, the best source of science popularization anywhere? Americans have a huge stake in knowing how the world works and yet our understanding of basic science is abysmal. In a 2009 California Academy of Sciences poll
We now return to your regularly scheduled column.
In 2008, neuroscientist Gary Small
In five days. Clicking around the net for just one hour a day.
Going back to a point he made in his TED talk, Michael Merzenich posted the following to his blog On The Brain
Note: Dr. Merzenich isn’t usually quite so heavy handed with the CAPS LOCK key.
who reads Tolstoy?
So what exactly is the net doing to your brain? The prefrontal regions of increased activity in the Small experiment are centers of problem-solving and decision-making. A 2009 New Zealand study
Which is apparently what sent Nicolas Carr to his keyboard to write The Shallows. Understand that Carr is no Luddite; he concedes the many wonderful uses of the net. He is himself a blogger and a social networker and logs many hours in front of a screen. When he first began to notice that it was difficult to pay attention for more than a few minutes, he wrote it off to “middle-age mind rot.” But now he attributes the greater part of his lack of concentration, his tendency to skip and skim and most important, his struggle to read and comprehend entire books, to what the internet is doing to his brain. The internet is transforming us into multitaskers and “heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set” according to a 2009 Stanford Uni versity Study
So what? says Clay Shirky. You may recall Shirky from the previous installment; he wrote the book Cognitive Surplus, which makes the case that the change that the net is effecting throughout society is mostly benign—and besides, it’s inevitable. Too bad if deep reading has become a lost skill. Get used to the idea that the age of the book is passing. “No one reads War and Peace,” he writes in an Encyclopedia Britannica blog post
If books that are “too long” are passé, then we must consign some of our cherished classics to the dustbin of history. The one volume Lord of the Rings runs 1216 pages. The Fortieth Anniversary edition of Dune is 544 pages. And then there are the works of some of my most talented contemporaries—I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin
exit
Excuse me, I got distracted thinking about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I remember feeling a sense of loss as I read the last page, mourning that my long and lovely encounter with English magic was over. Great book. And so very interesting!
So, what the hell were we talking about. . . ? Was it brains? Something that was supposed to be either good or bad, right? I don’t know why I find it so hard to concentrate these days.
The fact is, we don’t know whether our new brains will be better than the old ones. What we do know is that they are constantly adapting to the cognitive environment we live in. Maybe it’s time to take charge of that environment?
Otherwise it’s definitely going to mess with our heads.
Copyright © 2011 James Patrick Kell
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DEPARTMENTS
NEXT ISSUE
APRIL/MAY DOUBLE ISSUE
There’s a bit of a Steampunk feel to our colossal April/May double issue. A journey of discovery is related in Alexander Jablokov’s complex and compelling cover story about a pair of intrepid twins. On “The Day the Wires Came Down,” this enchanting twosome uncovered a few remarkable secrets about the overhead tramlines that crisscrossed the upper reaches of their city. The darker side of the Steam Age is explored in Christopher Barzak’s surreal look at life in “Smoke City.”
ALSO IN APRIL/MAY
A young woman awaits her fate on a ship stranded in deep space in Hugo Award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s suspenseful new novelette, “Becalmed”; Philip K. Dick Award winner Rudy Rucker continues his exploration of the wonders of biological nanotech in his short story about “The Fnoor Hen”; Nebula Award winner Esther M. Friesner weaves together more than one SF trope while spinning the risqué tale of “The One Who Got Away”; Hugo and Nebula Award winner Michael Swanwick’s bittersweet new short story takes a look at all the possibilities to be found in “An Empty House With Many Doors”; complex military maneuvers, competing human constructs, and
scheming groups of aliens are all a part of Tom Purdom’s latest novelette, “A Response from EST17”; a painful parent and child reunion is accomplished in Hugo and Nebula Award winner Mike Resnick’s “The Homecoming”; Jack Skillingstead flies us to the far future to investigate the truth behind “The Flow and the Dream”; Bram Stoker finalist Nick Mamatas marks his first appearance in Asimov’s with a vivid reminiscence about a traumatic night with “North Shore Friday”; and, in “Clockworks,” William Preston tells a new tale about the younger days of the heroic character featured in his March 2010 story about “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down.”
