Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11

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  Saturday, January 1, 2011

  EDITORIAL: MARTIN GARDNER

  Sheila Williams

  There were many reasons to be thrilled when I landed a job at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The first and most obvious was the chance to work along side Isaac Asimov—a man I’d admired since my childhood. A second, very important reason that I was doing my little happy dance, was that I would...

  THE BACKWARD BANANA

  Martin Gardner

  Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight! —Elizabeth Akers Allen Professor N.A. Gilligan and his assistants, Bianca Zacnaib and Duane Renaud, had been...

  REFLECTIONS: THE RUIN

  Robert Silverberg

  Many great works of science fiction, from Wells’s The Time Machine onward, have attempted to portray the far future, and in reading them we look backward by the brilliant light of those distant epochs to see our own era, outlined with the vividness that surrounds something very strange, something...

  ON THE NET: WARNING:THE INTERNETS MAY BE HAZARDS TO YOUR HEALTH!

  James Patrick Kelly

  ---nope--- Whenever a new and revolutionary information technology appears, naysayers always swarm. Television? Yes. Radio? Check. Newspapers? Right. Gutenberg and his printing press? Absolutely. Scrolls? Yes, even handwritten manuscripts—the primordial book technology at the foundation of our world...

  NEXT ISSUE

  FEBRUARY ISSUE Our February issue is crammed full of ground-breaking and evocative tales. Paul McAuley’s February’s cover story is a profoundly moving coming-of-age tale about “The Choice” two young men have to make in a future that is not too far from our own time, yet utterly alien from today’s...

  ON BOOKS

  Paul Di Filippo

  City Lover In June 2007, humanity passed a landmark in its history: for the first time more people lived in cities than otherwise. The city is one of the most significant, useful, and complex “inventions” in the annals of our species. It’s a technology we literally inhabit, and as such, like water...

  TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL READERS’ AWARD

  What a milestone! It hardly seems possible that we could be celebrating our Twenty-fifth Readers’ Award, but that’s what the calendar says. Seems like it was only yesterday that we started it! Please vote. Most of you know the drill by now. For those of you who are new to this, we should explain a...

  INDEX

  This index covers volume 34 of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, January 2010 through December 2010. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author. When there is more than one entry for an author, listings are arranged alphabetically according to the story/article title. All entries are followed by...

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

  Erwin S. Strauss

  A last burst of activity before the holiday lull. Good bets for Asimovians are WindyCon, SFContario, and PhilCon. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and...

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  EDITORIAL: MARTIN GARDNER

  Sheila Williams

  There were many reasons to be thrilled when I landed a job at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The first and most obvious was the chance to work along side Isaac Asimov—a man I’d admired since my childhood. A second, very important reason that I was doing my little happy dance, was that I would also get the chance to work with another childhood idol—Martin Gardner.

  I’d first fallen down the rabbit hole and into Martin Gardner’s wonderful work with The Annotated Alice. In middle school and high school, I read and reread his notes about Alice, both in Wonderland and through the looking glass, and I’ve continued to dip into that book in all its various editions ever since. As a teenager, I avidly turned to Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American as soon as the magazine arrived in our mailbox. I’m sure it was an early exposure to his work in SA that led to my own life-long love of logic and math games. On some level, these essays may even have contributed to my decision to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. In one of life’s circuitous routes, it was a fellow grad student who introduced me to Gardner’s famous pseudoscience debunking Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Once I got to know Martin, I subscribed to the Skeptical Enquirer, both because I found it an intriguing journal and because I wanted to keep up with his Notes of a Fringe Watcher column.

  “The Doctor’s Dilemma” appeared in the inaugural issue of Asimov’s. It was introduced briefly as “the first in a series of SF puzzles that Mr. Gardner has promised us.” The series of puzzles took the form of short science fiction stories and lasted for more than nine years and one hundred and eleven columns. I was lucky enough to work on nearly half of them and I edited a little sixty-four page booklet of his puzzles that was used as a premium by our circulation department. The columns took us “Around the Solar System,” escorted us along “The Road to Mandalay,” and introduced us to “The Jinn from Hyperspace.” They included correspondence with Paul Dirac and explored errors in William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies. The columns could be challenging to run because they were often accompanied by complex images and because we had to find space at the bottom of several stories for all the solutions. They were a lot of fun, though, and I enjoyed working closely with Martin and shepherding the puzzles through the production process. I was very disappointed when he called one spring day to let me know that he intended to retire from his duties as our columnist once “Thang the Planet Eater” appeared in our November 1986 issue.

  It was a very active retirement that saw the publication of at least thirty-five books. One of the last, The Jinn from Hyperspace: And Other Scribblings—both Serious and Whimsical (2007), showed that the little puzzle pieces in Asimov’s were not lying fallow.

