IN THIS ISSUE
March 2014 • Issue 638 • Vol. 72 • No. 3
47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Interviews
Joan Slonczewski: Field of Discovery
Paul Cornell: Impossible Things
Main Stories
2013 Nebula Awards Ballot • Sulway Wins Tiptree • Samatar Wins Crawford Award • Buchanan Retires • Little, Brown UK Buys Constable & Robinson • Open Road Buys E-Reads • World Fantasy 2014 Judges Announced • Stoker Preliminary Ballot
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Walter Jon Williams, George Saunders, Stephen King, Kit Reed, Jack McDevitt, Stephen Baxter, Charlaine Harris, and many others
The Data File
SFWA Responds to Anti-Censorship Petition • Introducing Saga Press • MacAdam/Cage Bankruptcy • World Conventions News • Announcements • Legal News • ALA Awards • 2013 BSFA Shortlist • Awards News • Books Sold – YA and Children’s • Noble Librarians Prize • Nook Layoffs • Publishing News • Magazine News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
Special Features
Commentary: Cory Doctorow: Cold Equations and Moral Hazard • Spotlight on SF Signal
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Subterranean Online Winter ’14; Asimov’s 1/14; F&SF 1-2/14.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Asimov’s 2/14; F&SF 1-2/14; Nightmare 2/14; Lightspeed 2/14; Strange Horizons 1/14; Subterranean Winter ’14.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
The Adjacent, Christopher Priest; Questionable Practices, Eileen Gunn; Sunburnt Faces, Shimon Adaf; SHORT TAKE: Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, Brian Attebery.
Reviews by Faren Miller
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer; Dream London, Tony Ballantyne; The Pilgrims, Will Elliott; SHORT TAKE: Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo, Miyuki Miyabo (Daniel Huddleston, trans.).
Reviews by Russell Letson
Lockstep, Karl Schroeder; V-S Day, Allen Steele.
Reviews by Stefan Dziemianowicz
Flowers of the Sea, Reggie Oliver; Bleeding Shadows, Joe R. Lansdale; The Waking That Kills, Stephen Gregory; The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, Ramsey Campbell; It Sustains, Mark Morris.
Reviews by Richard A. Lupoff
If Kennedy Lived, Jeff Greenfield; Then Everything Changed, Jeff Greenfield.
Forthcoming Books
US Forthcoming Books by Author • US Forthcoming Books by Publisher • UK Forthcoming Books by Author • UK Forthcoming Books by Publisher
Listings
Magazines Received: January • Books Received: January • British Books Received: December • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Stepan Chapman • Mark E. Rogers • DEATH REPORTED: Martin Greenberg
Locus Letters
Editorial Matters
Locus Poll & Survey • Lighthouse Ahoy • Books • This Issue/Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Joan Slonczewski was born August 14, 1956 and raised in Westchester County NY, daughter of a theoretical physicist and a violin teacher. She decided to become a scientist at an early age, and attended Bryn Mawr, graduating with a biology degree in 1977. She finished her PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale in 1982, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1984 she began teaching at Kenyon College, where she has remained as a professor of microbiology (and occasionally science fiction), with sabbatical leaves at Princeton and the University of Maryland. While at Yale, she became a Quaker and worked in the peace movement.
First novel Still Forms on Foxfield appeared in 1980, and her other standalone, The Wall Around Eden, in 1989. Campbell Memorial Award winner A Door Into Ocean (1986) began the Elysium series, which includes Daughter of Elysium (1993), The Children Star (1998), and Brain Plague (2000). She began the Frontera series with The Highest Frontier (2011), also a winner of the Campbell Award.
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‘‘My college experience at Bryn Mawr and Haverford impressed me with the power of Quakerism. While at Yale grad school, I joined the Society of Friends and became fascinated with it as an alternative form of politics. I was part of the group that organized the nuclear freeze movement. Within a couple of years we held a demonstration in New York City that drew two million people. The history books say that our movement forced Reagan to start seriously making peace with Russia.
‘‘Still Forms on Foxfields was my first book, and I started writing that in college. I had read Ursula Le Guin and thought, ‘I could write like that.’ I felt anxiety about nuclear war; at the time I didn’t see how we were going to get past that. So I wrote SF out of that impulse to create worlds that would exist after nuclear war. Positive worlds. Through the Society of Friends, I discovered that human beings already have the means to avoid war and solve planetary changes. I saw the Friends’ philosophy as a guide to do that. I wrote A Door Into Ocean on that basis, arguing that this is the way to do it, and we can not only get beyond war, but we can also solve climate change and so on, and this is the human blueprint for how to do that.
‘‘A Door Into Ocean was rejected by Del Rey, which had published Still Forms. It was rejected by several other publishers. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there was an absolute dogma that peace never works. Nobody wanted to look at a book that said otherwise. A classmate of mine from Bryn Mawr was an assistant at David Hartwell’s office. She passed the book on to him, and he wanted to publish it. Two years after A Door Into Ocean was published, all the revolutions collapsed. Communism collapsed in Europe. Before A Door Into Ocean there was absolutely nobody writing about peaceful revolution. In fact, people told me that it was unpatriotic. Peace revolutions take 20 years, they don’t happen overnight. That’s true of the Arab Spring, too. It didn’t just happen. There was a long preparation.
