Among the sf stories in this collection are Charlie Stross's “Trunk and Disorderly,” a comedy of manners set in the far-future asteroid belt, and “Glory,” by Greg Egan: a delightful tale of advanced physics and stellar engineering. In Ted Kosmatka's alternate-universe story “The Prophet of Flores” Darwin is proven wrong and the universe is less than 6,000 years old ... or is it? Nancy Kress shows us a world after ecological catastrophe in “By Fools Like Me,” and Bruce Sterling's “Kiosk” is a near-future political fable based in a pre-apocalyptic Eastern Europe. Stephen Baxter gives us an homage to the late Arthur C. Clarke in “Last Contact.” Finally there's Chris Roberson's “The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small.” This military-sf tale is set in Roberson's Celestial Empire universe (The Dragon's Nine Sons), in which a future Chinese Empire fights across the spaceways with the Aztec society of Mexica.
There are surely going to be other best-of-the-year anthologies out this year; I would wait a while and compare before deciding to purchase this particular one.
* * * *
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Two
edited by George Mann
Solaris, 407 pages, $7.99
(mass market paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-84416-542-1
Genre: Original Anthology
—
Original anthologies have been around even longer than the best-of-the-year variety. In this one, George Mann has put together a good variety of stories, all sf. There's hard sf, military sf, adventure, sentimental stories, extrapolation, humor, and even modern-day New Wave sf. In terms of sheer bang-for-the-buck, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction is hard to beat.
Among the standout stories are Paul Di Filippo's “iCity,” a tale of urban design in a world in which all cityscapes are endlessly malleable, and Robert Reed's “Fifty Dinosaurs,” a post-human parable that raises questions of identity and the meaning of life. “Book, Theatre, and Wheel” by Karl Schroeder is a powerful historical story about the power of knowledge. Neal Asher gives us two tales of “Mason's Rats,” set on a future farm of robot machinery and intelligent genetically-engineered rats. There's another Celestial Empire story by Chris Roberson; this one, “The Line of Dichotomy,” is rather unsatisfying and wouldn't make a good introduction to the universe.
The last and greatest story is Michael Moorcock's “Modem Times,” and features Moorcock's madcap antihero Jerry Cornelius tackling the current-day United States. Cornelius is crazy, irreverent, and very much an acquired taste. Either you like him, or he drives you spare. If you've never been exposed to Jerry Cornelius, the most helpful comparison I can come up with is vintage Vonnegut. This story (actually, at 70 pages, it's definitely a novella) is pure Cornelius. Depending on your own taste, treat that statement as either a wholehearted endorsement or a warning label.
There are fifteen stories total in this volume. If you can't find a few stories that you like here ... then what are you doing reading Analog to begin with?
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Physics of the Impossible
Michio Kaku
Doubleday, 329 pages, $26.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-385-52069-0
Genre: Popular Nonfiction
—
This book is subtitled “A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel,” and that pretty much sums it up. Michio Kaku is a real physicist, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, famous for helping to develop string field theory and appearing on popular-science TV shows all over the place. He certainly has scientific credentials; and what's more, his Acknowledgments include numerous colleagues, many of them Nobel laureates.
Still, this is a book aimed at the general public ... or at least the subset of the general public who watch Discovery or the Science Channel and read popular science books. Analog readers may find this volume a little simplistic. To a veteran sf reader, a lot of this is old hat.
Still, let me give Kaku his due. He is an sf reader—or at least he was, before theoretical physics stole him away. When he draws examples from sf, he doesn't stop at pop-culture Hollywood offerings like Star Trek, Star Wars, or Spielberg; he alludes to actual writers like Asimov, Clarke, and even van Vogt.
Still, Physics of the Impossible is a fair example of its type, which we might call “Scientist explains the real science behind popular sf/fantasy movies or TV shows.” There have been a plethora of these books in recent years: The Physics of Star Trek, The Science of Star Wars, The Physics of Superheroes, even The Science of Harry Potter. And like its siblings, Physics of the Impossible somehow manages to both misunderstand and underestimate real science fiction.
Kaku, like others, seems to be under the impression that the main business of sf is prediction—whereas we know that prediction is just a sideline. Again and again, his tone sounds a little condescending to the poor creators of sf (who, since they aren't actually scientists, can't be expected to get their physics absolutely right). He presents a concept from sf—the Enterprise's force shields, for example, or faster-than-light travel—and explains how it couldn't possibly happen the way it's presented. He then tells us how the creators could have gotten it right, if only they had paid attention to real science and engineering principles. Okay, obviously the Enterprise couldn't have real shields of force, but the crew could possibly erect an invisible barrier composed of “a combination of plasma window, laser curtain, and carbon nanotube screen.” Of course, even this shield, being invisible, would be incapable of stopping laser beams, so you'd need to add “photochromatics,” molecules that can change their optical properties when exposed to laser light.
Silly sf writers, getting it wrong that way....
Kaku falls into the old chestnut of using “science fiction” as a synonym for “nonsense.” Witness his reaction to the idea of hyperspace travel: “Science fiction? Undoubtedly. But could it be based on scientific fact? Perhaps.”