  Martin continued to write essays and books right up until his death last May at the age of ninety-five. His passing occurred just a month after the loss of Asimov’s first editor, George H. Scithers. Both men deserve thanks for the magazine’s firm foundation.

  I decided that a good way to memorialize Martin was to reprint one of his puzzles from the pages of Asimov’s. Now you have the chance to turn time back to July 1980 and see how ably you can resolve the puzzles presented in “The Backward Bannana.”

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  THE BACKWARD BANANA

  Martin Gardner

  Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight.

  Make me a child again just for tonight!

  —Elizabeth Akers Allen

  Professor N.A. Gilligan and his assistants, Bianca Zacnaib and Duane Renaud, had been working for years on a device they hoped could reverse time inside a small region of space. Their method is much too technical to put in laymen’s language, but essentially it involves a reversal of the spin of Penrose twistors—mathematical structures that underlie quarks. Twistors had been proposed in the mid-twentieth century by the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, and their existence was confirmed in 1991 by a series of ingenious experiments.

  Gilligan’s device was slightly larger than a washing machine. A compartment at the top, supercooled and surrounded by a powerful Penrose force field, was designed to hold any physical object the experimenters intended to time-reverse. On the side of the machine were twenty levers, their positions numbered 1 through 20. Pulling up on a lever closed a position, pushing down ope
ned it.

  “At last we are ready for a test,” said Gilligan, his eyes gleaming. “Let’s first use a small organic object, say a lemon. If we succeed, we’ll try to time-reverse a watermelon. Then maybe a mouse.”

  “No lemons, no melon,” said Bianca, “but we do have a banana in the refrigerator.”

  “Banana it is,” said Gilligan.

  Bianca fetched the ripe yellow banana. She carefully placed it inside the compartment and closed the lid.

  “Are all positions closed?” asked Gilligan.

  “No, it is open on one position—position two,” said Duane. “Shall I close two?”

  “Not yet,” said Gilligan, walking around the machine to inspect the row of levers. He pushed down lever seven, adjusted several dials, then pressed a button that turned on the machine. It began to hum.

  Gilligan hooked a finger under lever seven while Duane kept a finger below level two. “Pull up if I pull up,” said Gilligan.

  Gilligan waited a few minutes before he slowly raised his lever. Duane did the same. “Bianca, as I move these levers,” said Duane, “I’m so excited my hand is shaking.”

  Bianca raised the lid for a quick peek. The banana had already turned green.

  The hum grew steadily louder, then suddenly there was an explosive sound, like a tiny thunderclap, inside the compartment. When Bianca opened it again, the banana was gone.

  “By Albert, we’ve done it!” shouted Gilligan.

  The three physicists broke open a bottle of wine, drank several toasts, sand a chorus of “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” then went to Gilligan’s office to prepare their report on the great experiment.

  Did you notice that in the above episode the names of all three scientists are palindromes? That is, the order of the letters in each name is the same when the letters are taken in the reverse direction.

  Concealed in the text are three other palindromic word sequences that spell the same backward. One contains just four words, one contains six, and one contains seven. If you can’t find them, turn to page 35.

  ---FIRST SOLUTION TO THE BACKWARD BANANA---

  The palindromic sequences are:

  NO LEMONS, NO MELON.

  PULL UP IF I PULL UP.

  NO, IT IS OPEN ON ONE POSITION.

  Now focus your mind vigorously on this paragraph and on all its words. What’s so unusual about it? Don’t just zip through it quickly. Go through it slowly. Tax your brain as much as you can.

  If you fail to see what is so remarkable about the above paragraph, you’ll find the answer at the end of “Killer Advice”.

  ---SECOND SOLUTION TO THE BACKWARD BANANA---

  The paragraph contains every letter of the alphabet except “e,” the last letter of “time.”

  Now go back and study the original narrative. Somewhere in the text is a block of letters which taken forward spell the last name of a top science fiction author who has written about time travel. There may be spaces between letters, as for example in the word “fat” that is hidden in the second sentence of this paragraph. After you find the last name, look for another sequence of letters in the narrative which taken backward spell the same author’s first name. What is the full name?

  ---THIRD SOLUTION TO THE BACKWARD BANANA---

  The author is Isaac Asimov. Both names are in the sequence of capitalized letters in the sentence that starts: “BianCA, AS I MOVe these levers, . . .”

