Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

  Kit stood and turned to the voice behind him. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.” She wore blue and white, and her feet were bare. She had pulled back her dark hair with a ribbon and her pale shoulders gleamed. She glowed under the moonlight like mist. He thought of touching her, kissing her; but they had not spoken since just after Valo's death.

  She stepped forward and took the mug from his hand, drank the lukewarm beer, and just like that, the world righted itself. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash over him.

  He took her hand, and they sat on the cold grass, and looked out across the river. The bridge was a black net of arcs and lines, and behind it was the mist glowing blue-white in the light of the moons. After a moment, he asked, “Are you still Rasali Ferry, or will you take a new name?”

  “I expect I'll take a new one.” She half-turned in his arms so that he could see her face, her pale eyes. “And you? Are you still Kit Meinem, or do you become someone else? Kit Who Bridged the Mist? Kit Who Changed the World?”

  “Names in the city do not mean the same thing,” Kit said absently, aware that he had said this before and not caring. “Did I change the world?” He knew the answer already.

  She looked at him for a moment, as if trying to gauge his feelings. “Yes,” she said slowly after a moment. She turned her face up toward the loose strand of bobbing lights: “There's your proof, as permanent as stone and sky.”

  “ ‘Permanent as stone and sky,’ “ Kit repeated. “This afternoon—it flexes a lot, the bridge. There has to be a way to control it, but it's not engineered for that yet. Or lightning could strike it. There are a thousand things that could destroy it. It's going to come down, Rasali. This year, next year, a hundred years from now, five hundred.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “All these people, they think it's forever.”

  “No, we don't,” Rasali said. “Maybe Atyar does, but we know better here. Do you need to tell a Ferry that nothing will last? These stones will fall eventually, these cables—but the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here. My mother died, my grandfather. Valo.” She stopped, swallowed. “Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.” She leaned forward, across the space between them, and they kissed.

  * * * *

  “Are you off soon?”

  Rasali and Kit had made love on the levee against the cold grass. They had crossed the bridge together under the sinking moons, walked back to The Deer's Heart and bought more beer, the crowds thinner now, people gone home with their families or friends or lovers: the strangers from out of town bedding down in spare rooms, tents, anywhere they could. But Kit was too restless to sleep, and he and Rasali ended up back by the mist, down on the dock. Morning was only a few hours away, and the smaller moon had set. It was darker now and the mist had dimmed.

  “In a few days,” Kit said, thinking of the trunks and bags packed tight and gathered in his room at The Fish: the portfolio, fatter now, and stained with water, mist, dirt, and sweat. Maybe it was time for a new one. “Back to the capital.”

  There were lights on the opposite bank, fisherfolk preparing for the night's work despite the fair, the bridge. Some things don't change.

  “Ah,” she said. They both had known this; it was no surprise. “What will you do there?”

  Kit rubbed his face, feeling stubble under his fingers, happy to skip that small ritual for a few days. “Sleep for a hundred years. Then there's another bridge they want, down at the mouth of the river, a place called Ulei. The mist's nearly a mile wide there. I'll start midwinter maybe.”

  “A mile,” Rasali said. “Can you do it?”

  “I think so. I bridged this, didn't I?” His gesture took in the beams, the slim stone tower overhead, the woman beside him. She smelled sweet and salty. “There are islands by Ulei, I'm told. Low ones. That's the only reason it would be possible. So maybe a series of flat stone arches, one to the next. You? You'll keep building boats?”

  “No.” She leaned her head back and he felt her face against his ear. “I don't need to. I have a lot of money. The rest of the family can build boats, but for me that was just what I did while I waited to cross the mist again.”

  “You'll miss it,” Kit said. It was not a question.

  Her strong hand laid over his. “Mmm,” she said, a sound without implication.

  “But it was the crossing that mattered to you, wasn't it?” Kit said, realizing it. “Just as with me, but in a different way.”

  “Yes,” she said, and after a pause: “So now I'm wondering: how big do the Big Ones get in the Mist Ocean? And what else lives there?”

  “Nothing's on the other side,” Kit said. “There's no crossing something without an end.”

  “Everything can be crossed. Me, I think there is an end. There's a river of water deep under the Mist River, yes? And that water runs somewhere. And all the other rivers, all the lakes—they all drain somewhere. There's a water ocean under the Mist Ocean, and I wonder whether the mist ends somewhere out there, if it spreads out and vanishes and you find you are floating on water.”

  “It's a different element,” Kit said, turning the problem over. “So you would need a boat that works through mist, light enough with that broad belly and fish-skin sheathing; but it would have to be deep-keeled enough for water.”

  She nodded. “I want to take a coast-skimmer and refit it, find out what's out there. Islands, Kit. Big Ones. Huge Ones. Another whole world maybe. I think I would like to be Rasali Ocean.”