Kaku divides his impossibilities into three classes. Class I Impossibilities are technologies that don't violate the known laws of physics; he says that these may be possible “in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form.” These include such topics as Force Fields, Invisibility, Teleportation, Psychokinesis, Robots, Starships, and Antimatter.
Class II Impossibilities are those that “sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world.” If possible at all, these might be “millennia or millions of years in the future.” Kaku counts FTL Travel, Time Travel, and Parallel Universes as Class II.
Class III Impossibilities violate the known laws of physics, and so are actually impossible without “a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.” There are only two Class III Impossibilities: Perpetual Motion Machines and Precognition.
So if Physics of the Impossible is old hat to most Analog readers, who would be a good audience for this book? For one, it would make a nice gift to a bright child who likes sf movies and TV, but doesn't have a lot of background in written sf. And it might serve as a counter to others—parents, teachers, even peers—who might be trying to dissuade such a child from pursuing an interest in sf. “See, Stargate is based on real science, so it's educational ... you have to let me watch it now.”
* * * *
Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
Copyright © 2008 Don Sakers
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
In perusing an alpha-by-title list of all the stories published in Analog during the Schmidt Era (an excellent era, for the most part), I have noticed a surprising number of duplicate titles. That is, two identically titled stories by two different writers, published sometimes as little as two years apart. You have even bought and printed three different stories entitled “Chrysalis.” No law against it, of cou
rse, but I think this practice inevitably causes some confusion and should be avoided if possible. This might be accomplished by encouraging a writer to try for another title if his story that you intend to buy has a title identical to one already used.
Other than that, no particular complaints. The slightly larger page format is a welcome reversal of the “shrinking” trend that has afflicted SF magazines since the late 1940s. Keep up the good work.
* * * *
Marc Russell
Los Angeles CA
Dear Analog,
I enjoyed “Tracking” immensely, the broken English notwithstanding, or maybe the sentence structure made it more enjoyable than it might have been. As Mr. Palmer pointed out in his reply to Susan Shackleford's letter, the story was not skimmable, which can be, and is in this case, indicative of high quality writing.
David Palmer has class, which he showed in refusing to respond in kind to Susan Shackelford's vitriolic letter.
Thanks to David Palmer for creating a riveting tale, and thanks to Analog for publishing it.
Barry Flieder
Annapolis, MD
* * * *
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
I have been an Analog subscriber since 1967. I've been generally satisfied with the stories you and your predecessors have printed, so this is only about letter number six. (I haven't kept track.)
That said, I agree with letter writer Susan Shackelford (November 2008) that David R. Palmer's “Tracking” is unreadable crap. I couldn't force myself to read past the third page. When using oddball styles like “telegraphic” or whatever he calls it, a little bit goes a very long way. A whole novel in such style is nothing but an author's conceit.
Mr. Palmer's self-justifying response was a waste of page space. His letter didn't change my mind or convince me to try again, and I don't much care about his resume. Furthermore, he states that he would never be so “rude” as to write a critical letter to Mick Jagger, whose work he detests. Ms. Shackelford didn't write to Mr. Palmer, she wrote to you.
I suspect, like me, Ms. Shackelford wrote because she was dissatisfied with the product (entertainment) we paid you to provide when we bought your magazine. As paying customers, we would all like to see more of what we like, and less (or none) of what we don't. If we don't write to you, how will you know?
Regards,
Frank Brayman
Birmingham, AL
—
You're quite right on one count: we do want you to write, because we want to consider our readers’ likes and dislikes in deciding what to buy for the future, and we won't know what they are unless you tell us. But we have to consider all readers’ preferences, not just yours or Ms. Shackelford's or those of anybody else who thinks his or her tastes define an absolute standard of Goodness or Badness.
Your statement that tracking is “unreadable crap” is immediately, easily, absolutely, and irrevocably refuted by the simple observation that thousands of readers did read it and liked it better than almost anything else they'd read recently. By all means tell us when you hate something (or when you love it), but it would be refreshing if in the process you showed some sign of realizing that all you're really saying is, “I couldn't read it and I really disliked it.” It's certainly important for us to know that, but it's also important to realize that yours is not the only voice out there—or even the only one worth listening to.
And I'd think that when you do make such comments, you'd want us to pass them on to the authors—so that they, too, can consider your likes and dislikes in their future work.
* * * *
Dr. Schmidt,
Gentlemen, I agree with Ms. Shackelford in one sense only. I, personally, did not like “Tracking” and I stopped reading it about the middle of page three. My favorite was, and still is, the Venus Equilateral series.
But, therein lies the key, “I, personally...” Never did it occur to me that this story was “unreadable crap.” I didn't like it, so I moved on. Big deal!
For Ms. Shackelford to set herself up as the final arbiter of good/bad writing is the height of egotism. The readers set the standards. If no one finishes the story, it's bad writing. If only a few of us don't finish it, our tastes are simply different from the rest.
