Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

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When I was a child, my parents gave me several framed prints of ballerinas by painter Edgar Degas. To this day, they remain in my old bedroom, on the wall above the ballet barre where I was supposed to practice but almost never did. Although I loved to dance, doing it alone in my room held little appeal when the alternative was to join my friends, the other dancers at the studios where I trained. Those Degas paintings, however, remain a part of the creative landscape in my mind, whether I am writing, dancing, composing music, or solving the partial differential equations of quantum scattering theory.

The conventional assumption in our culture is that artistic endeavors are distinct from analytic pursuits such as science and math. On one side lies the lush realm of emotion; on the other, we find the straight lines of logic. That separation is reflected in how we view works of speculative fiction. Although the division is most prominent in comparisons between fantasy and hard science fiction, it comes into play for all the speculative subgenres.

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