Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  So the cosmic mission must be put on hold for Patrimony. Flinx hares off to Gestalt, a chilly world whose stinky natives (they have no sense of smell) get along just fine with immigrants of other species. After a bit of detective work, he finds a possibility and arranges a long trek with a native guide to interview the fellow. At the same time however, a vicious bounty hunter discovers that the Order of Null will pay handsomely for proof that Flinx is dead and realizes that Flinx is close at hand. And so the usual sequence of frying pans and fires begins. Flinx of course survives—he has to, for Foster has one more book to go. He also learns something of his past and himself and falls briefly into an identity crisis.

  Foster's sense of story is adequate unto the task, especially for fans of the series. But his writing is uninspiring. His prose is simple but also verbose, a combination that proves leaden, and when he grasps for cuteness, he fails. For an example, consider “Not wishing to have to pause in his journey in order to clean the skimmer's canopy, Flinx was relieved when the hlusumakai [an attacking predator] blew up well off to the craft's starboard side instead of directly overhead.” According to this the wish preceded the relief, but in anything resembling reality, a character in such a rushed life-or-death action would feel relief and then—maybe—think something like “Glad I don't have to clean the canopy!”

  He can do better, as in Sagramanda. I wish he had done so here.

  * * * *

  One of the classic SF story-templates begins with the launch of a colony ship from Earth, fleeing political chaos or tyranny or environmental collapse. The ship of course finds a life-bearing world, though it may have odd quirks of weather or biology, and the colonists—with struggle, of course—establish their colony. At that point, there are several possibilities. A ship from Earth arrives, perhaps bringing the tyranny the colonists thought they had escaped. Or aliens show up. Or they discover intelligent life on their world. Allen Steele stirred all three into the mix with the Coyote series.

  The template allows some variation, to be sure, but it is still a classic template. And Alexis Glynn Latner's Hurricane Moon fits it very nicely. The ship is the Aeon, and it is fleeing an Earth in crisis, both political and environmental, with some 10,000 colonists in coldsleep stasis. The target world is three centuries away, and it is known to have a suitable world, complete with a moon. Before it leaves, Catherin Gault is interviewing one last passenger, Joseph Devreze, a Nobel-winning genetic engineer who is both arrogant and handsome. She accepts him, and it turns out to be a good thing she does.

  Three centuries later, Catherin and the rest of the core crew awake to learn that Earth fell silent sixty-nine years into the mission. Stasis failed in part of the ship, and hundreds of colonists are lost. The target world is there, but it has no moon because a wandering binary star swiped it. And the reader is told that the longer stasis goes on, the greater the risk of genetic damage. Should they stay and make the best of what looks like a bad deal? Or go on, traveling another seven centuries to find a better world and risk the stasis damage?

  You can guess the answer. The next time they wake, a green world is in front of them, with a moon of about the same size, covered with water except for a curiously regular scatter of islands, and wreathed in hurricanes. Repairs to the ship are in order, and there is a clear need for someone who can tinker with genes to set right the stasis damage. So they wake up a few of the passengers, including Joe, who, being arrogant, is a difficult person to be around. He does not want to spend the rest of his life fixing people! He'd rather play gene-hacker, making things like dogs with flippers—sea-dogs—as he did on Earth. But man-grows-up is another classic trope, not just in SF, so you know what to expect. You also expect him to get together with Catherin (even if you didn't read the cover blurb), which makes this an unusually character and relationship-focused novel for SF.

  As for the aliens ... Well, I have to leave something for you to find out on your own, don't I?

