Asimov's SF, January 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  What it tells us is that the ancients may well have been far more advanced technologically than we ever suspected, and that the lucky survival of the Antikythera mechanism hints at the existence of a great range of Greco-Roman calculating devices, employed not only for calendrical work or astronomical studies but in their remarkable engineering accomplishments. The Greeks and the Romans, not having access to electricity, semiconductors, and wi-fi linkages, did not, of course, have computers of the sort that every six-year-old child uses today. But they may well have had—and it is a thought that should take today's technological whizzes down a peg—all manner of intricate computational instruments, about which we know nothing, simply because they did not happen to come down to us in the archaeological record, and at the close of their great age much of what they knew was simply lost, not to be rediscovered for many centuries. How far their technological reach extended is still largely a matter for conjecture. We know a great deal about those great ancient civilizations, yes, but our knowledge very likely is just the merest sliver of the total story. As Derek de Solla Price put it, close to half a century ago, in the article that first revealed the Antikythera instrument to the scientific world:

  The Antikythera mechanism was no flash in the pan, but was part of an important current in Hellenistic civilization. History has contrived to keep that current dark to us, and only the accidental underwater preservation of fragments that would otherwise have crumbled to dust has now brought it to light. It is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but in their scientific technology.

  Copyright © 2010 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON THE NET: DUDE, WHERE'S MY HOVERCAR?

  by James Patrick Kelly

  yogi

  When I was a kid, I couldn't wait for the future to arrive. The world of the twenty-first century promised to be a kind of technologically enchanted wonderland, sort of an Oz [the wizardofoz.info] with robots instead of Munchkins. Okay, okay, there was always the chance that we would nuke ourselves back into the Stone Age, but stories about the apocalypse made up just a small fraction of the SF books, comics, and TV shows that I and millions of other impressionable youngsters were exposed to. We expected to grow up into a shiny and well-engineered future that ran at supersonic speed on clean atomic power. And by the day after tomorrow, humanity was supposed to be just a step away from the stars.

  At this point in human history we are, I fear, not quite so bedazzled by the future. My fellow Baby Boomers, as well as the GenXers, the Millennials, and even fifth graders of all stripes, have reason to be concerned about what is to come. It is a measure of our plight that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ dreaded Doomsday Clock [thebulletin.org/content/ doomsday-clock/overview], which during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 stood at seven minutes to midnight, today has been pushed up to five minutes until that fateful hour, the figurative midnight being the moment we will obliterate ourselves. Although nukes are as much a threat as ever, they have pretty much dropped off our cultural radar, given our other problems. These days we have climate change on our minds, not to mention environmental degradation, mass extinction, and depletion of fossil fuels. In fact, there is so much to worry about that many of us have become numb to our danger.

  Oops. Sorry if I spoiled your lunch.

  It is not only that the future is scary, but that it is also pretty much unpredictable, as Vernor Vinge [mindstalk.net/vinge] and the Singularity [singularity.com] crowd have pointed out. Or rather, we now realize how hard the next fifty years will be to predict, whereas many of our SF forebearers, writing in the aftermath of World War II, blithely described the dawn of the upcoming century as if they were looking over the fence into their next door neighbor's backyard. They wrote in a time before the Civil Rights Act [archives. gov/education/lessons/civil-rights-act] here in the States, the empowerment of women [unfpa.org/gender/empower ment.htm], the gay rights movement [gayrights.change.org], the fall of the Soviet Union [coldwar.org/articles/ 90s/fallofthesovietunion.asp], the rise of China [state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/18902.htm], and the reawakening of Islam [islam.com]. Who really understood the difficulty and expense of sending humans to orbit, much less to Alpha Centauri? When John F. Kennedy called for a national effort to put a man on the moon [nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/Apollo/apollo.htm], did any SF writer or futurist predict that we would quickly accomplish this spectacular feat and then abandon the moon for thirty-seven years—and still counting? Even those who glimpsed the edges of the digital revolution failed to imagine the economic and cultural upheavals that the internet and ubiquitous computing would cause.

  Small wonder that for some, to quote the immortal Yogi Berra [yogiberra.com], “The future ain't what it used to be.”

  * * * *

  nostalgia

  At least one institution concerned with predicting the future has given up the task as pretty much hopeless. Last year Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau visited Disneyland's new Tomorrowland attraction, the Innoventions Dream Home [disneylandevent.com/tsm/dreamhome.html] and wrote a smart cultural commentary entitled “The Future Is So Yesterday” [washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071800837.html]. He found Disney's house of the future to be kind of retro, filled with tech that is more or less available right now, like flat screen TVs and voice activated talking computers. As Garreau notes:

  “But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain's trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.”

