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Asimov's Science Fiction
February 2007
Vol. 31 No. 2 (Whole Number 373)
Cover Art for “Recovering Apollo 8” by Dominic Harman
NOVELLA
Recovering Apollo 8 by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch
NOVELETTE
Outgoing by Alex Wilson
SHORT STORIES
Cold Fire by Tanith Lee
The Chimera Transit by Jack Skillingstead
A Portrait of the Artist by Charles Midwinter
Close by William Preston
DEPARTMENTS
Guest Editorial: A Second-Hand Sensibility by Brian Bieniowski
Reflections: Rereading Jack Vance by Robert Silverberg
Thought Experiments: Me and Deke and the Paradigm Shift by Michael Cassutt
Special Book Review: Alice Through the Magnifying Glass by Paul Di Filippo
On Books by Peter Heck
The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss
Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, No.2. Whole No. 373, February 2007. 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 $43.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $53.90 (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. (c) 2006 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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CONTENTS
GUEST EDITORIAL: A SECOND-HAND SENSIBILITY by Brian Bieniowski
THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: ME AND DEKE AND THE PARADIGM SHIFT by Michael Cassutt
OUTGOING by Alex Wilson
COLD FIRE by Tanith Lee
THE CHIMERA TRANSIT by Jack Skillingstead
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST by Charles Midwinter
CLOSE by William Preston
RECOVERING APOLLO 8 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW: ALICE THROUGH THE MAGNIFYING GLASS by Paul Di Filippo
ON BOOKS by Peter Heck
SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR
NEXT ISSUE
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Asimov's Science Fiction
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Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, No.2. Whole No. 373, February 2007. 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 $43.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $53.90 (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. (c) 2006 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.
GUEST EDITORIAL: A SECOND-HAND SENSIBILITY by Brian Bieniowski
There's this dream I used to have, when I was a teenager. It's not an uncommon dream, maybe even you yourself have had something like it. In it, I walk into a vast bookstore; shelves extend beyond the horizon line—a Jorge Luis Borges or artist Francois Schuiten kind of shop, decorated with rococo woodwork, tons of curling brass, ladders that slide along an eternal track near the ceiling (in my dream, the ceiling is the sky). And, of course, on the shelves, all the books I'd ever wanted to read, all waiting to be taken to a Borgesian cash register (perhaps one pays in shells or sand), and then home to become part of my own library. At that time in my life, the dream shop would have contained the complete works of Moorcock and Ellison, Simak and Burroughs, all in paperback size (even in my dreams, hardcovers were well beyond my means).
In today's world of instant-gratification
internet auction-houses and book dealers, this dream must seem quaint and unnecessary. But, for a young kid growing up in the eighties and early nineties, it was an intoxicating fantasy, since most of the works by the authors named above were completely out of print and unavailable to me or anybody else. Certainly, a copy of Dune or Foundation and Empire or The Demolished Man could be found at any shopping mall bookstore, but what were you to do when these few classic titles were exhausted and you wanted more? When the local library discounted science fiction as juvenile and thus only carried a few age-appropriate Heinlein and Bradbury titles?
The answer was simple: used-book stores. Becoming a reasonably well-read SF reader was no hard task, as the best known books had always remained in print. It was the more developed reader who ran into problems: how to discover Sturgeon? Or Lafferty? There was only one way, and that was to root around, a little teenaged pig hunting for paper truffles, in the mold-ering stacks of used-book stores. It was in those stacks that I discovered my favorite of the largely forgotten (for my generation, at least) writers of classic SF: Jack Vance.
A quick glance at JackVance.com reveals that his masterwork, The Dying Earth, was completely lost as an in-print US paperback between the years 1986 and 2000. Unavailable for fourteen years! If you had the great luck to find it used during those years (and when I found it, as Robert Silverberg writes about it in this month's Reflections column, I knew that I had to have it), and recognize it as a classic, you could look forward to future dreams of Borgesian bookshops featuring all the Greatest Works of Jack Vance, most of which were unavailable in anything other than costly small-press editions. Those who enjoyed The Dying Earth for the great poetic and mysterious masterpiece that it is would most certainly want to explore the many other worlds of Vance—perhaps Big Planet or the Gaean Reach? It was so for me. I leaped to the world of The Last Castle via interlibrary loan, and crashed upon the steppes of the Planet of Adventure with Adam Reith—a setting I have always equated subconsciously with Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical adventures upon the plains of Poland, which I read the same year. But it was always a vigorous hunt to find the next Vance book, in those days before Abebooks.com and eBay, when old books were gloriously fallen upon, found by pure chance and, perhaps, fate.
Imagine my delight, after years of collecting Vance in drips and drabs, when I discovered the Vance Integral Library [www.vanceintegral.com] in 1999—a volunteer-run project devoted to producing “a complete and correct edition, in forty-four volumes” of Vance's entire oeuvre. Forty-four volumes! Everything. That year, I knew I could not afford to purchase the whole collection, which was printed privately at considerable expense, but I had to be involved in whatever minor capacity I could muster. I signed up to proofread Vance texts in my spare time, a job I enjoyed, though I did not always have the opportunity to proof Vance's best.
The VIE's purpose was elegant: “the proper presentation and preservation of Vance's work” so that it “may ... be conveniently assessed.” That future assessment may feature wildly divergent opinions as to whether Vance is or is not literature, or, even whether his work is or is not science fiction—even the editors and volunteers of the VIE itself could not always agree on these points in their own newsletter. (I love when SF is not considered “literature"—the used-book-store owners price their stock accordingly.) At the project's core, and beyond all critical appraisal, Vance's work is now available to be accessed in its purest and least tampered-with form, in a truly beautiful edition meant to last several lifetimes. Though scheduling conflicts forced me to leave the project when I accepted the job at Asimov's,I was proud to have helped with this effort.