  * * * *

  Bruce Boston is best known as one of the premier poets of science fiction and fantasy. He also does short fiction and has the novel Stained Glass Rain to his credit. Now he adds another novel, The Guardener's Tale, in whose future environmental disasters have rendered much of the Earth unlivable. But in at least one place, civilization has condensed anew in the form of a city ruled by bureaucracy and regulated by “guardeners,” who assess the mental health and stability of citizens by means of Cybernetic Behavioral Analysis or cyberscan, which renders one's psyche in the form of a bundle of lines and nodes. In healthy, stable citizens, the bundle takes the form of a flower. If it doesn't, the guardeners have tools with which they can make adjustments, suppressing all individuality. When that doesn't work, the solution is generally exile to work camps. The end result is society as a garden of uniform flowers, carefully tended with the noble aim of growing the Perfect Future.

  The very thought makes me shudder! But of course not everyone can be a sweet little well-adjusted flower. Richard Thorne is like that. He has a job, a chosenmate, an apartment in a nice clean district of town, and Tuesday nights free to go out on his own and get drunk or visit a courtesan. Or ... Well, he finds himself visiting a remnant slum, where the bars are seedy and the courtesans are frankly whores. Then an acquaintance from work takes him to meet his half-sister, daughter of a long-suppressed anti-utopian revolutionary. She has actual books on her walls, uncensored, unexpurgated. She has a horribly illegal personal computer terminal. Richard gives her her price of booze and cash and is very promptly enchanted. And as he reads her books and learns the charms of being an individual, his flower becomes a distorted weed, at least according to the guardener, Sol Thatcher, who is writing this account in an effort to understand how such weeds can be. Alas, such writing is rather too individual for the Perfect Future, and it has strange effects both on Thatcher and—just perhaps—on the future of civilization.

  Boston's future civilization is a communist's wet dream. His aim appears to be to say that it must remain a dream, never reality. Great effort can go into getting everything right, but people resist being crammed into pretty little flowerlike molds. That resistance leads to cracks in the facade of perfection. Ultimately, it forces change, perhaps for the worse, perhaps for the better. Either way, weeds (as defined by the guardeners) will flourish, will “rise up from the fields,” he says on the next to last page. The garden will wind up in a more chaotic state. We might even say it will go back to nature.

  An interesting item. Worth a look.

  * * * *

  Michael Swanwick is as reliable source of reading pleasure as can be found anywhere, in or out of genre. I was therefore very happy to find The Dog Said Bow-Wow, a collection of delightfully warped Swanwick tales, in my mail. The title tale (and a couple of others) feature a pair of classic scalawags, Darger and Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux, a.k.a. Sir Plus or Surplus, who are constantly trying to con their way to wealth in a world that has banned all computers, replacing them with bioengineered monstrosities such as the current Queen of England. Their possession of a modem leads to no end of trouble!

  You will also find here such classics as “Triceratops Summer.” All in all, an excellent addition to anyone's collection!

  * * * *

  Future war stories come in several flavors: warnings of coming conflagrations, jingoistic “get ‘em first” tales, and what we might call “war-porn,” bloody action for the sake of bloody action (video games, anyone?). All three can be near-future or far-future. The former may publicize weaponry that is relatively unfamiliar to the general public or that is just emerging from the lab. The latter invites the writer to stretch the imagination toward the limits of known science (how about black holes as projectiles?). Rarely do any serve as genuine prophecy, even when the writers try hard to get things right. But they can prepare the public mind for future wars by identifying and vilifying an enemy or getting people used to inevitable changes in tactics and prices of technology, in lives, and even in “c
ollateral damage.” They can also mirror politics by justifying policy or by criticizing it.

  That's nice, you say, but that “prepare the public mind” business seems to presuppose that the public reads the stuff, and the SF readership is in decline. But there are still movies and video games, and as for readership, there was a time, Charles E. Gannon tells us in Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction, when a novel such as William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910 (1906) could be written to express a fever-dream of teutophobic conspiracy, be serialized in a newspaper, get discussed quite favorably in Parliament, and wind up claiming (arguably, admittedly) credit for predicting and preparing the ground for World War I. It missed important things such as trench warfare, but it got other things right and even managed to foresee how some technological shifts would play out in the more distant future of World War II. It also allows Gannon to say that this was an age when the modern superpower states were finding their feet and developing familiar tactics of “active information management, opinion formation, technophilia, and ideological cooption of popular discursive forms.” In addition, superpower states “aspire to create their own future—and they frequently imagine, design, and rehearse it through war fictions that envision bold new technological advances and the socio-political revisions they might impel.”

