Elizabeth Bear is the 2005 John W. Campbell Award winner. Her most recent novel, Dust (Bantam Spectra), is the first in a series she describes as “Amber: Gormenghast, Upstairs: Downstairs. In space!” The author lives near Hartford with a presumptuous cat. Her New England heritage is apparent in this skilful evocation of…
“Well, now, Professor Harding,” the fisherman says, as his Bluebird skips across Penobscot Bay, “I don’t know about that. The jellies don’t trouble with us, and we don’t trouble with them.”
He’s not much older than forty, but wizened, his hands work-roughened and his face reminiscent of saddle-leather, in texture and in hue. Professor Harding’s age, and Harding watches him with concealed interest as he works the Bluebird’s engine. He might be a veteran of the Great War, as Harding is.
He doesn’t mention it. It wouldn’t establish camaraderie: they wouldn’t have fought in the same units or watched their buddies die in the same trenches.
That’s not the way it works, not with a Maine fisherman who would shake his head and not extend his hand to shake, and say, between pensive chaws on his tobacco, “Doctor Harding? Well, huh. I never met a colored professor before,” and then shoot down all of Harding’s attempts to open conversation about the near-riots provoked by a fantastical radio drama about an alien invasion of New Jersey less than a fortnight before.