OUR EXCITING FEATURES
The distinguished Grand Master, James Gunn, takes a charming look at the life of the magazine’s founder in the April/May Thought Experiment: “Celebrating Isaac.” Since Robert Silverberg couldn’t cram everything into one Relections column, we’ll learn some additional secrets when he reveals yet “More About the Plot Genie”; Norman Spinrad examines both Steampunk and the New Weird in “On Books: Urbi et Orbi”; plus you’ll find an array of poetry you’re sure to enjoy. Look for our April/ May double issue on sale at your newsstand on March 1, 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, and ebookstore.sony.com’s eReader!
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DEPARTMENTS
ON BOOKS
NESFA Rules!
Who—or what—is a NESFA?
The acronym stands for the New England Science Fiction Association, and you can find them at POB 809, Framingham, MA 01701. Or, more swiftly, online at www.nesfa.org. They are a fannish organization of deep roots and vast traditions, one of which is publishing books. The first NESFA Press volume was issued in 1972, so in just a short time the Press will mark forty years of book-making. As you might expect, they know how to do things properly by now.
NESFA Press, in a first for one of my columns, will be the whole topic this time around. Why? Because they are doing the Lord’s work, and you need to support them. By focusing on reprinting the classics—and even some obscurities—of our field, they are keeping alive SF’s heritage, entertaining the millions (we hope!) of representative genre readers, and educating new generations of writers.
In the March 2010 issue of Locus, Samuel Delany says, “I keep urging people not to forget the last hundred years of history. In 1911, Gernsback published Ralph 124C41+, and things have happened between then and now… The original texts that are so important to us were not written by academics. That’s the stuff that has to be studied and paid attention to, especially if another generation wants to come out and do something that’s better aesthetically. All aesthetic progress is a matter of taking advantage of the structures that are laid out by the previous generation and doing more with them. You have to know what was there in the first place.”
Now, no one in their right mind would dare to call Chip Delany an “Old Fart.” Multicultural, plugged-in, hip, a perpetual revolutionary, at once a dedicated artist, academic, and stone genre fan, he represents the apex of what SF has accomplished.
And Chip is telling you it’s not cool to be ignorant of the field’s literary history.
Are you going to listen to him, or lightweight, short-sighted know-nothings who disparage everything ever written prior to the launch of Google Chrome?
I’m going with Chip, and that means reveling in the offerings of NESFA Press, a few of which are examined below.
Poul Anderson
I think it’s a fruitful accident that Volume 1 of The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson: Call Me Joe (hardcover, $29.00, 512 pages, ISBN 978-1-886778-75-2) opens with the title story now made famous as one of the myriad “inspirations” for Cameron’s Avatar. When this book was being planned, no one knew of the film’s details, so the focus on “Call Me Joe” is purely serendipitous. But that gives NESFA a great hook: “Read the story that inspired the hit film!”
Needless to say, Anderson’s groundbreaking concept is at least as affecting as Avatar, in one-tenth of the space, and with more intellectual rigor and less preachiness. First appearing in 1957, the story holds up exceedingly well, proving once again that cinematic SF always remains fifty years behind written SF.
But there’s plenty more in this first volume than movie templates, all of the stories working together to illustrate Anderson’s vast range. Take something like “Journeys End,” his well-known tale of the meeting of two telepaths. Purely humanist and emotional, something you might expect Connie Willis, say, to produce. “The Helping Hand” is as tough-minded a critique of cultural imperialism as anything being written today. “Backwardness” might have come from the acidic pen of William Tenn. “Flight to Forever” recalls van Vogt. And “Time Patrol” is pure adventure.
Anderson’s famous ability to appeal to the reader’s sensory empathy is on display everywhere. Take the opener to “Wildcat,” for instance.
“It was raining again, hot and heavy out of a hidden sky, and the air stank with swamp. Herries could just see the tall derricks a mile away, under a floodlight glare, and hear their engines mutter. Further away, a bull brontosaur cried and thunder went through the night.
“Herries’ boots resounded hollowly on the dock. Beneath the slicker, his clothes lay sweat-soggy, the rain spilled off his hat and down his collar . . .”