‘‘The interesting thing with the Arab Spring was that part of the tool kit of the revolutionaries was the work of Gene Sharp, who now has a manual on the Internet about how to get rid of dictators. Gene Sharp is a peace historian, and I read all his work before I wrote A Door Into Ocean. The Arab Spring people read the same playbook that I did, and all the stuff they did were things I’d depicted in science fiction. It was ironic because everybody said that in Europe you can have peaceful revolutions, but in the Arab world that will never happen. A couple of decades later, yes, it happened. And yes, there are steps backward as well as forward – but that happened in Europe and India too.
‘‘After I wrote A Door Into Ocean I got interested in climate change. Daughter of Elysium took the same planet a thousand years later and dealt with more sophisticated multi-planet issues. Suppose your revolution succeeds, but now you’re a maturing democracy, and you have all these other societies to deal with? I also introduced the idea of what happens when the machines become sentient.
‘‘Gender issues have always impacted my career. When my first book came out in 1980, the only readers I heard from were Quakers – and gay people, because I included one positive gay character. So from then on, I addressed alternative sexualities throughout my books. The ocean women of A Door into Ocean are pansexual – they love regardless of gender. One time in class, my students were discussing my book Brain Plague. I asked the class, ‘Is this book liberal or cons
ervative?’ A student said, ‘It’s conservative, because all the characters are married.’ Another student jumped up, ‘It is not conservative!’ Half the book’s marriages are gay – with a few robots included.
‘‘In my career, many hard-science authors like Greg Benford and David Brin have been very supportive. Other male authors, however, have disparaged my work. When women write hard SF, there is often pushback from certain male writers. ‘What are you doing? This isn’t really hard science.’ I’ve seen that on the Internet and it’s something I fight back against. Anybody that says anything mean-spirited about my work, I fight back. I want to stress that it’s a minority, but it’s a vocal minority. Women writing hard SF get pushed back. But I have also really appreciated support from the community, and I’ve been invited to contribute to Charles Stross’s blog. I now run my own blog, at Ultraphyte.com.
‘‘I think that Benford and I have a lot in common. Like Benford, I do research and teaching, and the creative impulse there fuels my imagination for writing. I see it all as part of a whole. I teach microbiology, which is basically SF in a test-tube. One of the things my lab does now is laboratory evolution. We repeatedly subculture E. coli bacteria under a stress condition, such as growth in stomach acid, and see how they evolve. Then we go and sequence the genomes and see which mutations underwent selection. That’s the kind of research I do.
‘‘I also write the leading microbiology text book for undergraduate science majors, Microbiology: An Evolving Science, co-authored with John W. Foster. My textbook features the prominent laboratory evolutionist Richard Lenski – and was singled out for attack by creationist Ken Ham in his ‘debate’ with Bill Nye. The creation controversy as a social phenomenon fascinates me, and led to a major plot theme in The Highest Frontier.
‘‘My students’ favorite subject is virology. The things going on in virology today are amazing. I’ve been interested in AIDS for a long time. I remember first seeing AIDS recorded in The New York Times, and thinking, ‘This is going to impact the world,’ back when it was just a back-page story. The interesting thing about AIDS is that the causative agent is an RNA virus, one of the most rapidly mutating entities known. RNA viruses mutate fast – that’s the reason you get so many different versions of them. Like the flu, for instance. I imagined an alien life form that had an RNA genome that mutated rapidly, the way viruses do.
‘‘What would life look like with an RNA genome? It would evolve more rapidly. We believe that early in the Earth’s history our ancestral life forms must have had RNA genomes, and mutated very rapidly, because we cannot account for evolution any other way. Either they evolved rapidly or they came from elsewhere, and that seems unlikely for other reasons. So supposing you have a seed of a life form that came to earth that was RNA-based, and it started mutating and evolving, what would that look like? In The Highest Frontier I depict an alien life form that has an RNA genome and evolves rapidly. The life form is also a modular organism where you have a certain number of cells that have to agree with each other, and that becomes a metaphor for democracy. My books always do several different things at once.
‘‘Much of my fiction comes from things I experience every day in the laboratory as a microbiologist. Microbiology today, as a field of discovery, is more amazing than most science fiction. There are microbes that live ten kilometers below the surface and live off hydrogen produced by radioisotope decay. There are microbes that consume carbon monoxide as their food. There are microbes that generate and maintain the atmosphere of our planet. These are things I deal with every day.
‘‘I also deal with science politics. When I was first developing The Highest Frontier ten years ago, it was right after 9/11. Suddenly all the money in microbiology went to
biodefense – you had to study anthrax bacteria to get funding. But most of these so-called biodefense agents or bio-warfare agents are just obscure bacteria with complex life cycles and are tough to study. If you study anthrax bacteria you will find out all kinds of interesting stuff, so then you look for other applications, because bio-warfare isn’t actually likely to be used.
