If you've read and enjoyed the previous books, you'll certainly enjoy this one. If not, and if you're the kind of reader who enjoys espionage and baroque politics, you'll probably want to go back and start with The January Dancer.
Transcendental
James Gunn
Tor, 304 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Nook: $12.99; Kindle: $11.04 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-7653-3501-2
Genre: Philosophical/Religious SF, Psychological/Sociological SF
James Gunn is one of the true masters of science fiction. No, really—he received SFWA's Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2007. Gunn has been active in the field since 1948, and not just stories and novels; in 1976 the Science Fiction Research Association gave him their Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in SF scholarship, and he's won the Hugo Award (among others) for his nonfiction about the SF field.
If you've read Analog for any length of time, you've seen James Gunn in these pages.
Gunn's last novel was in 2005; his newest, Transcendental, is worth the wait.
In this future of many worlds and intelligent species, there's a new force among the stars: the Transcendentalism movement. At the edge of explored space, a mysterious prophet claims he can help beings achieve the highly spiritual state of transcendence.
Riley is a human war veteran who joins dozens of others, of many different species and planets, on a pilgrimage to find the prophet. Unlike the others, Riley's not along to achieve transcendence—his mission is to kill the prophet.
During the journey, various fellow travelers tell their stories, Canterbury Tales style. As these tales unfold and tensions aboard the ship mount, Riley realizes that not all his fellow pilgrims are seeking transcendence. Especially the friendly but enigmatic woman Asha....
Gunn combines exotic aliens worthy of James White with psychological twists and philosophical speculation—I'm reminded of James Tiptree Jr.'s Brightness Falls From the Air. Riley is a compellingly damaged man in search of truth, who ultimately finds that he's as much a pilgrim as any of the others.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
Michael D. Sellers
Universal Media, 370 pages, $15.95 (trade paperback)
Kindle: $3.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-6156823-1-0
Genre: Nonfiction
Getting back to Mars for a moment, here's a book that tells the story of a long-awaited journey to the Red Planet that went horribly wrong. And it's a true story.
Since Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars appeared in 1912 (as a serial titled "Under the Moons of Mars" in the February issue of The All-Story), readers have been desperate for a film version.
In the centennial year, that long-awaited movie was released—and in the opinion of many, it was a very successful adaptation, a visual feast that evoked the sense of wonder of the original story.
The film, however, was a box-office flop.
Michael D. Sellers wondered what happened, and this book is the result.
In very readable prose, Sellers tells the history of Burroughs's Mars books, and the century-long challenge of bringing to the screen the world Burroughs called Barsoom. He follows the course of development of the 2012 film, and explains the factors that led to its perceived failure—overbudgeting, inexperience, and outright hostility among the higher levels of Disney Studios.
For anyone interested in the inner workings of Hollywood, or anyone who liked John Carter and wondered what happened, this is definitely a worthwhile read.
That brings us to the end of this column. If you get the chance, take a look at the eastern sky a few hours before sunrise: the Red Planet should be in Leo about the time this issue is on the stands. Give that little red dot a friendly wave for me, and I'll see you next time.
Don Sakers is the author of The Eighth Succession and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
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BRASS TACKS
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Dear Mr. Quachri:
In the June issue's Alternate View column ("On the Sucking Out of Inertia"), Jeffery Kooistra makes several comments on the use of an inertia-reducing process to create a space drive. I would like to add two comments of my own, if I may.
First, the reduction of a body's inertia by something like a tuning process would violate the law pertaining to conservation of energy, doing so by way of Einstein's mass-energy theorem. In order to reduce the inertia of a body, such as a spaceship, we have available to us only two processes: we can either shove matter overboard, as in a rocket, or we can convert matter into energy and allow it to radiate. (We actually have devices that use that latter process to reduce the inertia of a single component by a fraction of one percent. Two of those devices obliterated a pair of Japanese cities in 1945.) Any other process would constitute an act of magic.
And secondly, when Dr. Kooistra invokes conservation of linear momentum and claims that reducing the mass of a spaceship by a certain proportion results in increasing the velocity of that ship by the same proportion, my first question is "Velocity relative to what?" The ship displays different velocities to different observers if those observers are moving relative to one another, so it would also, when the drive is turned on, display different delta-vees. That gives us an absurdity, unless we live in a universe in which all real velocities are properly referred to a single universal inertial frame of reference and all relative velocities have no dynamic value whatsoever. Thus the drive will work in a universe founded upon a state of absolute rest, but not in one, like ours, founded upon a state of absolute motion (the speed of light); it will work in a Newtonian space-andtime, but not in an Einsteinian space-time. Bummer!
Cordially, Dennis Anthony
Greetings!
Mr. Martin Shoemaker wrote a very good mystery story with all the parts neatly put together. Hope to see more of his stories in the future.
