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Analog SFF, January-February 2008
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2008 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover art by David A. Hardy
Cover design by Victoria Green
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CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: ATTENTION by Stanley Schmidt
Serial: MARSBOUND: PART I OF III by Joe Haldeman
Science Fact: THE WORLD'S SIMPLEST FUSION REACTOR REVISITED by TOM LIGON
Novelette: TANGIBLE LIGHT by J. TIMOTHY BAGWELL
Novelette: THE MAN IN THE MIRROR by GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
Novelette: THE NATURAL WORLD by DON D'AMMASSA
Short Story: THE ENGULFED CATHEDRAL by CARL FREDERICK
Novelette: CONVERSATIONS WITH MY KNEES by RON GOULART
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: EINSTEIN AND THE ETHER by JEFFERY D. KOOISTRA
Probability Zero: WORLDS ENOUGH, AND TIME by HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Short Story: HOW THE BALD APES SAVED MASS CROSSING by WIL MCCARTHY
Short Story: A NEW GENERATION by JERRY OLTION
Biolog: MIA MOLVRAY by Richard A. Lovett
Short Story: LOW LIFE by MIA MOLVRAY
Short Story: A DEADLY INTENT by RICHARD A. LOVETT & MARK NIEMANN-ROSS
Novelette: THE PURLOINED LABRADOODLE by BARRY B. LONGYEAR
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: IT'S ANLAB TIME AGAIN
Reader's Department: 2007 INDEX
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXVIII, No. 1 and 2, January-February 2008
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: ATTENTION
by Stanley Schmidt
If you've been reading Analog more than a little while, you know we sometimes publish serials. A novel won't fit in one issue, but some of the meatiest stories are that long and tell stories that many of our readers like, so when we get one of those we divide it into two, three, or four installments of 20,000 or so words each and run them in consecutive issues, each but the last ending with “TO BE CONTINUED” or “TO BE CONCLUDED.” Some readers like to collect all the parts and then read the whole thing straight through, but some read each part as it comes. For them, a month or so elapses between sections, so as a memory refresher we precede each part except the first with a brief synopsis of what has happened so far.
I realize that not everyone likes serials (or anything else), but I think most of us can agree that, given that enough readers like them to warrant publishing them, it makes sense to end a part with a notice that there's more to come, and/or open with a brief recap of the story to that point. But you'd probably think it was pretty silly if we did the same thing for a short story or novelette that almost everybody will read in one sitting.
Imagine, for example, reading the first two-and-a-half pages of Isaac Asimov's classic novelette “Nightfall,” and then being subjected to an italicized paragraph that insults your intelligence by asking you,
Will Theremon persuade Aton to give him what he wants in the brief time he's been allotted to make his case? What does he want? Read on, and find out!
And then, after the line space Asimov included to show a dramatic break, another such paragraph:
Director Aton of Saro University believes the world is doomed: civilization will end in four hours. Newsman Theremon doesn't think so, and wants Aton's permission to cover the story live in the university's observatory. He has five minutes to make his case....
Now imagine going through that every couple of pages, every time the author left a break. The first time might amuse, the second would surely annoy, and I don't think it would take many before you were ready to throw the book across the room. You might never pick it back up, and never get near the story's unforgettable ending.
Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? Yet recently I've been seeing essentially the same thing being done routinely on television. I don't even watch much television, yet I've seen it over and over, in documentaries and even movies: each of the frequent commercial breaks is introduced by a preview of what the next segment will hold; and when the new segment finally begins, it starts not by taking up where the show left off, but with a summary of what the whole show is about and where things stood at the end of the last segment.
Now I realize commercial breaks are often much longer than most viewers would prefer, but they're not that long—not so long that many viewers of even minimal intelligence are likely to forget the little they've seen so far, or where the action or narration paused. So why are so many stations doing this, wasting time that could be used to continue telling the story or expounding on the topic to which they're supposedly devoting a half hour or hour? After all, not only are commercial breaks long, but the actual show segments between them are short—so those unnecessary teasers and recaps take significant bites out of what's supposed to be show time. During one recent documentary on an otherwise generally respectable channel, I timed a few of each kind of time: commercials, teasers, recaps, and (last and dangerously close to least) actual new show content. I didn't do it rigorously enough to give you exact figures, and it may vary from show to show; but my ballpark estimate was that commercials consumed at least a fifth of the nominal time allotted for the show, and teasers and recaps took at least a fifth of what was left over.
