RISING especially; I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of "Golly's" and blushes and grins. And aren't those dolphins cute? They talk in poetry that sounds like it came right out of READER'S DIGEST. They'd rather hear that somebody "muttered an oath" or came out with some made-up word like "Ifni!" than be told that they really said "shit" or "shove it up your ass, motherfucker."

No sex, of course, or maybe just a noise in the night in somebody else's tent. And it has a nice moral, too -- something Mom and Dad have always known, though it hasn't always seemed that way these last couple of decades -- that WE are better than THEY are, and that's enough to pull us out of any trouble, particularly when THEY are slimy alien scum.

The Benford book is scary in spots -- this Ganymede place they're trying to fix up seems almost REAL in places, and this terraforming isn't anything like the way Uncle Frank went about fixing up his cabin by the lake. But everything's okay, because the hero, Manuel (isn't that a foreign name?) is everything they would want a son of theirs to be: a perfect neutered little adult. He doesn't curse or masturbate or even THINK about girls.

As for that weird alien artifact, well, if we can't understand it, we can always try and kill it. That seems like a good level-headed approach.

Mom and Dad like Kim Stanley Robinson's "Black Air" for novelette. It's so nice to read a straightforward historical story, like that Frank G. Slaughter used to write, and it's just too bad he had to tack on that fantasy mumbo jumbo at the end just so he could sell it. But then that nice Joanna Russ did the same thing last year with "Souls," and isn't it nice that she's not mad any more and writing unpleasant books like THE FEMALE MAN?

Mom and Dad are looking forward to the 1984 Nebulas, because they're sure that nice Mr. Robinson is going to be up for their favorite book so far this year, THE WILD SHORE. They like to see the OLD stories, and what could be more comfortable and familiar than living on the farm after they drop the Big One? Nope, nothing scary here. The hero tried to tell Mom and Dad that he's not a virgin, but they know better. He never seems that interested in sex anyway.

Mostly they like the ending, where Henry discovers that he is a *WRITER*. It seems to agonize him terribly to write, but he is just so wonderfully sensitive. And Mom and Dad love the moral of the book, which is just like that Judy Garland movie: "There's no place like home."

Maybe the people who vote for the Nebulas are still afraid of their Moms and Dads; maybe they're not Moms and Dads themselves. That would explain why they don't vote for books with real ideas and real sex and real language in them.

And yes, Mom and Dad, there were still books like that being written, even in 1983. John Calvin Batchelor wrote one called THE BIRTH OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF ANTARCTICA that was not only real SF but real literature, at one and the same time. Rudy Rucker's THE SEX SPHERE is witty and stylish and takes on sexual stereotyping with breathtaking candor. Even Paul Preuss, whose BROKEN SYMMETRIES tries hard to be a soap opera and a spy story, still makes big league points about the way politicians use scientists and people use each other.

These people are going to keep writing this sort of book no matter how many Nebulas Brin and Robinson and their ilk manage to rack up. Watch out, Mom and Dad. They're out to get you.