The Nebulas are a tradition, but that’s not why they’re important.

The Nebula Awards are important because they allow the people who dream, who speculate, who imagine, to take pride in the achievements of the family of SF. They’re important because these Lucite blocks celebrate the ways that we, who create futures for a living, are creating our own future.

This speech was given in Chicago on April 30, 2005, in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Nebula Awards.

IV

FILMS AND MOVIES AND ME

“It’s oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened.”

The Bride of Frankenstein

Films deliver their pleasures in different ways. Many films give you everything they have to offer the first time you see them, leaving you nothing for another viewing. Some deliver what they have grudgingly on first viewing, only to reveal their magic on subsequent occasions, when things become increasingly satisfying. Very few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think, you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows in the back of your head. The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those dream-films. It exists in the culture as a unique thing, magical and odd: a lurching story sequence as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.

It’s a lot of people’s favorite horror film. Dammit, it’s my favorite horror film. And yet . . .

My daughter Maddy loves the idea of The Bride of Frankenstein: she’s ten. Last year, captivated by the little statue of Elsa Lanchester in frightwig that stands, facing a statue of Groucho Marx, on a window ledge halfway up the stairs, she decided to be the Monster’s Bride for Hallowe’en. I had to find her imagery of Karloff and his bride-to-be, e-mail her photos of them. Several weeks ago, finding myself in sole charge of Maddy and her friend Gala Avary, I made them hot chocolate and we watched The Bride of Frankenstein.

They enjoyed it, wriggling and squealing in all the right places. But once it was done, the girls had an identical reaction. “Is it over?” asked one. “That was weird,” said the other, flatly. They were as unsatisfied as an audience could be.

I felt vaguely guilty—I knew they would have enjoyed House—or is it Ghost?—of Frankenstein, the one with Karloff as a mad scientist, and John Carradine’s Dracula, not to mention a Lon Chaney Jr. wolfman—so much more. It’s a romp, after all. It may not be scary, but it feels like a horror film, and it would have delivered everything two ten-year-olds needed to be satisfying.

The Bride of Frankenstein doesn’t romp. It’s oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head. I’ve seen it I do not know how many times since I was a boy, and I’m almost pleased to say that I still can’t quite tell you the plot. Or rather, I can tell you the plot as it goes along. And then, when it’s done, the film begins to scum over in my mind, to reconfigure like a dream does once you’ve wakened, and it all becomes much harder to explain.