Asimov's SF, July 2009
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Cover Art for “The Spires of Denon” by Paul Youll
CONTENTS
Department: EDITORIAL: BOOM AND BUST by Sheila Williams
Department: REFLECTIONS: ADVENTURES IN THE FAR FUTURE by Robert Silverberg
Short Story: THE LAST APOSTLE by Michael Cassutt
Short Story: CAMP NOWHERE by Kit Reed
Poetry: FOR SALE: ONE MOONBASE, NEVER USED by Esther M. Friesner
Novelette: SINBAD THE SAND SAILOR by R. Garcia y Robertson
Short Story: SLEEPLESS IN THE HOUSE OF YE by Ian McHugh
Short Story: SHOES-TO-RUN by Sara Genge
Poetry: EXOBIOLOGY II by F.J.Bergmann
Novella: EARTH II by Stephen Baxter
Department: NEXT ISSUE
Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo
Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss
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Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 33, No.7. Whole No. 402, July 2009. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2009 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov's Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Quebecor St. Jean, 800 Blvd. Industrial, St. Jean, Quebec J3B 8G4.
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Department: EDITORIAL: BOOM AND BUST by Sheila Williams
In his February 2006 story, “Under the Graying Sea,” Jonathan Sherwood imagines a future where, for a short time, “the world was at peace, economies were expanding, and generosity chic.” This temporary stability gives the Earth the opportunity to attempt to build a “star bridge.” While the star bridge is an enormous project that will take at least two hundred years to come to fruition, the successful completion of this task would give humanity instantaneous travel to a nearby star system “a perfect first stop on the journey into the stars.” Although the star bridge runs into problems, it is clear that the author put a lot of thought into exactly what sort of civilization could engage in such a magnificent undertaking. “Under the Graying Sea” was written during an economic upswing. In our own turbulent times, it's interesting to look at the influence of certain outside events, such as the Second World War, the space race, and previous economic cycles on past science fiction. When our economy is on the upswing, it seems as though some authors are more willing to engage a big idea and expand the science fiction universe and when our economy is contracting and options in the real world appear more limited, many are more inclined to look inward, to focus on life on Earth and our inner landscapes.
According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, a number of the field's commentators believe that the American “Golden Age” of classic science fiction lasted from 1938 until 1946. These dates include the waging of the Second World War, and the research and technological developments that that entailed, and the beginning of John W. Campbell's reign at Astounding/Analog. It is interesting to note that during this time, the United States moved from an economic low point in June 1938 and to a peak in February 1945. Works published during this period include Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation stories, Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series, Clifford Simak's “City,” and A.E. van Vogt's Weapon Shop books. The era almost seems to close with Arthur C. Clarke's exuberantly optimistic first sale, “Rescue Party."
Many of the stories from this period are unsettling and they don't all have happy endings, but they often present big-picture ideas about the future of humanity. Stories that appeal to our sense of wonder don't end after 1946, but darker works such as Jack Williamson's 1947 depiction of good intentions gone wrong, “With Folded Hands,” Judith Merril's 1948 look at fallout from the atomic age, “That Only a Mother,” and books like Nevil Shute's 1957 On the Beach, which predict that the arms race will lead to the end of life as we know it, gain a foothold, too.
The space race to put a man on the Moon, which coincided with a period of economic growth that rose from a low in February 1961 to a peak in December 1969, was another fertile time for big idea fiction. Dune was serialized in Analog from 1963 to 1965. Viewers were able to suspend their disbelief in faster-than light-travel and a universe rife with humanoid lifeforms, and enjoy watching the original Star Trek from 1966-1969. Of course, the sixties were a turbulent time and there are plenty of counter examples of books that focus on the problems we had at home, such as John Brunner's projections of overpopulation in The Sheep Look Up and Philip K.
Dick's exploration of what it means to be human in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Still, the space program coupled with a growing economy seems to have contributed to an optimistic time for many science fiction readers and writers.
