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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVII No. 6, June 2007
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by David A. Hardy
SERIAL
QUEEN OF CANDESCE, conclusion, Karl Schroeder
Novella
THE SANDS OF TITAN, Richard A. Lovett
Novelette
ON THE BUBBLE, Rajnar Vajra
Short Stories
FATHER HAGERMAN'S DOG, Scott William Carter
A ZOO IN THE JUNGLE, Carl Frederick
Science Fact
CRYOVOLCANOES, SWISS CHEESE, AND THE WALNUT MOON, Richard A. Lovett
Probability Zero
VECTORING, Geoffrey A. Landis
Reader's Departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, Jeffery D. Kooistra
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Associate Editor
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: FOGGY BORDERLANDS by Stanley Schmidt
THE SANDS OF TITAN by RICHARD A. LOVETT
SCIENCE FACT: CRYOVOLCANOES, SWISS CHEESE, AND THE WALNUT MOON by RICHARD A. LOVETT
FATHER HAGERMAN'S DOG by SCOTT WILLIAM CARTER
ON THE BUBBLE BY RAJNAR VAJRA
A ZOO IN THE JUNGLE by CARL FREDERICK
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ROBERT HEINLEIN TURNS 100 by Jeffery D. Kooistra
VECTORING by GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
QUEEN OF CANDESCE by KARL SCHROEDER
IN TIMES TO COME
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS
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EDITORIAL: FOGGY BORDERLANDS by Stanley Schmidt
"Just because there's twilight,” as Kelvin Throop observed, “doesn't mean you can't tell the difference between night and day."
He was speaking figuratively, about the perennial debate over what is and isn't science fiction. Certainly science fiction has something in common with several other fields, notably fantasy and alternate history. Sometimes a story can be both science fiction and something else, such as alternate history or mystery. And sometimes a case can be made for considering a story either science fiction or something else, enough so that intelligent people can disagree and argue at length about which classification is more appropriate.
But there are also plenty of cases that, by reasonably well-defined criteria, are clearly one or the other. The recent tendency of some publishers, marketers, critics, and even readers to treat all of these kinds of stories as one big fuzzy catch-all, more or less equivalent, is simply wrong. They act as if the whole literary landscape were blurred into one fog-blanketed whole (if I may mix metaphors), whereas really only the borders are hazy.
Why does it matter? Because some readers care about the differences—and this does not necessarily imply that they view one field as Absolutely The Best and look haughtily down on all the others. Some do, of course; but there are plenty of readers who like well-done science fiction and fantasy and alternate history...
...but like to know which one they're getting into at any given time. If I have a taste for steak tonight, fish stew may not satisfy, even if I would think it wonderful at another time. Somebody buying a ticket to a baseball game expects to see a baseball game, and has a legitimate gripe if he gets into the stadium and finds it full of people playing football instead.
And the players certainly need to know which kind of gear to wear and which rules to follow. Which leads us to another reason for trying to blow some of the haze away and clarify just where those borders are: writers need to know what kinds of materials they are most likely to be able to sell, and who is most likely to buy them.
That last part is important because not everyone draws the borders the same way. As I've already mentioned, many people now apply the term “science fiction” quite loosely to a wide range of things ranging from fantasy to alternate history to things barely distinguishable from mainstream. Analog is famous (or notorious, depending on who you talk to) for defining it a good deal more stringently.
But how much more stringently? Not as much so as some assume, when readers don't read us or writers don't submit to us because they mistakenly believe that all we publish is nuts-and-bolts technical-problem stories focusing only on hardware. The actual range of what we publish is, as regular readers know, far broader than that. On the other hand, it's not infinitely broad. There are stories that simply would not go over with most of our readers if they found them here, even if they might like to read them elsewhere.
So what are the limits? I thought it might be worthwhile to spend a few pages trying to clarify them, at least a little, because I'd like to get as many readers as possible who might like what we're doing, and I don't want writers sending good Analog stories elsewhere because they think our limits are narrower than they are. Neither do I want to attract readers under false pretenses, or encourage writers to waste postage on stories that are clearly not right for us. (But if you're a writer and you have the slightest doubt about whether we'd be interested, please let me decide!)
I can't give you an exact, infallible prescription that says if you do this it will work for us and if you do that it won't. Much about writing is subjective, and once in a great while I'll get a story that seems to break all the “rules,” but does it so dazzlingly that my gut feeling is that the readers will love it anyway. In such a case, I'll go with the gut (and usually it's right). Genuine brilliance can overcome a lot of preconceptions. So can brevity and/or humor (remember what Shakespeare said about those?). You can get away with risky things more easily in a short story than in a long one, and readers will swallow things in an unabashedly facetious tale that they wouldn't in one that purports to be serious.
But few of us can count on being truly brilliant or briefly witty every time we try, so if you're trying to sell stories to our readers (and do remember that they're the customers; I'm just the go-between), your chances are best if you have a clear understanding of what the guidelines usually are.