Which means the viewers were getting a lot less actual show than they were being led to believe.
When I first noticed this phenomenon I thought it was just another of those goofy gimmicks that people often feel obliged to try out, even if they ought to know better. It soon became apparent that it was an actual trend, or fad, and it has now been going on quite a while. When it had been around long enough for me to start looking for a reason, my first thought was that it was just laziness and/or cheapness, two of the most popular motivations in the world. It was as simple as my previous paragraph: if you pad your show with a lot of repetition that looks like content but isn't, maybe you can fool enough of the people to get away with producing less material, and that will save you time and money. After all, it's cheaper and easier to produce a minimal amount of show and then recycle pieces of it as padding than to actually spend each segment saying and showing something new.
But it kept happening, so I kept thinking. Pretty soon it occurred to me that it might actually reflect a much bigger and more pervasive cultural problem in at least two ways: an epidemic of short attention span, real and/or perceived.
First, the practice may reflect stations’ and/or sponsors’ belief that most viewers can't sustain a thought or follow its development for an hour, or even a significant fraction of one. That belief may or may not be true, but there's plenty of evidence that it's widely held. Even New York City's one surviving classical music radio station has apparently been convinced of it, though not quite so seve
rely, and I'm pretty sure it isn't true of much of their audience. I can easily believe it's true of some other audience segments; but regardless of how true it is, if stations and/or sponsors believe it, they'll act accordingly. So a major reason for the effect I'm describing may be that the people producing a show don't believe their viewers can remember what it's about through four or five minutes of commercials.
Second, the prevalence of channel surfing suggests that at least a sizable part of the audience really does have a short attention span and little patience, but they have something else that sponsors want: money. So the heavy infestation of teasers and recaps may be at least partly a ploy to hook and hold surfers who chance upon a show in midstream, by offering frequent reminders of what it's about and enticements to stay tuned for more.
Either way, it seems to reflect a cultural tendency (which I am by no means the only person to notice) toward short attention spans. And that can have consequences on several levels.
The first, and perhaps least important, is that it further dilutes the content of television shows—which, with relatively few exceptions, have never been noted for either depth or breadth. Any show that spends sizable chunks of its time repeating and anticipating itself will necessarily be more superficial than one that tries to cover as much new and solid ground as possible in each segment.
Second, and perhaps a bit more important, is that widespread catering to short attention spans encourages them, likely making them even more prevalent (which in turn makes them a bigger market segment and therefore even more influential on future content). That, of course, is more important if and only if you believe that matters for some reason beyond itself.
Which leads us to the third consequence, which is the biggie: If more and more people become unable or unwilling to stay with a show or a train of thought for more than a few minutes, that means they will be unable or unwilling to think meaningfully about most of the important issues we will all have to deal with in the real world. Sound bites may be catchy, but actually making sensible decisions about things like global warming, privacy versus security, and population growth (to name just a few) will require paying close attention and actually following arguments that may be lengthy, complicated, and even multibranched.
I wouldn't count on a population of people who expect everything delivered in sound bites, or five-minute chunks with reminders every few minutes of what was said in the last few minutes, to be able to do much of that.
But they will be able to vote.
Think about that.
Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt
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Peter Kanter: Publisher
Christine Begley: Associate Publisher
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Stanley Schmidt: Editor
Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
[Back to Table of Contents]
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CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS OF THE 2007 HUGO AWARDS
Best Novel: Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
Best Novella: “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed, Asimov's, October/November 2006
Best Novelette: “The Djinn's Wife” by Ian McDonald, Asimov's, July 2006
Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, Asimov's, July 2006
Best Related Book: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
Best Dramatic Presentation—Long Form: Pan's Labyrinth
Best Dramatic Presentation—Short Form: Doctor Who: “The Girl in the Fireplace"
Best Professional Editor—Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Professional Editor—Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semi-Pro Zine: Locus, Edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, and Liza Groen Trombi
Best Fanzine: Science-Fiction Five-Yearly, Edited by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan, and Randy Byers
Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Naomi Novik
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Serial: MARSBOUND: PART I OF III
by Joe Haldeman
Humans have been moving into new frontiers as long as they've been human. Some things they take with them; others they discover accidentally....