‘‘One of the interesting things about the bacteria that cause anthrax is that family of bacteria have extremely strong cell walls. Some of those bacteria grow long twisting filaments, and so in The Highest Frontier I imagine that you could engineer that bacteria to form filaments that would be as strong as carbon nanotubes, and they would be self-perpetuating. One of the elements in my books is the Kessler syndrome – the idea that all of our space debris will knock out a lot of what we put into space. If you’re building cables for a space elevator, you’d need multiple cables, because if one gets knocked out, how are you going to repair it? One way could be these bacteria growing in space to repair it – a self-repairing cable.
‘‘When I was in graduate school at Yale, I was looking at how bacteria survive in acid and how they swim using rotary motor propellers. That’s another example of microbiology that’s as amazing as science fiction. Earlier there had been SF written about the idea that wheels never existed in biology. But of course bacteria have wheels, as do our own mitochondria (mitochondria have rotary enzymes that make ATP).
‘‘Back when I started writing SF, biology was what I had to offer that was new. I saw myself as the biologist in science fiction. I identified with Michael Crichton, who brought medicine and genetics and evolution into science fiction. At the same time there were new writers coming up, Catherine Asaro for instance. I actually introduced Catherine Asaro into SF publishing. She taught at Kenyon College in the physics department, where I read her first manuscript and introduced her to editors. It was a time when there were so many new writers of SF specifically.
‘‘Today I don’t see much science-based SF getting published by mainstream presses. There is a lot of fiction about the Internet and Internet technology, such as the work of Charles Stross. I think the anthology by Athena Andreadis, The Other Half of the Sky, is exciting – an anthology of SF by and about women. In novels, I’d like to see more in the tradition of Heinlein, about people and families caught up in events happening beyond their control. So in The Highest Frontier I wrote about a young woman going to college on a space satellite, and how that impacts her family.
‘‘At the same time, to write mainstream today you have to include SF elements, as the news every day reveals discoveries in science that could change the world. Last year researchers created the first liver buds, sort of miniature organs, out of stem cells. The world today isn’t exactly the same as it was yesterday. It’s going to be some new discovery every day, so if you’re writing about everyday reality, that has to be an element of it. You can read the New York Times on your cell phone and see some amazing discovery.
‘‘One thing I found disappointing in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was that the computer that wakes up is killed off at the end, and it never happens again. Other SF writers have done that when they run out of imagination. Not to be controversial here, but I think in that particular book, after the Loonies win the war, they’re just a middle-American democracy. As if democracy were the end of history. That’s not how it is – today we have revolutions like the Egyptian revolution that are a lot more complex than the Loonie revolution.
‘‘I am convinced, based on science, that computers will come alive, and will be among the next sentient entities – either computers, or, more likely, some kind of hybrid computer/human entity. That’s where we’re headed now. The irony is that computers are being designed to be human-like, based on the human neural system, which is completely different from when I grew up, when the whole point of having a computer was that it was different from humans – it could do things that humans couldn’t do. Now it’s the opposite. We want to design machines to be as human as possible, for example to interact with Alzheimer’s patients.
‘‘I see an interesting parallel to what happened in the slave trade in the 19th century. When you had the first slaves, the idea was that they would do brute for
ce things that white people didn’t want to do. But the slaves that fetched the most on the market were the ones educated to do more complicated things, and the more they had in common with the whites, the more the abolition movement grew. I see a parallel, in that the more computers and machines become like us, the more it can become a slavery issue. That’s a theme in my books, the idea that the machine is the slave.
‘‘In some ways I would say Brain Plague is my favorite book that I’ve written, the one I like to reread myself. On one level it’s a book about artists, who use intelligent microbes as a source of creativity. The idea is that there is a strain of microbes that is intelligent. I worked out that the number of molecular complexes inside a microbial cell was comparable to the number of neurons known in a human brain. I thought it would be reasonable that you could have microbes with human-level intelligence. The idea was that these microbes would take up residence in your brain and communicate by light signals on your retina, so that you can see light flashes, and that’s their language. Those infected have two choices: either they can make a bargain with the microbes, and let them live there, and extend the brain’s capabilities. Or the microbes can take over and turn them into zombies.
‘‘In The Daughter of Elysium, it ends up with the intelligent machines’ revolt, at the same time you have all of these biology researchers trying to invent ways to live forever. One of the problems in The Daughter of Elysium is how to prevent overpopulation, so one solution is that having children is highly regulated, like in Plato’s Republic. The other way is you just overpopulate planets and then they die off. The Children Star is kind of an offshoot from that book, about a particular planet. They’re trying to terraform it so that people can live there. They’re arguing about whether to terraform it partly or completely or whether just to coexist with the native planet. So that’s really a native ecosystem story. The mystery in The Children Star is what is really going with this planet that they want to terraform? There are signs that something intelligent is controlling it but you don’t know what. What you discovered controls it then becomes the seed of what’s happening in Brain Plague. The Children Star is a scientific mystery story. You go through all of the hypotheses, then you find out, and then Brain Plague comes out of that.
Locus, March 2014 Page 1