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Asimov's SF, July 2011
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com
Copyright ©2011 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover art by NASA
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CONTENTS
Department: EDITORIAL: WHAT'S IN A TITLE? by Sheila Williams
Department: REFLECTIONS: THE FANTASTIC VOYAGES OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE by Robert Silverberg
Novelette: DAY 29 by Chris Beckett
Short Story: PUG by Theodora Goss
Short Story: DUNYON by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Poetry: E by R. M. Kaye
Short Story: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERE by Norman Spinrad
Short Story: BRING ON THE RAIN by Josh Roseman
Short Story: TWELVERS by Leah Cypess
Poetry: PAGE TWENTYFOURHUNDREDANDSEVENTYTHREE by W. Gregory Stewart
Poetry: GENE'S DREAMS by Joe Haldeman
Short Story: THE MESSENGER by Bruce McAllister
Department: NEXT ISSUE
Novelette: THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION by Paul Cornell
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. 35, No. 7. Whole No. 426, July 2011. 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, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2011 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. Please visit our website, www.asimovs.com, for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual 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 Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3.
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ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
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Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them online at www.asimovs.com or send a self-addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope, and a note requesting this information. Write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic submissions, but the address for manual submissions and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.
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Department: EDITORIAL: WHAT'S IN A TITLE?
by Sheila Williams
Early one morning while making breakfast for my children and listening to the radio with only part of my attention, I overheard a reference to a now-defunct corporation called Genetics Savings and Clone. The subject of cloning could, of course, provide material for future editorials, but what struck me about the sound bite was how unappealing I found the name of the company. It reminded me of some of the titles I've seen attached to story submissions that haven't worked for me and that got me thinking about the value of the title of a story.
The title is usually our first introduction to a story. It is highly unlikely that a title will be a deal breaker—I don't think I've ever rejected a story because of its title—but there are titles that have intrigued me and enticed me into a tale. Lawrence Watt-Evan's classic “Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers” is one of my favorite examples of this sort. Often the most memorable titles don't achieve their full resonance until after I've read the stories they come attached to: Daniel Keyes's “Flowers for Algernon,” Connie Willis's “A Letter from the Clearys,” James Patrick Kelly's “Plus or Minus,” Alice Sola Kim's “The Other Graces.”
Authors use many different criteria for settling on a tale's title. A few sources of inspiration include a character from the story, Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild"; an action that occurs in the tale, Isaac Asimov's “Nightfall"; a place, Arthur Clarke's “The Star"; or a snippet of poetry, Robert Silverberg's “Sailing to Byzantium.” Many titles combine two or more of these elements. Jim Kelly offers the following advice about titles to writers: “Often as not, the title you want is somewhere in your piece, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. It doesn't necessarily have to be your cleverest turn of phrase, but it should point toward the heart of what you have to say.”
While pointing to the heart of the story it is equally important that the title not give away too much about the tale. This is not a problem that I tend to run into in stories by professional writers, but it can crop up in tales by beginners. It's generally not a good idea to telegraph too strongly that the main character is going to meet a bad end or that the story was inspired by a science fiction cliché. Of course, the most adroit hands can make mincemeat of this advice. A couple of years ago, the title of a lovely story by Mike Resnick had completely slipped out of my brain the minute I'd started on the firs
t paragraph. About two thirds of the way into the story, I suddenly realized that there could only be one possible title for the tale. A quick check back to the first page informed me that yes, it was indeed called “The Bride of Frankenstein"—a bit of a sleight of hand and an ever so witty name for a story that ended up on the Hugo ballot.
I find the moment when a great title suddenly makes sense to be an intellectually pleasing one. It's a little bit like figuring out the theme in a crossword puzzle. One of my all-time favorite titles is Daryl Gregory's “Second Person, Present Tense.” I'd always wondered about which point in the creative process of constructing the tale did that title occur. I recently put the question to Daryl and I wasn't surprised by the answer:
Most titles I have to struggle to find, but this one—appropriately enough—was a gift from the unconscious. I was looking for a story idea, reading articles and books about theories of consciousness, when I realized I could write about the second personality to inhabit a body. The title immediately popped into my brain. (From where? Some other part of Daryl. Or an alternate Daryl. My Darallel.) So, the title was there before I wrote a sentence, and survived intact until I sent it off. The section of the story actually written in second person present tense was included because the title demanded it.