  He argues that this diverges from Walt Disney's original futurist vision for Tomorrowland, which borrowed its conceit from the New York World's Fair of 1939 [xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/DISPLAY/39wf/front.htm]. Twenty-five years later, when another World's Fair [nywf 64.com] opened in New York, Disney's fingerprints were all over it, which featured Tomorrowland-like tours of the future as conceived by the engineers of Ford and General Electric.

  Danny Hillis [longnow.org/people/board], who once served as a vice president for research at Disney Imagineering [corporate.disney.go.com/careers/whoimagineering.html], and who is now co-chairman of the Long Now Foundation [longnow.org], commented on the new retro Tomorrowland on the Long Now's blog [blog.longnow.org/2008/07/23/the-future-is-so-yesterday]: “...we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There's a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.”

  * * * *

  retro cool

  The impulse to imagine historical do-overs has ever been present in science fiction. After all, what are alternate history [asimovs.com/issue0810/onthenet. shtml] and steampunk [steampunk.com]? If the future is too scary or unknowable or weird, why not step back in time to a safe remove and re-envision it? As David Zondy of the website Tales of Future Past [davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm] writes, “It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine.” Zondy's site is organized around tours of the future as depicted by the mass media of the last century. Take a peek at developments in flight, housing, culinary arts, and urban life that you will have missed because they never happened. Try out the “latest robots,” death rays, cars, and space ships. This site is a blast!

  There are a lot of retro transportation sites on the web, but none more comprehensive than Transpo
rtation Futuristics [lib.berkeley.edu/newsevents/ futuristics]. My favorite vehicle on this site is the Curtiss-Wright hovercar, a fifties vision of hot red and yellow steel. Why didn't it ever get to the market? Check out these specs: it had a top speed of fifty mph and gulped twenty gallons of aviation fuel per hour—even when hovering at a red light. At 2.5 mpg, it makes a Hummer look like a Prius!

  The mission of the excellent Retro-Futurismus [www.retro-futurismus.de] is to “demonstrate to readers from Germany and Austria the wealth of visionary thinking in these countries during the past.” Alas, only the front page has been translated into English, but even those who don't speak German can make use of the links. Of particular interest are the videos culled from YouTube in a variety of languages.

  For the very latest from the retro future, click over to the Paleo-Future blog [paleofuture.com], which bills itself as “A look into the future that never was.” It's the creation of Matt Novak, who scours the net for items of interest for retro fans. His posts are organized by decade, so you read about the noted Professor Plantamour who in 1873 predicted that Plantamour's Comet would collide with the earth in 2011, or open to Nevada State Journal for September 21, 1919, wherein experts predicted that giant airships would someday make the New York to London run in two days, or learn that in 1955 then United States Treasurer Ivy Baker Priest predicted that half of Congress would be female by the year 2000. (Currently there are 441 male members of the U.S. Congress and 92 female).

  Without doubt the best site examining the records of SF writers as futurists is the wonderful Technovelgy.com [technovelgy.com], the creation of one Bill Christensen, who, like so many of the unsung heroes of the net, has turned an idiosyncratic passion into an invaluable resource. Technovelgy isn't exactly a retro site, but insofar as Mr. Christensen has created an index of science fiction inventions and ideas dating as far back as 1634, he has documented our successes and failures more comprehensively than anyone else I know. The site is marvelously useful, with inventions, authors, and novels cross-indexed for easy reference. A warning, however, to my fellow genre typists: click here at your peril. You know that shiny new idea you have for your next magnum opus? Somebody beat you to it!

  And if any of you is hankering for the retro apocalypse, grab your laptop, duck and cover under your desk and click over to Conelrad: All Things Atomic [conelrad.com]. The tribute to the “Golden Age of Homeland Security” is a treasure trove of Cold War culture. Thrill to the Top One Hundred Atomic Films and groove to finger snapping hits ranging from “Agnes (The Teenage Russian Spy)” to “Your Atom Bomb Heart.”

  * * * *

  exit

  After rereading the opening of this column, I imagine that some might misinterpret my position on futurist science fiction. Lest anyone think I am claiming the superiority of my own predictions to those of my betters of the Golden Age [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldenAgeofScienceFiction], let the record show that my prognostications have been just as wonky as anyone else's. Most SF practitioners recognize that our stories have sell-by dates and will inevitably be overtaken by events. Which leads me to propose a genre law (I have always aspired to have a law named after me!):

  Kelly's Law: All futures will someday be retro.

  Copyright © James Patrick Kelly

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: MARYA AND THE PIRATE

  by Geoffrey A. Landis

  After two years as the Ronald McNair visiting professor of astronautics at MIT, Geoffrey Landis is back at NASA, working on advanced space missions. One such, the Solar Probe Plus, is a mission to send a probe to the outer corona of the Sun. After too long an absence, we are pleased that our resident rocket scientist has found the time to fashion a riveting adventure story about “Marya and the Pirate.” More information about Geoff can be found on his website, www.geoffreylandis.com.