  Copyright © 2010 Martin Gardner

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  REFLECTIONS: THE RUIN

  Robert Silverberg

  Many great works of science fiction, from Wells’s The Time Machine onward, have attempted to portray the far future, and in reading them we look backward by the brilliant light of those distant epochs to see our own era, outlined with the vividness that surrounds something very strange, something utterly unfamiliar. Viewing the ruins of our own culture through the eyes of the denizens of the future creates a powerful effect. Thus the famous final shot of Planet of the Apes, the Statue of Liberty buried neck-deep in the sands of what we had thought was an alien world. Thus the glimpses of our own long-vanished era (and later eras, also long-vanished) in such books as William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, Brian Aldiss’s The Long Afternoon of Earth, and Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, and such stories as Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” John W. Campbell’s “Twilight,” Robert Moore Williams’s “Robots Return,” and Poul Anderson’s “Epilogue,” to name just a few out of a great many.

  My own best shot at achieving the time-displacement parallax effect was the 1971 novel Son of Man, in which my bewildered protagonist, wandering through the world of some billions of years from now, comes upon the ruins of an ancient building, “a columned edifice in the classical style, gray and stolid and self-assured, fitted by style and grandeur to have been the supreme museum of Earth. . . . A scaly green lichen clings to the roughnesses of the wall, creating patterns of choked color, continents sprouting on the ancient stone. Weeds have begun to straggle across the portico. The door is gone, but, staring through it, he sees only darkess within the building.” Five huge dinosaur-like beasts, remote descendants of mankind, occupy a courtyard behind the shattered columns. What he experiences is the parallax of time, the measure of the distortion and shifting that the eons impose on the past. One of the finest things science fiction can do is show us the great span of time under the auspices of eternity, the succession of the ages, the great arch of history shading into almost unknowable prehistory at one end and the utterly unknowable future at the other.

  But we don’t need to turn to science fiction to get that frisson of awe and even terror that comes from contemplating the slow, inexorable impact of time. Our world is full of the ruined relics left behind by epochs past. The Forum and Colosseum in Rome, the Acropolis in Athens, the temples and pyramids of Egypt, the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, the Mayan pyramids of Chichen Itza, the city of Petra in the Jordanian desert (that “rose-red city half as old as Time”) all stir the imagination to an appreciation of the power of time in the same way that a strongly realized work of science fiction can do. These ruins have, of course, generated many a poem or novel or painting. The eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who had the fifteen-hundred-year-old ruins of Persia’s greatest age close at hand, put it this way:

  They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

  The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:

  And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass

  Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.

  A second poem that comes quickly to mind is Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which speaks of a vast fallen statue in the Egyptian desert:

  I met a traveler from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies. . . .

  And Shelley gives us, with savage irony, the inscription on the pedestal:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  There is another and much more obscure poem that provides me with an even stronger sense of one age succeeding another, generating its force for me because it is the work of a poet of one ancient vanished society writing about an even earlier one already all but unknown in the poet’s time. The displacement effect thus provided verges on something only the best science fiction has achieved for me. This is the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem we call in modern English “The Ruin,” a work that has come down to us only because it was collected in an eleventh-century manuscript known as the Exeter Book, which is our main source for what remains of early English poe
try.

  The Exeter Book is something of a ruin itself. The front cover was once used as a cutting board, and even as a beer mat. The last fourteen pages are marred by a large diagonal burn, apparently done by a branding iron and damaging much of the text. “The Ruin” is on one of the damaged pages, and so it is partly unintelligible, but what remains is one of the great works of Old English verse.

  The poet is writing about a ruined city that the Romans had left behind when they abandoned their conquered province of Britain about three hundred years earlier, just as the first Saxon invaders were arriving. Most authorities consider the city to be Aquae Sulis, on the site of what is now the city of Bath, where Roman ruins can still be seen today. It is a masterly depiction of time’s ruination; but what gives me the true science fictional shiver is its view of the vanished Romans as a quasi-mythical race of giants:

  These walls are wondrous. Destiny destroyed them.

  The courtyards and battlements are smashed. The work of the giants is crumbling.

  Its roofs are breaking and falling; its towers collapse.

  Plundered are those walls with grated doors, their mortar white with frost.

  Its battered ramparts are shorn away and ruined, eaten away by Time. Earth’s fist and grasp

  Holds mason and man, all decayed, departed. . . .

  The poet tells us that for “a hundred generations” men held sway here, the red wall standing “while kingdom followed kingdom in the land,” and he gives us a picture of radiant drinking-halls, lavish baths and pools, joyous revelry. But then came mighty Fate, bringing sudden change.

  Wide-wasting was the battle where the great walls fell.

  Plague-laden days upon the city came; Death snatched away that mighty host of men. . . .

  There in the olden time full many a lord,

  Clad in gleaming battle-armor, gazed upon his silver treasure and his jewels,

  A radiant city in a kingdom wide.

  There stood the courts of stone, and the hot surging stream that carried water to the baths, the heart of the place. . . .