Analog SFF, December 2008
Page 22
Tony Marshallsay
Riyadh
Saudi Arabia
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Actually, neither the initial “X” (as in English) nor the “inverted f” as described is intrinsically unpronounceable. But you're right that the description of “f” is inverted, and I'm not sure how that slipped though. I remember noticing it as an obvious slip in the manuscript and marking it for correction, but somehow it eluded our clutches all the way to the finish line.
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Dear Dr. Schmidt,
The Fourth of July fireworks just came to a glorious conclusion, here in Columbus, Ohio.
I decided to follow that with the conclusion of Kukulkan by Sarah K. Castle (May 2008).
I was well rewarded for saving this story.
I then visited www.analogsf.com, hoping to find that with the advance of the Internet Age, and Web 2.0, and the contributions of the younger people you are bringing along with such success, there might be an advance in the quill pen technology of rating stories.
Alas, as one of your long-in-the-tooth readers, I confess I was unable to find what I was looking for.
I came to www.analogsf.com, hoping to find a quick and simple way to express my appreciation for Ms. Castle's remarkable story.
If there is a way to contribute to the positive feedback for Ms. Castle's work, I did not find it.
You chided me once before for my inability to abide by the antiquated feedback system you've had in place for more than the thirty years I've been reading Analog. You even went so far as to inform me that Mrs. Schmidt had found a way to deal with the ancient methodology you have in place.
I have great admiration for Mrs. Schmidt.
I have equal admiration for you.
I do not admire the quill pen methodology you inherited from Ben Bova, and from John Campbell before him.
Please enlist one or two of your bright young people to set up a simple database for subscribers who are so inclined to record their impressions of a particular story by a particular author within minutes of the peak moment when the story or article has come to its inevitable end.
With sincere appreciation for decades of inspiring stories and articles,
Thomas A Hanson
Columbus, Ohio
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As you've just demonstrated, there already is a quick, simple way to express your immediate appreciation for a story: e-mail.
There is also a quick, simple way on our website to record your comparative impressions for the year, called online voting—which leaves me puzzled as to why you claim we're still using “quill pen technology."
Although, now that you mention it, keeping a page of paper where you jot down your immediate impressions so you can compare them at the end of the year isn't such a bad idea. If you shudder at the thought of pen or paper, you could just as easily do the same in any of the many readily available word processors, spreadsheets, or database programs. If what you're suggesting is that we should supply you with a readymade electronic form for doing that, we can look into the possibilities—although, our readers being who they are, I suspect each of you would prefer a different way of doing it. So I put it to you directly: What would you like to see us do to make it easier for you to keep track of your ratings of stories and convey them to us in a meaningful and mutually useful way?
Before you write, let me emphasize one thing. Much as you might be bubbling with enthusiasm over a story you've just read, what we're most interested in is which ones made you bubble the most, and still left you feeling that way some time later. Which is why, much as we like getting letters enthusing about a story you've just read, we still want to know which ones stand out in your mind when you've read the whole year.
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Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I am prompted to write to you by Angie Boyter's letter in your June 2008 edition. Praising your editorials, she says, “I often want to pull them out to send to my local elected officials.” Well, I am an elected official of a locality, and I want to praise Angie for her thinking.
I have been a reader of Analog for over thirty years. Science fiction and fact have helped define the person I am. Stories that answer questions starting with the words, “What if?” have been, and still are, my favorite reference texts. Through SF, I've met the most thoughtful, educated, and caring people I know. Yet many of us just assume that we are outside the mainstream, sidelined from the political forces that shape much of our world.
You have written on the topic of climate change, which I regard as humanity's greatest and most urgent challenge. SF readers are skilled and experienced at seeing the various futures that answer the questions of “What if?” There has never been a more pressing need for that ability in the offices of local government than is now created by the dangers of our damaged ecology.
Your readers should know that they are not precluded from being leaders in the mainstream, nor from solving the problems they are uniquely equipped to foresee. I ask them to do as Angie suggests, and send your essays to their elected officials. Or, do as I have done, and join those officials themselves. I assure you, and them, that if I can do it, they can too.
Please forgive the honorific in my signature line. I very rarely use it, but perhaps it will draw an extra eye or two to this note, which I hope will suggest a possibility to a future local leader.
Hon. Stevens R. Miller
Dulles District Supervisor
Loudoun County, VA
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Dear Dr Schmidt:
As always, when the current issue of Analog arrives, I turn first to the editorial. No exception this month [July/August, 2008].