Unfortunately, the world (and I do mean the entire world) contains far too many people who know exactly what's right for all the rest of us (whether we like it or not) and happily spend their lives trying to cram it down our throats. Some by persuasion, some by votes, and—much more worrisome—some by force. My current favorite is Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I wonder what he would think of “Tracking.”
Sam Brunstein
Prescott Valley, AZ
* * * *
Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I see people keep complaining about David Palmer's terse writing style.
Come on, people, get over it! Haven't any of you ever read “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? If it was good enough for Heinlein, it ought to be good enough for Palmer.
Pat
* * * *
Dear Dr. Schmidt,
In your November editorial, “The Great Rush Forward,” you pointed out that rapid progress can have unpleasant consequences. Our dependence on petroleum is a current example. One hundred years ago, people assumed that petroleum was so abundant that it would continue to be cheap and readily available for thousands of years. It was abundant, but consumption increased so rapidly that now we are facing serious shortages. If Vernor Vinge's suggestion that advances in science and technology are accelerating so rapidly that we are approaching a singularity is correct, we may be approaching disaster.
Another possibility is the opposite of a singularity: asymptotic approaches to some limits. The limits may be set by nature: the speed of light, conservation laws, the second law of thermodynamics, the sizes of atoms. Or we may be approaching limits of utility. No matter how fast we travel, the time required to complete a journey will never be less than zero. No matter how cheap and abundant food is, a person cannot eat more than his stomach can hold. If each of us will have cheap, instantaneous access to ten million books, the addition of another thousand books will not add much knowledge or enjoyment. If we are approaching limits, humanity's future may be peaceful and prosperous but stagnant.
Sincerely,
David Lippmann
Austin, Texas
* * * *
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
Many thanks for your really excellent editorial, “The Great Rush Forward.” It is not only a timely topic, but you have captured the essence of the argument in an eloquent way.
As an older person who is a scientist and manager, but a more cautious adopter, and who is married to a visionary and early adopter, I have felt that we are being bombarded, beyond our ability to discern meaning, with urgent messages that we must go faster and faster in order to even “belong” to the human race (I know you will see the double entendre in “race” here).
My husband is brilliant and feels that events can hardly go fast enough to suit him; I have a high IQ and many accomplishments, but have had to adapt to change at a much faster rate than I am comfortable with, precisely because I have lived long enough to see some of the consequences of early adopting by eager and intelligent people, who later paid the price.
My work has been in the quality of foods and pharmaceuticals in particular, so there are plenty of examples right there, and now technology is making of us a more and more ignorant species in some ways. For example, we really don't know what is in our food, our cosmetics and toiletries, and so on. Of course, there are so many benefits to advances, and one needs to be hopeful and not too afraid, but I see our grandchildren, for example, hurling themselves headlong into their computer and cell phone worlds to the exclusion of developing other important skills. It is particularly disturbing to me to see people becoming more and more slaves to machines, those high-maintenance and often mysterious “creatures.”
Sorry, I did not mean to go on and on, but it was very encour
aging to read your editorial and know that others not only see the conundrum, but can speak about it (and do speak about) it in a useful, food-for-thought way. I hope the speed demons will pause long enough to read your words and think about them!
Best wishes,
Trean K. Blumenthal
Metuchen, NJ
* * * *
Stan,
Like Ulysses drawn to the Sirens, so was I drawn to my computer, pounding the keys again and again and again, much like the pounding of the surf on the beach of Ulysses time (or any other for that matter), drawn by the opening sentence of Alan Dean Foster's short story “Cold Fire"—an oxymoron in usual use, but neatly chosen here—to ask you, the editor, how such a sentence that could qualify for the Bulwer-Lytton contest slipped through your metaphorical fingers to be published in your august magazine.
Al Westerfield
Crossfield, TN
—
Sorry you didn't like that sentence, but I can't agree with your judgment of it. Seems to me that it used a single vivid and quite apt simile, rather than the hodgepodge of forced effects typical of a Bulwer-Lytton entry (or your letter).
* * * *
ADDENDUM
Immediately after our January/February issue went to print, a discovery relevant to that month's fact article ("Neptune, Neptune, Neptune ... But Not Neptune” by Kevin Walsh) came to light.
The author adds: “Only a few months after the article was completed, astronomers discovered that the star BD+20 307, surrounded by a million times more dust than the Sun, is actually binary and several billion years old. This means that the dust is not from the formation of the system, but more likely from a recent catastrophic collision between two terrestrial planets.”
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS
by Anthony Lewis
3-5 April 2009
WILLYCON XI (Nebraska SF conference) at Wayne State College, Wayne, NE. Author Guest of Honor: M. R. Sellars; Artist Guest of Honor: Maria J. William; Fan Guest of Honor: Rod Vasek; Alumni Fan Guests of Honor: Matt and Jen Ptacek. Membership: $15 until 1 March 2009, $20 thereafter and at the door, $10 for students with school ID, FREE for WSC students. Info: wildcat.wsc.edu/clubs/ willycon/; [email protected] or ToYoung1@ wsc.edu; (800) 228-9972.
Analog SFF, March 2009 Page 21