For all its accomplishments, though, one thing the space race had shown us was that a viable space program took an enormous amount of effort and money. Gone now were the days when one could easily be convinced that a tinkerer could build a spaceship in his backyard or a time machine in the basement. The seventies certainly saw its share of books like Larry Niven's depiction of the awesome Ringworld and Frederik Pohl's Gateway. Yet, while these books have the same kind of scope and grand ideas that are found in “Golden Age” fiction, they may also indicate that our earlier dreams of conquering the universe without outside help are unrealistic. The upheavals of the Viet Nam War, Nixon's resignation, the energy crisis in 1974, and another downward economic slide that bottomed out in 1975, are concurrent with the publication of evermore introspective books such as Robert Silverberg's exploration of a man's interior landscape in Dying Inside and the grim microscope that James Tiptree, Jr. brought to bear on so many of our human failings.
There isn't enough space in this editorial to look for the anecdotal evidence that will take me through the events and economic cycles of the eighties and nineties, but I can note that the most recent economic boom time also saw a renaissance of the grand space opera tradition. I'll be very happy to immerse myself in Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's The New Space Opera 2 this summer and I'm looking forward to reading Jetse de Vries anthology of positive SF stories, Shine, which is scheduled for publication early next year. In our current economic climate, I'm sure I'll be encountering a number of darker works as well.Still, while I attempt to avoid thinking about the state of my 401(k), I will find the time to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of our first Moon landing. I know that it will be hard for writers to resist turning inward and that there is a great value in holding a mirror up to our lives, but I'd also like to see stories that uplift us, show us some ways out of our current circumstances, and offer us some grand new vistas of the future.
Copyright © 2009 Sheila Williams
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Department: REFLECTIONS: ADVENTURES IN THE FAR FUTURE by Robert Silverberg
Science fiction is an international phenomenon—it's published far and wide, in every major country of the world and some surprising minor ones—and, since I've had a long and busy career, my books and stories have been translated just about everywhere. It's been a little hobby of mine to track down those foreign translations, because I find it fascinating to stare at a book in, say, Finnish or Estonian, and know that I was the organizing intelligence behind all those words and yet am unable to read anything in the whole book except “Robert Silverberg."
The number of my translated editions is immense. I've written about as much science fiction as anyone who ever tried it, and almost all of it has been published abroad, often many times over as a single title passes through one edition after another. For example, my novel The Book of Skulls has had three Italian publishers and four in France. Dying Inside has been done five times in France and twice in Italy. Add in the various German, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Japanese, Israeli, Czech, and other editions, and you can see that one novel can easily generate forty or fifty foreign items.
It hasn't always been easy for me to get those foreign editions, though. Usually the publishers are contractually obligated to send them to me, but not all of them have done it, especially the ones who simply pirated the work, as was the custom in the Communist sphere before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over there they regarded our copyright laws as evil capitalistic nonsense and took whatever they liked, without asking permission or making payment. (And even after our Marxist brethren decided to honor Western copyright laws, I had an agent in that part of the world who cheerfully made sales for me in such countries as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, and pocketed the proceeds. Naturally he wasn't sending copies of the books, either. Eventually I caught wise, but by then he had absconded to Slovakia and has not been heard from since.)
But some of the publishers have sent the books. I travel widely, too, and I've made a point, when visiting a country that I know has published my work, to check out the local bookstores and buy whatever I find. Also I've been lucky enough to make contact with fans in such places as Sweden, Finland, Israel, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, Greece, and even China who have located my translated books and sent them to me in exchange for English-language copies of my work. Sometimes I've even been able to connect with a foreign book dealer who can find and ship me my books.
But one big difficulty has been the lack of bibliographical information. Titles get changed when books get translated. I don't necessarily know what the Polish edition of Downward to the Earth was called (W Dol, do Ziemi), or the Czech version of Dying Inside (Umiranu v Nitru, as it turns out), and so I can't compile a proper wantlist. Sometimes I can guess—I'm fairly fluent in Italian, have a modest reading knowledge of French, Spanish, and German, and decoding Poland's Czlowiek w Labiryncie into The Man in the Maze, or Stacja Hawksbilla into Hawksbill Station, wasn't all that hard. But where there's an alphabet barrier, as in China, Japan, Korea, Israel, or Russia, I can't even begin to figure out which book is involved. So, despite years of diligent search, I've been lacking hundreds of my foreign editions. I keep a chronological ledger of all my story sales, one line per work with the last box on the line reserved for an entry about its publication, and the number of such boxes that were blank, in a ledger that goes back to 1953 and records my first foreign payment in 1958, was formidable and dismaying.