May I express a note of serious disagreement with your idea that Scottish Gaelic has as bad a pronunciation-to-spelling “fit” as English? I'm a native English speaker, but a Gaelic learner—and for my sins, the chairman of the Gaelic Education Committee of a regional Gaelic culture/language organization. I've had a lot of exposure to Scottish Gaelic in written, spoken, & sung forms over the last ten years, and I'm firmly convinced that spelling in Scottish Gaelic is far more logical and consistent than spelling in English.
Once one gets past the (mistaken) notion that Latin letters have intrinsic sound meanings, the spelling rules for Gaelic are simple & very consistent. None of this stuff of, say, “ough” having four or five different sounds. There are rules for assigning pronunciation to letters & letter combinations. The latter are a bit more complex, but they are consistent.
I'd say that the consistency exceeds French.
Chas. H.W. Talbot
Gaelic Education Committee
Seattle, Washington
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I'll take your word for it; I haven't attempted an exact numerical analysis, and I haven't studied Gaelic in as much depth as I gather you have. However, I did get through most of an introductory course, and while it's true that the rules are good for identifying broad and slender consonants, no rules that I encountered made it easy to tell which vowels were pronounced as vowels. If there are such rules, I'd be interested in hearing about them—but if they're as complicated as I suspect they are, I'd still have to say the system is at best cumbersome.
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Dr. Schmidt:
France imposed a roman alphabet on Vietnam that uses a great many diacritics to correlate spellings and pronunciation, which the socialist republic of Vietnam still uses. But you cannot look at a word and tell how to pronounce it without learning the rules, which, as you pointed out with regard to French, are hardly simple. Colonial schools did not teach the old Vietnamese script, an extensively modified form of Chinese ideographs, cutting modern Vietnamese off from over a thousand years of their literature. It is being reconstructed now, but it is as difficult as you can imagine. But don't imagine that a phonetic alphabet will transparently preserve literature of the past, because it won't. English spelling was phonetic which first devised, and if you knew the spelling rules, you'd know it is ridiculous to aver
“fish” may be spelled “ghoti."
Lee in Siam
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The observation about “ghoti,” which I believe is due originally to George Bernard Shaw, is based on today's English usage, for which “rules” is too strong a word: “gh” as in “laugh,” “o” as in “women,” and “ti” as in “nation."
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Dr. Schmidt,
It is very difficult for me to read this story ("Tracking” by David Palmer in the July/August 2008 issue). I don't know what to call the type of writing, skipping all those words, but it is very distracting for me. I read a couple pages, then skipped forward to see if it continued throughout. I will not read the other installments if they are written this way. Hopefully this is not a “trend.” I have been subscribing for too long to give up now.
Jay Berlo
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I'm sorry you found the language in TRACKING off-putting, but I very much hope you'll give it another chance. At least read as far as the “Interlude” beginning at the end of p. 18, which explains why Candy writes the way she does—and it certainly has nothing to do with illiteracy. Yes, it does take a little getting used to, but nowhere near as much as learning a new language. In our experience, most people find it feels a little strange for a very small number of pages, but then they get caught up in it and find it not only easy going but irresistible. EMERGENCE, the first story in this series, was written in exactly the same style, and the AnLab scores said it was, at least for many years, the most popular story we ever published.
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Dr. Schmidt,
I recently submitted a manuscript for consideration by your publication. It was rejected which I certainly accept, however I think you could provide the submitting writers with more information than you do.
With the reasonable assumption that you are reading the manuscript to assess its suitability for publication, you have some criterion in mind as a basis for rejection of the submission (when you reject it). It would seem to me that a checklist with at least the main reasons for rejection wouldn't take much time to complete.
It is frustrating to invest the time and money in a submission and then not really learn anything from the submission. I wouldn't consider a format using a checklist with few checked off boxes giving more specific reasons for rejection as burdensome because I would assume you are making those decisions as you read anyway. It would also be useful to know if you read the entire manuscript.
You have a good thing going. A little bit of help to the writers will do nothing but improve the quality of the submissions and your final product.
Arthur Pluim
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Actually, the checklist you suggest would be far more burdensome and less informative than you realize. It would be at best oversimplified and therefore misleading, and deciding where to put the check marks would take more extra time than you think, with 500 or so manuscripts a month—and would produce little or no benefit for the magazine. We have a very small staff and our job is not to provide free writing instructions to everybody who wants it, but to fill the magazine with stories readers will want to buy. This means 98-99% of stories must be rejected, and it's simply not because of any thing conspicuously wrong with them, but simply because they don't stand out as sufficiently special from 98% of the competition. There are other places to get help with writing; I'll give it when a writer is getting close to what we need, but I have to resist the temptation to try to do more than that. Giving a meaningful critique of a story that's almost there can be so time-consuming that the first question I must answer about every manuscript—as quickly as possible—is whether it warrants spending company time on a detailed critique. (For more, please see my March 2007 editorial, “New Writers.")