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“The butterfly counts not years but moments, and has time enough."—Rabindranath Tagore
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1. The Undead
t wasn't a lot of luggage for five years; for the longest journey anyone has ever taken. We each had an overnight bag and a small titanium suitcase.
We stepped out into the warm Florida night and carried our bags to the curb. I looked back at the house and didn't feel much. We'd only lived there two years and wouldn't be coming back. I'd be twenty-four then, and getting my own place anyhow.
Dad pointed out Jupiter and Mars, both near the horizon.
The cab hummed around the corner and stopped in front of us. “Are you the Dula party?” it said.
“No, we're just out for a walk,” Dad said. Mother gave him a look. “Of course we are. It's three in the god-damned morning.”
“Your voice does not match the caller,” the cab said. “After midnight I need positive identification.”
“I called,” my mother said. “Do you recognize this voice?”
“Please show me a debit card.” A tray slid out and Dad flipped a card onto it. “Voice and card.”
The doors opened silently. “Do you require help with your luggage?”
“Stay put,” Dad said, instead of no. He's always testing them.
“No,” Mother said. The luggage handler stayed where it was and we put our small bags in the back, next to where it crouched. Its eyes followed us.
We got in, Mother and me facing Dad and Card, who was barely awake. “Verify destination,” it said. “Where are you going, please?”
“Mars,” Dad said.
“I don't understand that.”
Mother sighed. “The airport. Terminal B.”
“The undead,” Card said in his zombie voice.
“What are you mumbling about?”
“This thing you humans call a cab.” His eyes were closed and his lips barely moved. “It does not live, but it is not dead. It speaks.”
“Go back to sleep, Card. I'll wake you up when we get to Mars.”
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2. Good-bye, Cool World
It's the only elevator in the world with barf bags. My brother pointed that out. He notices things like that; I noticed the bathroom. One bathroom, for twenty people. Locked in an elevator for two weeks. It's not as big as it looks in the advertisements.
You don't call it “the elevator” once you're in it; the thing you ride in is just the climber. The Space Elevator, always capitalized, is two of these climbers plus 50,000 miles of cable that rises straight up into space. At the other end is the spaceship that will take my family to Mars. That one will have two bathrooms (for thirty people) but no barf bags, presumably. If you're not used to zero-gee by then, maybe they'll leave you behind.
This wh
ole thing started two years ago, when I was young and stupid, or at least sixteen and naive. My mother wanted to get into the lottery for the Mars Project, and Dad was okay with the idea. My brother Card thought it was wonderful, and I'll admit I thought it was spec, too, at the time. So Card and I got to spend a year of Saturday mornings training to take the test—just us; there was no test for parents. Adults make it or they don't, depending on education and social adaptability. Our parents have enough education for any four people but otherwise are crushingly normal.
These tests were basically to make us, Card and me, seem normal, or at least normal enough not to go detroit locked up in a sardine can with twenty-nine other people for six months.
So here's the billion-dollar question: Did any of the kids aboard pass the tests just because they actually were normal? Or did all of them also give up a year of Saturdays so they could learn how to hide their homicidal tendencies from the testers? “Remember, we don't say anything about having sex with little Fido.”
We flew into Puerto Villamil, a little town on a little island in the Galapagos chain, off the coast of South America. They picked it because it's on the equator and doesn't get a lot of lightning, which could give you pause if you were sitting at the bottom of a lightning rod long enough to go around the Earth twice.
The town is kind of a tourist trap for the Space Elevator and the Galapagos in general. People take a ferry out to watch it take off and return, and then go to other islands for skin-diving or to gawk at exotic animals. The islands have lots of bizarre birds and lizards. Dad said we could spend a week or two exploring when we came back.
If we came back, he didn't say. It's not like we were just moving across town.
Mother and Dad both speak Spanish, so they chatted with the taxi driver who took us from the airport to the hotel where we would get a night's rest before ferrying out to the elevator platform. The taxi was different, an electric jeep long enough to seat a dozen people, with no windshield and a canvas sun canopy rather than a roof. I asked what happens if it rains, and the driver summoned up enough English to say, “Get wet.”
Analog SFF, January-February 2008 Page 1