  Later he notes that “traditionally, war narratives have woven ruminations on ethics, morality, politics, ontology, and even religion into their depictions of combat.” Today there is much less of that, especially in movies and video games, which draw a much larger audience than print. The focus is on rapid-fire destruction and percussive special effects. The justification for violence is a given and the hero is little more than a gun on legs. About the exceptions, largely textual, he says, “at their most subversive, future-war fictions are, ultimately, challenges to our cultural traditions and values.” The implication is that those future-war fictions that are not exceptions do not challenge our traditions and values, and that is a frightening thought. It is also a thought that is not unknown abroad and has a lot to do with why the United States is distrusted, feared, and/or hated.

  Gannon is neither an SF writer nor a technologist. He's an English professor, and his book is couched in the patterns and terminology of literary criticism. If you are of a mind to give less credence to the humanities than to the sciences, set that aside long enough to read Rumors of War. I think you'll be glad you did.

  * * * *

  Patricia Kerslake can say some things so astonishing—such as “Just as a blue light is not visible in a blue room"—that I struggle to resist the temptation to wax rude at her expense. Other temptations to resist arise when she buries her points in litcrit jargon and “postcolonial” cant so dense as to obscure clarity. But she still manages to be worth mentioning here. Science Fiction and Empire's premise is that science fiction—the “literature of the agent provocateur"—is a variety of sociological laboratory in which some writers perform thought experiments to examine possible futures. “SF produces ... an unending succession of literary experiments, each one examining a small part of a much larger image and each equally necessary to the greater vision. In order to analyse such experiments properly we need to reason in the manner of scientists and to use contemporary theory, both literary and social, as a tool in the investigation.” Her focus is the role of empire in SF, and though as a scientist I can easily object to saying that literary theory has anything to do with thinking like a scientist, she still comes to some interesting conclusions, including that although “We are all products of the historical imperial project” SF is only partially bound by what its writers know of history or how history has shaped them. Extrapolation and experimentation mean that SF “is not completely determined by the ideology and culture of the time of writing. It is both connected and free.”

  I am sure that more literary folk will get more from the book than I.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Tom Easton

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Our March issue features “The Spacetime Pool,” one of the versatile Catherine Asaro's unique blends of colorful setting, engaging and memorable characters, mathematics, romance, and science fiction that may (temporarily) look to the inattentive reader like fantasy. I can't tell you much more than that without giving too much away, but I'm confident that you'll find it thoroughly satisfying and thought-provoking.

  Stephen Baxter's fact article is about a world a little closer to home. “Project Boreas” describes the vision hatched by the British Interplanetary Society (with Baxter's active participation) for a manned base that might be built at the Martian north pole in three decades or so—and it looks intriguingly worthwhile and doable.

  Speaking of Mars, we'll also have Part 2 of Joe Haldeman's novel Marsbound, as well as a mixed bag of stories by Robert R. Chase, John G. Hemry, James C. Glass, and Howard V. Hendrix.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Dr. Schmidt,

  Your March ‘07 editorial on new writers had a different effect on me than it did on Larry Cohen (Brass Tacks). As an aspiring writer, it caused me to become conscious (and critical) of the quality of the stories printed in Analog and Asimov's, and to try to determine the factors that resulted in their acceptance. My background was in scientific writing which has exactly the opposite goal from recreational writing. (Operating instructions for a chemical process must be unequivocally clear and precise, or several types of disaster may occur.)