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
We start 2009 with the first “double” issue in our new format, with a strikingly dramatic cover by John Allemand for Rajnar Vajra's novella “Doctor Alien,” which gives new meaning to the archaic term “alienist.” It's hard enough for psychiatrists to help patients of their own species, for whom they have a pretty good idea of what is “normal.” But what is one to do when thrust into the life-or-death position of having to treat a motley collection of extraterrestrials, whose standards of normality are all over the map—and all quite unknown? The possibilities are, so to speak, mind-boggling....
As usual, we take advantage of the extra space in a double issue to feature items that wouldn't fit in a regular issue. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's January/February offering in this category is “The Recovery Man's Bargain,” an offshoot of the “Retrieval Artist” series she started here some while back, but with a different kind of specialist—who has a lot to learn, not all of it comfortable.
Kevin Walsh returns with another of his fact articles exploring our rapidly expanding knowledge of what sorts of extrasolar planets are really out there. This one he calls “Neptune, Neptune, and Neptune ... But Not Neptune,” examining a trio of discoveries which all have some similarity to one of “our guys"—but also plenty of differences from it, and from each other.
Rounding out the issue will be a mixed bag of intriguing stories by Dave Creek, Edward M. Lerner, Richard Foss, Richard A. Lovett, and John G. Hemry—and, last but by no means least, Part 3 of Robert J. Sawyer's Wake.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
16-19 January 2009
ARISIA 2009 (New England regional SF & fantasy conference) at Hyatt Regency, Cambridge, MA. Guest of Honor: Walter L. Hunt; Artist Guest of Honor: Dave Seeley; Fan Guests of Honor: Ricky and Karen Dick. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2008, $60 thereafter and at the door (if not sold out). Info: www.arisia.org; info@arisia.org; Arisia, Building 600, PMB 322, 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139.
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23-25 January 2009
VERICON IX (Harvard SF, fantasy, gaming, anime conference) at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Guest of Honor: Kim Stanley Robinson. Membership: $15/$25 (student/ non-student) online until 10 December 2008, $20/$25 online until 14 January 2009, $25/$35 at the door. Info: www.vericon.org; Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, Student Organizations Center, 59 Shepard St., Box 93, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
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13-15 February 2009
BOSKONE 46 (New England regional SF & fantasy conference) at Westin Waterfront, Boston, MA. Guest of Honor: Jo Walton; Official Artist: Stephan Martiniere; Special Guest: Irene Gallo; Featured Filker: Dr. Seti; NESFA Press Guests: Greg & Astrid Bear. Art show, dealer's room, gaming, talks, panels, music, whimsy. Membership: $46 in advance, more at the door. Info: www.boskone.org; info-b46@boskone.org; (617) 776-3243 (fax); Boskone 46, PO Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701.
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27 February-1 March 2009
SheVaCon 17 (SF conference) at Roanoke Virginia. Writer Guest of Honor: Larry Niven; Art Guest of Honor: Ernie Chan; Fan Guest of Honor: Carla Brindle. Multi-genre con: art room, dealer's room, gaming, anime room, video room, computer room, masquerade/ cosplay, workshops and panels. Membership: $35 until 31 December 2008, $40 thereafter and at the door. Info: www.shevacon.org; PO Box 7622, Roanoke, VA 24019-0622.
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13-15 March 2009
MADICON 18 (Virginia area SF conference) at James Madison University Festival Center, Harrisonburg, VA. Guest of Honor: L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Info: www.madicon.org.
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6-10 August 2009
ANTICIPATIONSF (67th World Science Fiction Convention) at Palais des congres de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Guests of Honor: Neil Gaiman, Elisabeth Vonarburg; Fan Guest of Honor: Taral Wayne; Editor Guest of Honor: David G. Hartwell; Publisher Guest of Honor: Tom Doherty; MC: Julie Czerneda. Membership: until 31 December 2008 (see website for latest details): USD/CAD 215, GBP 95; EUR 130; JPY 20000; supporting membership USD/CAD 55; GBP 30; EUR 35; JPY 6000. This is the SF univ
erse's annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home. C.P. 105, Succursale NDG, Montréal, Québec, Canada H4A 3P4
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Visit www.analogsf.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.