  “You will come to Ulei with me?” he said, but he knew already. She would come, for a month or a season or a year. They would sleep tumbled together in an inn very like The Fish or The Bitch, and when her boat was finished, she would sail across the ocean, and he would move on to the next bridge or road, or he might return to the capital and a position at University. Or he might rest at last.

  “I will come,” she said. “For a bit.”

  Suddenly he felt a deep and powerful emotion in his chest, overwhelmed by everything that had happened or would happen in their lives: the changes to Nearside and Farside, the ferry's ending, Valo's death, the fact that she would leave him eventually, or that he would leave her. “I'm sorry,” he said.

  “I'm not,” she said, and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it.”

  All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.

  “When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you.”

  A fo ben, bid bont. To be a leader, be a bridge.

  —Welsh proverb

  Copyright © 2011 by Kij Johnson

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  DECEMBER ISSUE

  A special holiday issue sporting stories about the winter season has been a semi-annual tradition at Asimov's, and we're delighted that this year the holiday spirit returns to the magazine with a brand new novelette by Connie Willis. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll read this story on the edge of your seat as New York Theater comes alive and an aging Broadway star contends with a very unusual protogeé in “All About Emily.”

  ALSO IN DECEMBER

  New author Suzanne Palmer makers her Asimov's entrance with a wild tale about a team of xenobiologists whose accademic voyage of exploration goes all-together differently from what (most) of them expected; new author Ken Liu offers us a heart-breaking mystery about a young boy making sense of the world in “The Countable"; Pamela Sagent looks at a group of children growing up in the fifties and reveals the truth behind “Strawberry Birdies"; in his devestating new story, Ferrett Steinmetz shows us why it's a good idea to move quickly when “'Run,’ Bakri Says"; with his usual sardonic humor, Tim McDaniel demonstrates why a certain element would go to any length to get a hold of “The List"; and in a poignant visit to the fu
ture Steve Rasnic Tem discovers that there's more than one type of “Ephemera.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg's “Reflections” investigates “The Strange Case of the Patagonian Giants” and we'll have Peter Heck's “On Books” column, plus an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our December issue on sale at newsstands on October 4, 2011. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www. asimovs.com. We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebook store.sony.com's eReader and from Zinio.com!

  COMING SOON

  new stories by Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley, Ken Liu, Kit Reed, Jack McDevitt, Rudy Rucker & Eileen Gunn, David Ira Cleary, Tom Purdom, Zachary Jernigan, C.W. Johnson, Bruce McAllister & Barry Malzberg, and many others!

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS: INSIDE/OUTSIDE

  by Norman Spinrad

  ANATHEM,

  by Neal Stephenson

  $9.99, Harper Collins, $9.99

  ISBN: 0061982482

  —

  THE ROAD,

  by Cormac McCarthy

  Knopf, $7.99

  ISBN: 0307267458

  —

  THE LOST SYMBOL

  by Dan Brown,

  Doubleday, $9.99

  ISBN: 0385533136

  —

  SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY

  by Gary Shtenygart

  Random House, $9.99

  ISBN: 067960359X

  * * * *

  By the time J. Edgar Hoover reached mandatory Federal retirement age, it was well-known that the long-time FBI Director had become an ominous nutcase with the dirty goods on many people, including the political high and mighty. Lyndon Johnson was president, and it was assumed that he, like many of the denizens of Washington, would heave a sigh of relief as he handed Hoover the gold watch on his way out the door.

  Instead, LBJ made a special exception and kept Hoover on as head of the Bureau. When asked why he had done such a thing, Johnson replied: “Better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

  In the second decade of the twenty-first century, publishing, literature, and “SF” find themselves in revolutionary times, in part thrust there by technological developments—and how perfectly science fictional that would sound leading off a story in John W. Campbell's Astounding.

  But this really is the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the times they really are a-changing. Publishing is being changed by ebooks and ebook readers like Kindle, Nook, and the iPad, the literary content of the product can hardly be immune from bottom-line changes, and science fiction, by its very nature, cannot escape being up there on the line of scrimmage, for better or for worse, whether it likes it or not.

  The four novels under consideration here are The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and that it itself tells a multiplex revolutionary tale. I read them all on my Nook.

  I received none of them as review copies. I bought them all as ebooks with my own money.

  For those of you for whose beer money we critics compete and who must be constrained to shell it out for your literary entertainment, will it really come as a shock when I say that we reviewers expect freebies to review from publishers competing for our attention?

  I have upon rare occasion bought books because their publishers did not grace me with copies or galleys, but I wanted to review them anyway. But I had never ever written one of these columns entirely about books I had to pay for. Which, of course, I hope will never happen again. Which, of course, I know damn well will.

  And until now, I've never before reviewed a novel I read as an ebook, and in this essay I'm doing nothing but. And this is something I think I'm going to be doing a lot of in the future, and I won't be complaining about that at all.