Sometimes an author really has to struggle to come up with a title. Rather than thinking of it before they ever sit down at the computer to write the story or happening upon it somewhere in the middle, they have to sit back when the story is done and figure out what turn of phrase will best represent exactly what they wanted to say. On rare occasions, an author will request permission to change the title even after they've sold the story to the magazine. I've asked a few authors to change titles that didn't work for me, but I'm not like some of the old-time editors who seemed to enjoy slapping their own titles onto the works that they published. It's not always easy to come up with titles for my own editorials and I find it even harder to come up with a new title for someone else's work.
I don't always unlock all the secrets of the best titles until long after I've read the stories. Sometimes I'll come upon a line in a poem or a play and discover that the title of a story I read years earlier has a meaning on another meta level. It's the realization that our shared culture holds clues to the direction the story will take. We don't really want to have that direction spelled out before we read the tale. Indeed, much of the joy of reading is figuring out those connections ourselves. Just like a good mystery novelist, an SF writer may misdirect us, but we get a triumphant feeling the moment when we suddenly realize that the key to the heart of the story—whether it came from literature, wordplay (as long as it's not an awful pun), or Strunk & White—was right there on the first page.
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Department: REFLECTIONS: THE FANTASTIC VOYAGES OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE
by Robert Silverberg
L. Sprague de Camp, who wrote so many great novels of fantasy and science fiction in the middle years of the twentieth century, liked to refer to fiction writers as “professional liars.” I've also heard the term applied to lawyers, politicians, public-relations people, and various other practitioners of the verbal arts.
I don't like it. There are a lot of lawyers and politicians whose statements I mistrust, and I rarely accept PR statements at face value, but it seems too cavalier to dismiss all practitioners of those professions as liars. (Honest Abe Lincoln was both a lawyer and a politician.) And I absolutely reject the glib labeling of the writing of fiction as a kind of lying. Fiction writers—and trust me on this; I have been one for almost sixty years—do indeed make up stories, and hope that their readers will believe them at least while engaged in the act of reading. But no one past the age of seven thinks that Dante actually took a tour of the nine circles of Hell, or that Hamlet really encountered his murdered father's ghost on the battlements of the castle, or—to come closer to our own genre—that Cthulhu slumbers in his undersea palace, dreaming of the moment when he and the other Elder Gods will emerge and reconquer our world. Those stories have a certain kind of fictional truth, but their writers did not expect readers to regard them as literal reports about the real world.
The phrase “professional liar,” I think, ought to be reserved for swindlers, financial manipulators, and the creators of hoaxes. That last category includes such diabolically ingenious people as John Keely, who bilked nineteenth-century investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine, and Richard Adams Locke, who convinced credulous readers of the New York Sun in 1835 that Sir John Herschel's powerful new telescope had revealed the existence of forests, oceans, and all sorts of strange animals on the Moon.
And then there was the fourteenth-century author of The Travels and Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, who, at a time when Europeans had very little knowledge of the world beyond their immediate vicinity, produced a lively and readable tale of his travels through far-off and fantastic regions full of the most amazing marvels and wonders. In a later era, he would have been a successful fantasy writer; in his own, he was regarded as an authority on our planet's geography, and as late as the seventeenth century Samuel Purchas, who compiled a vast compendium of explorers’ journals, called him “the greatest Asian traveler that ever the world had,” which certainly he was not, though he does rank high in the roster of charlatans.
The prologue to Mandeville's Travels says that he was born in the English town of St. Albans and set out to explore the world in 1332 (or 1322, according to some manuscripts), “and since hitherward [I] have been a long time over the sea, and have seen and gone through many kingdoms, lands and provinces and isles, and have passed through Turkey, Armenia the less and the more, Tartary, Persia, Syria. . . .” and on and on to India and “Amazonia,” where he beheld “many diverse manners of folk of diverse laws and shapes,” and many a land even stranger and more distant.