If you aren’t fully inhabiting Anderson’s depiction of the Jurassic just a few sentences into the story, you soon will be.
Is it too much also to hear a little Ballardian world-weariness and anomie in that opener? I think not, especially given that the story proves to be about the end of civilization. Anderson was no Pollyanna, and he knew and conveyed tragedy intimately. Yet at the same time, he remained generally optimistic about humanity’s potential and destiny.
One additional quality that leaps out: Anderson’s love of women and his ability to depict strong female protagonists, as in “The Sharing of Flesh.”
Volume 2, The Queen of Air and Darkness (hardcover, $29.00, 503 pages, ISBN 978-1-886778-87-6), continues the intelligent and attractive gameplan established by editor Rick Katze: to mix up stories of all types from all stages of Anderson’s long career. Additionally, this time, along with more of the poems that were a “bonus” in Volume 1, we also get some fine essays on the nature of SF.
Some new chords in the Anderson symphony resound here. The award-winning title story opens this volume on a Gene Wolfish note. “Operation Afreet” is a pioneer work of urban fantasy, and spiritual ancestor of the Fables comics. “A Little Knowledge” offers a taste of the legendary Polesotechnic League series. And of course, the themes from the first volume reappear, as with a second Time Patrol tale, “Brave to be a King”
These two volumes should whet your appetite for the ones to follow: at least two more are scheduled. By the end, you’ll see why Anderson earned his Grandmaster status—and you will not even have considered his novels yet!
James Blish
The name of James Blish is recalled today mainly for his critical outpourings—collected in such volumes as The Issue at Hand (1964)—and for his Cities in Flight quartet (1955-62), a milestone that never seems to go out of print for very long. Additionally, Blish will always have a footnote in SF as the first fellow ever to novelize the Star Trek franchise, way back in 1967. But naturally, as a professional hard-working writer, he turned out scads more original fiction, too much of it unjustifiably neglected these days. So it’s a particular thrill to encounter Flights of Eagles (hardcover, $29.00, 454 pages, ISBN 978-1-886778-86-3), which follows NESFA Press’s previous Blish collection, Works of Art (2008).
The reader knows she’s in for a treat as soon as she starts reading Tom Shippey’s stimulating, dense, and closely reasoned introductory essay about the hybrid, genre-straddling nature of Blish’s work, h
alf genre, half modernist. But if such academic pursuits are alien to you, just jump right to the novel that opens the volume, Welcome to Mars (1967). Here you’ll find 100 percent entertainment unmediated by scholarly discourse.
As finely constructed and as engaging as any Heinlein YA—and deserving to be as well known and respected—this book tells of the discovery of easy antigravity by brilliant teen Dolph Haertel. Haertel’s first, highly inpractical notion is to make his treehouse airtight, stock some provisions and oxygen, and take the whole shebang to Mars—and so he does. But when a key component fails on the surface of the Red Planet, he seems doomed, left to attempt survival with a pathetic handful of tools and materials. And then, at that point, his girlfriend Nanette crashlands on the Red Planet in Dolph’s packing crate prototype, bent on rescue but needing help herself.
Of course, the scientific details of Blish’s Mars no longer conform entirely to what we know today, although there are still plenty of remaining correspondences, such as lodes of buried water. But what matters are two things: the utter respect that Blish paid to the best science and technology of his time; and the superior and engrossing narrative itself. Both these aspects of the book are immaculate, and insure that the reading pleasure to be derived is nearly as great as when the book first appeared.
Blish honors the scientific method and the implacable, fatal nature of the laws of physics: a universe that would kill a man without malice in a second. But he also champions humanity’s ingenuity, sense of wonder, indomitableness, capacity for love and joie de vivre. This tale of maturation and exploration that Blish delivers—tinged with the genre’s eternal romance with exotic aliens, however improbable—will never grow old or passé.
Next up is a second complete novel, Jack of Eagles (1952), Blish’s first book-length outing. (Did I mention yet what great value these NESFA Press compilations are, containing as they do immense tracts of story for the money?) Blish sold his initial short story in 1940, so you can rightly assume that this novel will read as an assured debut, no amateur’s stumbling crash out of the gate.
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