C. Henry Depew Tallahassee, FL
Editors,
Please confirm that "Tethered" was an April Fool joke (in spite of the mid-April delivery and July/August cover date), and not a complete lapse of editing responsibility. The story made mincemeat of physics, orbital mechanics, and facts, not just one disposable character. The scenario places high, medium, and low orbits just a kilometer or so apart (with radically different orbital velocities), and a similar distance above the distinct top of the ionosphere. It puts a satellite intended to protect one region of earth in "low" orbit ("geosynchronous" is never mentioned). It has a chemical-flame rocket coming from the moon to Earth at an average straight-line speed greater than 15 times Earth's escape velocity. I could go on and on, but this was either a very poor joke (with a missing punch line), or it didn't belong in Analog.
Anonymous
The author responds...
Thank you for your comments—you have some valid points. However, I would like to point out that "Tethered" never specifies the distances between orbits, but only the distance between the ship and LEO when it is about to exit MEO and enter LEO, in a future where the manipulation of debris has made such boundaries easily visible. It also does not specify how the Chinese barge is propelled (chemical-flame rockets are never mentioned), if any kind of matter propulsion is the means of travel at all. Of course the velocity is extremely large; that is why the Chinese won't disclose the designs "for all the Saudi oil they can get." Lastly, although the satellite is intended to protect a region on Earth, this does not mean it relies solely on geosynchronous orbit to remain fixed; for all we know, before the protagonists reached it, the satellite was self-propelled. I sincerely appreciate your concerns, but some of them are based on assumptions about the story which are not explicitly stated.
I would also like to note that there is a surplus of science in "Tethered" that was peer-reviewed and fact-checked. There are so many factual details that I cannot possibly list them all here. I made sure to vet previous drafts of the story with a University of Pittsburgh at Greensb
urg assistant professor of physics, an MIT PhD graduate who is a member of the American Astronomical Society, and of course with a significant amount of independent academic research. Still, please forgive any imperfections you may encounter in "Tethered"—all errors are my own.
I hope we can appreciate the most important scientific issue raised in "Tethered:" The escalating dilemma of the Kessler Syndrome, and the general failure on the part of governments and the private sector to address both the root causes of artificial debris and the unregulated militarization of space, the latter of which may pose the greatest threat to the progress of science.
Good day Trevor,
As usual, I went straight to the editorial when Analog arrived and enjoyed the story of digging gems out of old issues. But it wasn't until I got to the end that I realized it wasn't you who wrote the article.
This is way too good an idea to let go to waste. Can you add an oldie-but-goodie along with some background to future Analog's?
Cheers, Tony
P.S. I really enjoyed "A Cup of Dirt"—funny story, good writing style, great ending!
Dear Editors,
I'm not sure if I should be addressing these comments to Trevor or to Jamie Rubin, guest editor for the June issue. My comments are sparked by Jamie's editorial, but Trevor might take a hand in any potential action items that may eventually evolve out of recommendations I will make.
The editorial certainly stirred up a lot of nostalgia in my head for many of the gems mentioned, whether I read them or not. Not that I was able to read them at the time. In 1939, for example, I was not even born yet! It wasn't until I was old enough to be allowed to cross the street by myself that I discovered the public library, and then the collection of science fiction books therein. In those books were some of the gems that Mr. Rubin describes, and I learned to love SF from those. At that time, it never even occurred to me that some of the stories I read were extracted from periodicals, or that I might want to read them a) in the original and b) other similar stories that I missed out on reading because I only had access to those stories the book editor chose to include.
Having read the June editorial, however, I now know that at least one complete collection of Analog exists. I also strongly suspect that there's no realistic way I can currently get access to it. Nor should I; these days, it's not necessary to get physical access to an information source, in order to access the information.
So first I have a question: does a digital archive exist for all those issues of Analog? And if so, how does one get access to it? My second question is: if such an archive doesn't exist, why not create one? I (and undoubtedly many, if not all, of your other readers) would love to be able to read some of those old stories that we missed at the time, and read the ones we read in other sources in the original.
Best regards and keep up the good work!
Howard Mark Suffern, NY
The primary problem with running reprints of stories (or creating and maintaining a digital archive of classic issues) is that we don't actually have the rights to do so. The authors themselves own their stories (which is how it should be), and for obvious reasons, nobody thought to buy digital reprint rights back before there were such things as home computers, so we'd have to track down the current rights holders and pay them again. That's more than fair—creators deserve to be paid for their creations—but that would also take a lot of money, and there's almost no way such a project would make back even a small fraction of its cost. Until the stories enter the public domain (and when they do, we'd gladly help Google or any other such body that wants to preserve them), we have to content ourselves with reading them in anthologies and collections.
Dear Trevor,
I enjoyed your editorial (Analog, September 2013) about violent video games. One piece of evidence that those calling for censorship of the media never mention is that, as the level of violence in games (and comics and television) has gone up and up, violence in real life has been going down. For example, according to the World Almanac, the murder rate dropped more than 30% between 1994 and 2003. Sadly, the kind of people who blame violence on video games are impervious to data.
