Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 Read Online Free Page A

the wind comes at me, cold and smelling of snow. A name, over and over and over again.
    Farewell , Narkissos said, and again Echo sighed and whispered, Farewell .

NEBULA AWARD, BEST NOVELLA
     
    BURN
     

JAMES PATRICK KELLY
     
    J ames Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, audioplays, and planetarium shows. With John Kessel he is coeditor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The New Cyberpunk Anthology . His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice. He writes a column on the Internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. In 2007, he launched James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible, a podcast that will feature him reading fifty-two stories.
    Here’s what he has to say about the genesis of “Burn”:
 
    I can’t claim that it was inevitable that I would write “Burn.” Many years ago my little novel began to accrete around a grudge I had against one of our literary Founding Fathers, Henry David Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t why I wrote “Burn.” As I contemplated this project, one of its principal attractions was the lure of doing research into forest firefighting, a subject that is at once intrinsically fascinating and way obscure. Lolling around libraries paging through books that haven’t been checked out since 1975 is one of my principal joys as a writer. In addition, I could find very little fiction about forest firefighting, and none in genre, which meant that I’d have the territory pretty much to myself. But fire wasn’t the reason I wrote “Burn.” Of course, like so many of my fellow skiffy writers, I’d been wrestling with the problem of the singularity, and writing about a human enclave in a posthuman galaxy seemed like a challenge that was within my range. But once again, that wasn’t why I wrote “Burn.”
    The fact is that Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications cajoled me into signing a contract for a thirty-thousand-word novella by telling me I could write pretty much whatever I wanted. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would’ve spent the end of 2004 and early 2005 on short fiction, as had been my habit for almost a decade. I signed on thinking how pleasant it would be to have a new book that wasn’t a short story collection. However, I wasn’t at all sure that I could sustain a narrative over thirty thousand words, after too many years away from the long form. At the time I told myself that if worse came to worst, I could churn out twenty-two to twenty-five thousand words and hand in a manuscript with a large font and wide margins. And so, by giving myself permission to fail, I was able to begin.
    Years ago I had made a note about the curious incident of the forest fire that Henry David Thoreau started. You can read some of Thoreau’s account of what happened at the beginning of chapter 14 in “Burn,” but suffice it to say that after accidently setting the Walden woods ablaze—some estimates hold that more than three hundred acres were consumed—our First Naturalist repaired to the top of Fair Haven Hill to admire his own private conflagration. I thought folks ought to know about this. You see, as a student I was force-fed Walden and much of it disagreed with me. I will admit that never has the Luddite point of view been advanced quite so eloquently. And while I agree that simplicity can be a virtue and that cultivation of one’s inner resources is necessary for the good life, it seems clear to me that the habit of thought which Thoreau urges on us is antithetical to the enterprise of science fiction. Thoreau had little use for the technology of his own time, dismissing both the telegraph and the railroad. I can imagine his horror at the spread of our own asphalt and information