My set of the VIE—purchased on-line in 2006, some time after its original publication—represents to me a secretive nod to that Borgesian dream-bookshop of my youth. The next best thing, used-book shops were places where chance and randomness and instinct unwittingly collided to create my tastes and sensibilities in the fiction I love. Without these places, stores separate from the consumer economics of larger chain bookshops and the ephemeral trends of the day's literati, I would never have had the opportunity to discover Poul Anderson's classic novels, Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia, or scores of other books and stories that are as integral a part of my intellectual tapestry as most of the Vance Integral Library remains. It seems to me that this constant recycling of artifacts is crucial to the development of new science fiction aficionados, and I hope that my library, painstakingly cobbled together over many years, will one day disseminate to the next generations of SF readers, becoming the currency paid that will keep the genre alive forever.
Brian Bieniowski is the associate editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
Copyright (c) 2006 Brian Bieniowski
[Back to Table of Contents]
I confess I haven't been reading much science fiction in recent years. It isn't that I've lost interest in it, exactly. But life is finite, the supply of books to read is well-nigh infinite, and one has to keep that disparity in mind when making one's reading selections. About a decade ago, as I was entering my sixties, I realized that although I had read an immense number of SF novels, I had never read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Tolstoy's War and Peace. Reading science fiction has given me much pleasure over the years, but maybe, I thought, the time has come to clear some space in the reading schedule for Gibbon and Tolstoy instead of reaching for that new Gregory Benford novel.
So I read Gibbon. I read Tolstoy. Those are big books, and gobbled up months of reading time, and very rewarding reading they were, too. And so it has gone ever since—it became time to read or reread Thucydides, or Carlyle's The French Revolution, or Ovid's Metamorphoses, and SF kept getting pushed to one side. Suddenly, though, I'm hungry for tales of space and time again. But despite what I said above about finite reading time and infinite numbers of books to choose from, I've begun rereading the great science fiction books of my youth, re-experiencing them from the other end of life, and I'm going to talk about those books and my modern-day feelings about them in several columns this year.
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I started with Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, a book I've read and reread any number of times since it first appeared in 1950, and which, apparently, I never tire of reading.
I still have my original copy of the book, and there's a story connected with it. The fall of 1950 saw the arrival of Worlds Beyond, a new SF magazine edited by Damon Knight. On the back cover of the first issue was an ad for The Dying Earth, a novel by Jack Vance, which was described in these words:
Time had worn out the sun, and Earth was spinning quickly toward eternal darkness. In the forests strange animals hid behind twisted trees, plotting death; in the cities men made constant revel and sought sorcery to cheat the dying world....
I had to have it. Not only was I particularly fond of Vance's soaring imagination and voluptuous prose, but the novel of the far future had had special appeal to me ever since my discovery of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine when I was about ten. Finding it, though, was not so simple. This was the era of the Korean War paper shortages, and Hillman Publications, the publishers of Worlds Beyond and the paperback series that included The Dying Earth, had swiftly killed both the magazine and the paperback line. The Dying Earth's first edition became an instant rarity, and only through luck was I able to find a copy.
I confess my younger self was disappointed at first. It wasn't a novel, I quickly discovered, just six loosely related tales with a common background and a few overlapping characters. (Mysteriously, the first two chapters were reversed in that edition, so that the central character of the opening section was a woman not created until Chapter Two.) And all the sorcery bothered me, the demons and wizards and other such Arabian Nights filigree. What I wanted then was scientific verisimilitude and technological razzle-dazzle, a literal revelation of time to come, not magic. (Arthur Clarke had not yet coined his famous dictum about how hard it is to tell science and magic apart in a technologically ad
vanced society.)
So at the age of fifteen I failed fully to appreciate The Dying Earth because I had asked it to be that which it was not. Still, I admired the music of the prose and the elegance of the wit, the cunning of the characters and the subtlety of human interaction. And when I read it again, five years or so later, I could forgive it for not being hard-edged SF and I began to love it for its own sake. I've reread it every ten or fifteen years since, always with immense pleasure.
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Now, after a gap of some twenty years, I have read it yet again, and I was delighted to find that it still sings to me. I still love the sly mal-evolent characters, the beautiful prose, the cunning plotting. The sorcery element bothers me not at all: the workings of Vance's wizards’ spells are inexplicable to me, but so, too, are the workings of the modem that brings me the incredible richness of the Internet every morning.
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The names of characters, how magical: Pandelume of Embelyon, Prince Kandive the Golden, Thrang the ghoul-bear, Rogol Domedonfors, and—especially—Chun the Unavoidable! The Deodands, the Twk-men, the Gauns. And the place-names: Grand Motholam, the river Scaum, the Ide of Kauchique, the lost city of Ampridatvir!
The names of spells: the Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal's Gyrator, the Expansible Egg, the Omnipotent Sphere, the Spell of the Slow Hour, the Mantle of Stealth, the Call to the Violent Cloud.
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An essay by the late scholar of fantasy Lin Carter notes that Sam Merwin, who edited the SF magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in the 1940s, read and rejected “fascinating, but, alas, unpublishable pseudo-Cabellian fantasies” by Vance during the war years before purchasing, in 1945, “The World-Thinker,” Vance's first commercially published story. Carter assumes, correctly, I think, that these “pseudo-Cabellian fantasies” were the six Dying Earth tales that eventually became that ephemeral 1950 Hillman paperback. If so, it means that Vance (who was born in 1916) was in his twenties when he wrote them. This is remarkably accomplished prose for a writer in his twenties—for any writer, indeed.
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