  I can now identify interest-capturing first paragraphs, smooth dialog, coherent story line, and logical conclusions, as well as just plain skilled writing. Some writers stand out as real “wordsmiths” but others are more mundane. It isn't hard to distinguish slight differences in writing style within a story written by two authors.

  In the July/August issue, I was astonished at the breadth of knowledge displayed by Michael Flynn, with an excellent alternate history followed by an erudite discussion of the same subject. Richard Lovett's “Weathermen” was not as interesting, but was well written as usual. Cramer's “Alternate History” was mind-boggling and very thought provoking. “Loki's Realm” was a good story, but it was obvious when either Lowe or Nordley were writing. “Jimmy the Box” was cute, “Bringing It All Back Home” funny, and all the others satisfactory.

  “The Caves of Ceres” bothered me from the very first page, because the style of writing is what I call “Herky-Jerky.” It did not flow smoothly from idea to idea, and the author seemed to insert dramatic phrases just to impress the reader. If I were grading such a story, I would have given it a C+ and suggested ways to improve it. Furthermore, by page two, it was obvious that the hero was going to have an affair with an attractive female he met. Nothing wrong with that, but I immediately wondered if this was another hackneyed story by Bud Sparhawk, writing under an assumed name. Not until I turned the last page did I find that Joe Schembrie was a different person.

  One of my pet peeves is the increase in the number of fantasy stories in science fiction magazines, some of them not even good fantasy. Hopefully, that will never be a problem in Analog.

  Bob Stanton

  * * * *

  Hi Stan:

  I think that it was in 1962 or 1963 that I first subscribed to Analog and found that it generally matched my need for airplane entertainment and regular thought provocation. I saw the format changes and the evolution to the double-issue era (ten issues for the price of twelve) with no real comment, but since I tend to save up issues for long periods (the record, I think, is over a year's worth) I am only now getting around to reading the July/August 2007 issue. Specifically, it seems that you owe the readers a replacement for pages 10 thru 61, which seemed to me to be pretty much a waste of ink.

  I have rarely had trouble getting into an Analog story, but in this case, the first f
ive pages didn't help at all as there appeared to be no story there. Giving that up as a lost cause, I went to the next piece, a science fact article. That was a little better, but appeared to me to suffer from the same style problem as the earlier story. It was an interesting question/answer format, but still seemed to be stuck in the 15th/16th(?) century and held no attraction at all to go past the first two pages.

  Just a data point for you, as I generally really enjoy the magazine cover to cover.

  Tom Thompson

  * * * *

  Thanks for the comments. I'm sorry you didn't like those pieces, glad you like most of the rest of what we do, and especially glad you recognize that your dislike of the pair of items is “just a data point.” Too many people don't seem to realize that when they say something is a “waste of ink,” all they're really saying is, “I didn't like it.” Quite often a piece that some readers hate, others will love (and vice versa). That was certainly true in this case—and if you think the article “seemed to be stuck” in an earlier era, I suggest you read the “In Time to Come” in the June issue, which explains why it was quite deliberately written that way.

  * * * *

  Dear Stan,

  This story ("Caves of Ceres,” July/August) had me unconvinced about stalactites and stalagmites being present in caves in Ceres.

  I'm not a geologist, but I used to do a lot of exploring in limestone caves.

  Limestone is formed from the skeletons or shells of marine creatures, deposited over millions of years. Then the limestone sheet is raised above sea level, and rainwater (with a bit of dissolved carbon dioxide—i.e. carbonic acid) can dissolve the calcium carbonate. If the solution drips from the ceiling, some of the CO2 evaporates, and the CaCO3 comes out of solution, forming a stalactite. What lands on the ground below forms a stalagmite.

  Now, how can this happen on Ceres? Unlikely to have had an ocean, marine creatures, or an atmosphere where rain with CO2 falls. There is a comment in the story “...for mineralized water to drip, the cavern must have been pressurized and warmer, once.” But I think it would have needed a lot more than this!