However, we all live in the far future, these days—the Internet age, where a couple of clicks will bring almost any bit of information you might want, and where you can communicate with people in remote lands instantaneously and without even any postage cost. So I've been spending a good deal of time this year in roving the planet via the aptly named World-Wide Web to track down those missing books. And a fascinating adventure it has been for me, an astonishing one, even, demonstrating for me again and again not only the international nature of science fiction but what a small planet this has become.
The first great Internet boon is bibliographical information. A little Googling around turns up wonders. I am missing many of my Polish translations, for instance—but a search for “Polish Science Fiction Bibliography” led me to the Institute of Literary Research in the Polish city of Poznan, and a quick e-mail query about Polish editions of my work brought me an immediate reply in good English from the wonderful scholar Zyta Szymanska, who was overjoyed that an actual living writer wanted to make use of the Institute's research. (Again and again in this quest I encountered amazement at the foreign end of things over my inquiries, as though they had trouble believing that the actual Robert Silverberg would be writing to them or that he cared so much about his translated editions.) She promised to hunt out all of my Polish translations, and over the next few weeks she sent me a series of bibliographies—one of my novels, one of my short stories, and then a consolidated list that bore the dedication, “In homage to Sir Robert Silverberg and his free imagination sinking into our minds over Iron Curtain."
And the lists were full of revelations. I knew, of course, about the works for which contracts had been sent and money paid. But I had no idea that in the bad old Communist days my stories had been used without my permission in such magazines as Tygodnik Demokratyczny and Problemy and Przeglad Techniczny. In 1987, the Klub Fantastyki of Lodz had published an entire collection of my short stories. Even more interesting was a 1970 entry indicating that someone—we will probably never know who—had put together a typed collection of my stories, what is called a samizdat edition in Russian, done by carbon copy in an edition of one hundred.
I haven't yet been able to find a Polish bookseller on the Internet to sell me copies of all these books. But around the time you read this I
expect to be in Poland myself, where I'll do some bookshopping with Zyta Szymanska's marvelous list in my pocket.
My Polish bibliography was a custom-made job. Bibliographies of science fiction translations in many other languages are readily available on the internet, though, and after compiling lists of the books I want it has been fairly easy—or, sometimes, amusingly difficult—for me to find booksellers to provide them for me.
Lithuania was one of the not-so-easy ones. A publisher called Eridanas had bought Lithuanian rights to The Man in the Maze in 1997. A wonderful French website called “Lunatik” shows color photos of hundreds of SF books from all over the world—you can find it easily through Google if you want to see what some of these books look like—and there, under the Silverberg entries, I found a group of translated editions of Man in the Maze, including a lovely green book called Zmogus Labirinte, my Lithuanian edition.
A quick Google for Zmogus Labirinte took me to the website of what was plainly a Lithuanian online bookstore. Ah, but the site, although it seemed to be a reasonable imitation of the amazon.com home page, was entirely in Lithuanian, a language unrelated to any other living language on Earth except Latvian, and I don't know any Latvian either. It might as well have been a Martian website to me. But when I keyed Zmogus Labirinte into what appeared to be a search box, I found myself looking at that pretty green cover. I clicked on what I hoped was a link taking me to the checkout counter, but no, what I got was a review of my book—in Lithuanian. I'm sure it was all the most extravagant praise, but I'll never know. Back to the first page for a careful study of the other information offered. The “kaina"—price?—was 10,27 Lt. That sounded affordable. (What currency do they use in Lithuania?) They promised delivery, or so I assumed “pristatymo trukme” meant, in “5-10 dienu.” I looked for a payment link. Nope: I had to enter a password first, and that required me to register for the site.