  The best-kept secret in the solar system, a sheet of glass nine meters in diameter, was coasting at about twenty kilometers per second on an unpowered trajectory between Venus and Earth. The sheet of glass was unremarkable except that, despite being only a few centimeters thick, it was unusually flat. A thin layer of aluminum vacuum-coated onto the surface made it a nearly perfect mirror.

  Domingo Bonaventura, in a small pod barely larger than a coffin, coasted along silently in the shadow of the mirror. He had been coasting for thirty days, periodically making small corrections in the angle of the mirror to insure that it shielded the pod from view from the Earth, and from the many stations and habitats in the cis-Earth space, and likewise that the mirror hid the pod from the view of a precisely calculated point in space. From the viewpoint of an observer anywhere in the Earth-moon system, if any such had happened to point a telescope in his direction, the mirror would reflect only an image of empty space. The infrared emission of the mirror was negligible, and only a phenomenally sensitive detector would show anything other than empty space. Radar, too—if anybody were probing space with radar—would be reflected into empty space.

  He had his antennas out, listening for radar, and for radio emissions. There was some modest radio chatter originating from the point of space he was coasting toward: navigation beacons, primarily, and occasional data, most likely engineering-systems status updates. No voice, so far, and he was getting close enough that he would very likely be hearing spillover from a narrow-beam, if there were one. That was good.

  Domingo made a tiny adjustment in the mirror angle, checked it, checked it again, and then checked it once more. A little over two hours to go. There was nothing to do, but Domingo had been living in space for two decades: he understood waiting. He folded his legs, placed his hands on his knees, palms up, and, floating freely, cleared his mind of all conscious thought.

  For all practical purposes, Domingo Bonaventura was invisible. Which was precisely what he had intended all along.

  * * * *

  Domingo Bonaventura was a tall man, lean, his eyes dark and intense. He was clean shaven, except for a small and neat mustache, but that was not unusual for people who lived and worked in space; any more facial hair would interfere with the seal of an emergency oxygen mask. His one extravagance was his long hair, which floated in tendrils around his head, waving slightly like the arms of an anemone in the faint currents from the air recirculator. The air itself was stale; he had been far too long in quarters far too small, and the entire living area, small as it was, smelled of him. But he was long past noticing, or caring. He floated silent except for his regular breathing, and waited as the laws of physics brought him to his destination.

  Two hours later, Domingo opened his eyes. It was time. With slow, economical motions he checked the radio spectrum. No changes in radio signature from the quarry, and no radar pings. Good, and good. As far as he was able to determine, he was still invisible.

  He risked a visual, periscoping a camera lens out from behind the shielding effects of the mirror. His target was a glistening white sphere, twenty-five meters in diameter. Zooming the view, he saw attached to it were much smaller aluminum spheres—fuel tanks—and below that, a habitation module.

  The hab module was also spherical, with four portholes spaced evenly around the equator, and thermal radiators deployed outward like fins, one to either side. It was a design he was familiar with. There would be blind spots at either end of the module, and also where the radiators blocked the view.

  It was the cargo, not the habitat module, that he was interested in. Ten thousand tons of cometary water being shipped to the Earth-orbital colonies using a Venus fly-by. The cargo ship itself had only a small engine, adequate when it was empty, but far too small to accelerate at more than milligees with the full load of load. It could not flee even if it had been warned. Except for fine trajectory correction; it was on a precisely aimed orbit that would take it to the Earth orbital whip, a hundred-kilometer-long rotating orbital station. The whip was little more than a smart rope, but one rotating fast enough that its end would match the speed of the
incoming spacecraft, grab it, and swing it in a precisely defined arc that would end up with the cargo in a perfect Earth orbit, and the energy from the ship's original speed banked into the whip's orbital energy, where it would be used to toss the next cargo toward the outer belt. Ten thousand tons of water was a significant treasure. At its intended destination of the inner colonies, it would be used for luxuries and for life support, to grow plants in greenhouse modules and to be electrolyzed into fuel. In the out and out, even a fraction of that much water could be the difference between survival of a colony and starvation.

  The distance was closing rapidly. He made a few brief bursts of thruster firings, using cold-exhaust thrusters calculated to have almost no infrared signature. This adjusted his trajectory to bring his course closer to the target and also brought him in along a path where the bulk of the cargo would block any view of his pod from the habitat module.

  And it was time. With a swift motion, Domingo hit the controls that blew the three struts that held the mirror to his pod, and fired a short blast on a braking thruster to separate them. The mirror coasted silently on, disappearing into space. Its trajectory was known precisely, and some time months later one of his people would chase it down and pick it up, so it could be used for another job. But for now it had done its work of keeping him invisible, and was unnecessary. He watched it disappear with no particular emotion.