The part about having come from St. Albans may even have been true. A certain Jean de Bourgogne of the Belgian city of Liege seems to have confessed on his deathbed in 1372 that he was actually “Master Jean de Mandeville, Knight, count of Montfort in England. . . . Having had the misfortune to kill, in his country, a count whom he did not name, he obliged himself to traverse the three parts of the world. . . . Although he was a man of distinguished nobility he preferred to keep himself hidden,” practicing medicine and writing an account of his travels. We have no way of telling if this is true. The oldest surviving manuscript of the book is in French heavily flavored with Anglicisms. Malcolm Letts, the foremost modern Mandeville scholar, has concluded that the book was almost certainly written by an Englishman, and “the more the problem is studied the clearer it becomes, at least to my mind, that Mandeville was a man of flesh and blood, born, as he says, at St. Albans, that he practiced medicine, . . . that he fled the country, and that de Bourgogne was a name invented or borrowed by Mandeville to conceal his identity.”
More than that we will probably never know. But his book is a wild and wonderful thing, very much worth reading by the connoisseur of good fantasy or good hoaxes.
Mandeville seems to have based his account of his purported travels on the narratives of such earlier medieval travelers as Friar Odoric of Pordenone, John de Plano Carpini, and William of Rubruck, who made valiant journeys to India, China, and Indonesia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the intent of spreading Christianity. But whatever he lifted he embellished with magnificent fantasies of his own invention.
Thus he inserts into a discussion of the tomb of St. John at Ephesus the tale of a princess who was transformed into a dragon; in Jaffa he sees the “bones of a giant that hight Andromedes, and one of his ribs is forty feet long"; he informs us that the Pyramids were “the barns of Joseph that were made for to keep corn in for the seven barren years . . . as the first book of Bible tells.” But much better is coming as he presses on to the Near East and then Africa. Such as the Fountain of
Youth, which flows out of Paradise. He took three sips of it, “and evermore since that time I feel me much the better and the wholer.” The land of the Amazons, which he places in what is now Iraq: “in that realm is all women and no man, because that the women will not suffer no men among them.” To the south he finds Ethiopia, where the sun is so strong that “in the sea of Libya is no fish, for the water is evermore boiling for the great heat.” In that land “are young children white-haired, and when they are old, their hair waxes black.” In the city of Saba diamonds abound, which “grow together male and female, and they are nourished with dew of heaven. And they engender and conceive, and bring forth small children, and multiply and grow all the year.” Deeper yet into Africa “be folk that have but one foot and they go so blue that it is marvelous. And the foot is so large that it shadoweth all the body against the sun when they would lie and rest them.”
Onward: “In a certain isle towards the south dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads, and their eyes be in their shoulders. And their mouth crooked as an horse shoe, and that is in the midst of their breast. And in another isle be folk that have the face all flat, all plain without nose and without mouth, but they have two small holes all round instead of their eyes, and their mouth is flat also without lips. And in another isle be folk that have the lip above the mouth so great that when they sleep in the sun, they cover all the face with that lip to shade themselves.” He continues his parade of human monsters with people with ears hanging down to their knees; people with horses’ feet, who run so swiftly they overtake wild beasts; hermaphrodites, who alternately sire and bear children; eight-toed people who crawl wondrous fast on their knees, and a race that had heads like those of dogs, “yet they are full reasonable and subtle of wit,” and many another remarkable tribe. In India are eels thirty feet long, “and folk that dwell near that water are ill colored, yellow and green.” In Cathay—China—he enrolls in the Great Khan's army and spends fifteen months doing battle in the Mongol conquest of southern China, a campaign that had taken place twenty or thirty years before he was born, though probably he assumed his readers knew nothing about that. As for the Khan, he says, “he passeth all earthly princes in might, noblesse, royalty, and riches.”
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