Rick Norwood Mountain Home, Tennessee
Dear Mr. Quachri,
I am pleased that you have managed to avoid destroying Analog in your first few months of editorship. However, I strongly encourage you to remain vigilant against the "soft-creep"—you know what I'm talking about don't you? It's the tendency to want to publish more stories that are literary (or should I say "literary?"), poetic, and lacking in hard science. Don't let it happen.
I'll just pull an example out of the July/August double. (Great issue, by the way—packed with good stuff.) But what was up with "Other People's Avatars" (Howard V. Hendrix)? It was like the protagonist was walking around in a dream, the boundary between reality and VR was blurred, he was maybe hallucinating on drugs (or not), and the whole thing was very unsatisfying. I call it "acid-trip" science fiction, and I don't like it. It's weak. And simply working the name of Julian Jaynes at one point is not enough to turn a story into hard SF!
Here's something else from the July/August issue that caught my attention—are we doing product placement now? In "Tethered" (Durrani), one of the characters was eating a Twix bar through the whole story. I'm not going to go back and count how many times the brand was mentioned, but I distinctly recall that it was often enough to be intrusive. And she was drinking a Dr. Pepper, too.
Now, if Analog authors are starting to get product placement deals, I think that's a great thing and I fully support it. But I want to be told. Brand names in short fiction are a good thing. They are vivid details that can often create or strengthen an emotional response. And if Analog 's guys are getting paid for doing it, all the better. But for all I know, Durrani just stuck them in because he doesn't know any better.
Keep it up. Christopher Meyers
So far, so good, eh? I figured I'd wait to completely ruin the magazine for at least another couple of issues. Got to get to the end of the serial, after all.
But seriously, I do know what you mean by "soft creep" (and, yes, by "literary"). As much as I share your concern, though, there's also such a thing as "hard creep." Analog has long published stories about science, or stories with time travel, or stories exploring alien culture and language, and under too strict a definition of "hard SF"none of those things (among many others) would have been possible, and that's worth bearing in mind.
As for the use of brand names, while I'd love to be big enough to attract the attention of a multinational conglomerate offering us a product placement deal, we'd never take them up on it. Still, you're not the only reader to find those specific story details obtrusive, and I'll definitely remember that in the future. (It's also funny to try to picture products specifically pitched at Analog readers: somehow, I don't think they'd get very far with soda and candy bars.)
Dear Mr. Quachri,
After reading Mr. Kooistra's Alternate View about "The Death of the Rocket Equation," I was a bit taken aback. The premise being that anti-matter was so powerful an energy resource that a miniscule of the fuel could propel a spaceship to anyplace in the cosmos in a minimum of time. The rationale being that not only did it contain oodles of energy but its own mass was not a part of the equation.
When I thought about that fact, I began to wonder how an infinite amount of force could be applied to a conventional spacecraft without tearing the ship into tiny pieces. Applying an infinite amount of force to any device means that the device must be able to stand the strain of the thrust
I can imagine such an anti-matter engine starting up and thrusting itself right through the spacecraft like plunging a hot knife through a chunk of butter. It's not likely the butter would even move.
Leonard R. Cook
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2013 Index
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Here is the Index to 2013, Analog 's Volume CXXXII Entries are arranged alphabetically by author, with month and page. Whe
n the author's name and/or part of the entry's title is omitted, it is the same as that of the previous entry. Multiple entries by the same author are listed alphabetically according to the story/article title. Collaborations are listed under all authors with cross references. Unless otherwise noted, each entry is identified as an Alternate View (av), editorial (ed), fact article (fa), guest editorial (ge), novella (na), novelette (nt), poem (pm), Probability Zero (pz), serial (se), special feature (sf), or short story (ss).
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IT'S ANLAB TIME AGAIN
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YOUR BALLOT WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY ENTERED IN OUR DRAWING FOR A FREE ONE-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION!
Welcome to the year 2014! As usual, we're asking you to choose your favorites via the Analytical Laboratory. Not only will your votes provide tangible awards for authors and artists, but your feedback will help guide the selections we offer you in the future. Your vote is important!
Look over all your copies of Analog dated 2013, or refer to the index on the following pages. Pick your three favorites in each of the following categories: novella, novelette, short story, science fact article, and cover. If you're not sure about a piece's category, you'll find it listed both in the Table of Contents for the issue in which it appeared, and in the Index. In the event of a disagreement between the Table of Contents and the Index, the Index should be considered correct. List your choices in order of preference (your favorite in each category is #1) on the ballot below, and either mail it in or send it by e-mail. You can also vote at our website, www.analogsf.com . The ballot is intended to make it easier for you to vote, but if you don't want to cut it out, feel free to copy it.
To be sure your vote counts, please have it reach us by February 1, 2014.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014 Page 37