  As a reader of literature outside the commercial SF genre, I do have to pay my own way, and have always been parsimonious about buying hardcover copies of what I wanted to read for my own personal enjoyment and/or edification for twenty-five dollars and up. This Scroogy attitude is probably exacerbated by all the free copies I'm inundated with of stuff that goes for the same prices, but which just isn't the sort of stuff I want to read.

  But epublishing and retailing, by fits and starts, here doing it right, there being exploitatively and foolishly greedy against enlightened self-interest, are changing my attitude, and I believe are in the process of changing the attitude of readers in general with finite budgets who have to balance wanting to read what they want to read right now with how many right-now editions they can afford to buy.

  All of that is gone into at far greater length than I can burden you with here in The Publishing Death Spiral and The Future of eBooks Is Now on my blogsite Norman Spinrad At Large (normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/). For present purposes, the point is that all the novels under consideration here were launched as hardcovers for twenty-five dollars or more, yet all of the ebook editions sell for the same price as the trade paperback reprints and sometimes a lot less, and are out there just as fast. Meaning at any time in the publication cycle readers of ebook editions are going to get more titles to read for the same money.

  Three electronic cheers for that!

  It means that even a critic who in fact not only gets freebies inside the genre tent but gets paid for reading them will look around more freely at what may be relevant to larger literary matters outside the genre tent, the boundaries of which are swiftly eroding.

  None of the four novels under consideration are what we think of as genre “science fiction,” which is why they never came in over my transom as review copies. But all of them are not only literarily speculative fiction, not only even arguably science fiction, but perhaps, taken together, a clade of speciating literary vectors that arguably may replace “science fiction” entirely.

  Or vice versa?

  None of these four novels are mimetic contemporary tales; none of them are fantasies, since they do at least attempt to more or less stay within the known laws of mass and energy—or in the case of Anathem, argue its way around them and through them with geeky rubber cosmology. So if one reverses figure and ground to define science fiction by what everything else is not, they have to be SF because there's nothing else for them to be.

  I bought an ebook edition of The Road with no thought of wanting to review it because Cormac McCarthy is an establishment literary lion, the novel is set in a post-apocalypse future, and it received such laudatory attention in what's left of the establishment literary press as a novelist in my existential position would sell at least a collateralized debt obligation on his soul for. I had previously bought the ebook of Super Sad True Love Story because the coverage in the more or less same PR environment promised a fun read, and because this non-genre SF novel was set in some sort of gonzo near-future.

  Only after having read both the Shteyngart and McCarthy did I realize that both of them were science fiction, and not even merely speculative fiction, by any coherent literary definition. And that from a proprietary genre point of view, these guys were standing outside the genre tent.

  But were they pissing in or knocking on the door, to flagrantly mix two metaphors in a single sentence? The only thing that seemed clear was that something mutationally general was going on.

  Only then was my curiosity drawn to The Lost Symbol, a sort of sequel by the author of the monstrous best-seller The Da Vinci Code, which I had read for lack of anything else in English to be found in an apartment in Paris where Dona and I were staying. This is what one could only call the kind of contemporary paranoid present tense historical thriller that insists that it's realistic by shoehorning itself inside the physical laws of mass and energy, however loosely it plays with everything else.

  And is this not another func
tional definition of science fiction if ever there was one? And has not Dan Brown gotten filthy rich writing it? And does it not make sense for those of us writing science fiction without attaining his lofty commercial eminence to try to figure out why? Particularly since The Lost Symbol is, in literary terms, a real stinker, much more so than The Da Vinci Code.

  In The Da Vinci Code, it was the Catholic Church getting the expose the machinations of the Illuminati of the Month treatment, via a search to crack the secret encoded in the Mona Lisa that exfoliates into a derring-do thriller via an academic expert forced by fictional necessity to do the derring, a la a reluctant Indiana Jones.

  Unless you've just returned from the ex-planet Pluto, you don't need me to tell you that it was an enormous commercial success, but maybe you do need me to confess, if that is the proper word, that I rather enjoyed it. Hey, Leonardo, Opus Dei, a homicidal albino monk, the Holy Grail, the hidden secret life of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Roman Catholic Church fighting for its life well outside the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry—pretty hard to not be gripped by such material, and Dan Brown writes proficiently if not with high literary ambition.

  But did Brown really believe this stuff ? Could it really be true? Was that why some Church officials expressed their displeasure? Was not putting these thoughts bouncing around the heads of readers and paranoid pop culture part of its appeal?

  Whatever, Dan, any agent worth his commission would have told Brown, since The Da Vinci Code earned out so much above the advance we got on it, your publisher is slavering to lay out much more for the advance on a sequel.

  Voila, The Lost Symbol! Same lead hero, but this time it's the Freemasons, particularly the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, the CIA, and Noetics, a science fictional science of consciousness reminiscent of Scientology presented without the sardonic wink of an L. Ron Hubbard.

  And the venue in which the action—and there is plenty of that—takes place is not millennial Rome or Paris with the atmospheres that implies, but the mythical cityscape secretly created as Washington, D.C.