Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 Read Online Free

off to another sort of world in his novelette “Sauerkraut Station.” The story is set on a space habitat that offers medical aid and refits ships with supplies. Those supplies include their specialty, sauerkraut, which most of their visitors hold in far too low esteem, at least in the view of Lizzie, the narrator. The setting is brought alive by the author’s careful detail and serves as a foil for the political background of the universe Steinmetz builds. The tale is both stark and reaffirming, the story of a remarkable young woman.
    When I first read “Sauerkraut Station,” I assumed it had appeared in Analog . It has that feel for me in part because of the well described life in a space station, including what happens if we lose amenities we take for granted, such as light and gravity. I was intrigued to learn that it came from the online zine GigaNotoSaurus . In fact, two works in this book first appeared in GigaNotoSaurus , the other being “The Migratory Patterns of Dancers.” They offer telling examples of the sea changes in publishing we’ve experienced over the last decade. In the past, when the outlets for short fiction were limited to hardcopy markets, the expense of producing and distributing such publications drastically constrained the number of markets, which meant many good stories went unpublished or appeared in hard-to-find places. Now, with the advent of so many online markets, more top-notch stories than ever are seeing print. This is the first I’ve seen of GigaNotoSaurus , but I will definitely be looking up more of their issues.
    You can’t remake the world
Without remaking yourself.
    â€”Ben Okri, Mental Fight
    Geoff Ryman’s carefully rendered novelette “What We Found” takes place in Nigeria. On one level, it centers on the attempts of Terhemba, a Nigerian scientist, to reconcile his research with the ravages suffered by his family; the two converge when he discovers evidence that parents can pass the effects of traumas they have endured to their children. The narrator writes, “What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. . . . We live our grandfathers’ lives.” In telling Terhemba’s story, Ryman writes vividly of a Nigeria that is in turns severe and beautiful.
    On another level, “What We Found” draws on a phenomenon observed by psychologists, in particular John Schooler, that their research showed a “decline effect,” where attempts to duplicate a well-documented result become less and less successful over time even if many scientists initially replicate the work. The decline may derive from psychological effects, that the experimenters expect the result and so are subconsciously predisposed toward work that verifies their expectation. The decline is then the reassertion of the scientific method over time. However, even that theory doesn’t seem to fully account for the effect. In “What We Found,” Ryman extrapolates the idea to a fascinatingly eerie extreme. What if all scientific results disappeared over time?
    To motivate the idea, Ryman draws on quantum theory, specifically the result that the act of observing a system changes that system, collapsing it from a mixture of possible states to the one observed. As a physicist, I’ve calculated linear superpositions of quantum states to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. Mathematically, it simply means that more than one state exists for the particles in a collection, and we don’t know which applies to a particular particle until we look at it. In popular culture, it has become famous as the “Schrödinger’s cat” paradox, which essentially says, “The cat in the box is neither dead nor alive, but is a mixture of those states—until we look.”
    Ryman takes the idea a wonderfully fanciful step further. Suppose the