And those are quite simple. In general, I expect Analog science fiction to do two things:
1. It should incorporate some element of scientific or technological speculation in a way that is integral to the story.
2. It should make a reasonable effort to make the speculative science plausible in the light of what we now (think we) know about science.
And that's all, except for the basic requirements common to any kind of fiction, such as creating characters who engage a reader's attention and sympathy and whose efforts to solve meaningful problems make for a rewarding reading experience.
Please note carefully that neither of my two special requirements implies that our stories need to be exclusively or primarily about technical details, or to be full of technical jargon. Daniel Keyes's classic “Flowers for Algernon,” for example, is first and foremost a hauntingly memorable people story, with hardly any technological gimmickry or jarg
on, yet it's a perfect illustration of my first requirement. Everything that happens to Charlie Gordon grows directly out of his intelligence-raising operation; take that out, and the whole story collapses. The Star Wars movies, on the other hand, don't meet that test at all, though they're chock-full of “science-fictional” elements like rockets, robots, and aliens. They're lots of fun, but they're essentially recast mythology—or, as my father puts it, “westerns with terrific special effects."
And “The Force” leads us naturally to my second “rule": the stories are so vague about what it is and how it works that it comes across as more mystical than scientific. There's no real way to judge how plausible it is. In the matter of plausibility, science fiction (in the Analog sense) can often be viewed as using one of two types of speculation. Extrapolation is in some respects the simpler and in other respects the more difficult. It means taking principles that are already well established and working out something new that can be done with them. Many stories in which space travel figures prominently are of this type: orbital mechanics and rocketry are understood in such detail that writers can figure out in great detail new things that could be done with them, as Donald Kingsbury and Roger Arnold did for Kingsbury's “The Moon Goddess and the Son” (December 1979). It's “easy” because the relevant data and equations already exist; it's hard because the readers insist that you use them—and get it right.
Some would like to see science fiction restrict itself exclusively to extrapolation, exploring the consequences only of things we already know are possible—but that would make for a seriously unrealistic body of fiction. We also need the other main kind of speculation, which I call innovation: postulating kinds of science that haven't been discovered up to now, but conceivably could be in the future, like antigravity, faster-than-light travel, or time travel. Most of the ones we can imagine will never happen, but something approximating some of them may, so it can be worthwhile—and fun—to explore the possible consequences if they do. As evidence that such surprises can and do happen, consider the fact that relativity and quantum mechanics would have been in this category little more than a century ago.
At first glance it might seem that innovation is easier than extrapolation because you can make up your own rules, but that's not quite true. You have to make them up in such a way that they don't contradict the old rules in regions of experience already well tested, just as relativity and quantum mechanics become indistinguishable from Newtonian mechanics under the special conditions of everyday life. And you have to think out their logical consequences well enough to keep what happens in your story consistent with them. (For more about these matters, see my editorials “Magic” [September 1993] and “Bold and Timid Prophets” [November 1995].)
So much for the ground rules: the basic principles that, if they are satisfied, assure you that you are clearly within the frontiers of “Analog science fiction.” But what about those foggy borderlands? Let's look at a few examples (some real and specific, some general and hypothetical) of stories lying Out There, either pushing the boundary or lying beyond it—and how I decided which way to classify them.
It's often said that fantasy is as far from Analog as it can get, but remember that Unknown, that wonderfully quirky fantasy magazine of the late 1930s and early 1940s, was a direct spin-off of Astounding (as Analog was then called) and edited by the same John W. Campbell. Even in my tenure we have published enough stories dealing with classical fantasy themes that I may someday put together an anthology of them (called Fantasy With Rivets?). “Murphy,” by Stephen L. Kallis, Jr. (April 1983), was a short story about the technologically unemployed leprechaun who invented the profession of gremlin. In Charles L. Harness's “H-Tec” (May 1981), Hell was being used as the high-temperature reservoir of a heat engine (and was in danger of freezing over if this went on). Timothy Zahn's “The President's Doll” (July 1987) combined acupuncture (a real technology that works even though we don't yet understand exactly how) with voodoo.
How did these authors get away with it? In each case the author made one clearly fantastic assumption, but then extrapolated from that with the attitude of a perfectly competent engineer using ordinary logic in a context of real science. In each case the author's tongue was clearly in cheek; he made no secret of the fact that he was implicitly asking you to play along, just for a little while, with something that you would normally consider too far-fetched. And each story (with the arguable exception of “H-Tec,” a moderate-sized novelette) was short, because people can suspend their disbelief (just as they can hold their breath) more easily for a short time than a long one.
An apparent exception from a little before my time was a very famous novel (now grown into an extensive series) often mistakenly thought of as flat-out fantasy: Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight, which started out in Analog as the novella “Weyr Search” and the serial Dragonrider. Presumably people think of these stories as fantasy because of the dragons, but these are not the simple dragons of Earthly mythology. They have even more remarkable powers, dependent on principles that we don't know but are applied quite consistently. Those principles aren't explained, and neither are the Threads that periodically menace Pern, because none of the characters is in a position to do so; but there are enough fragmentary remnants of old investigations of the Threads to tell a knowledgeable reader that McCaffrey did her homework and knew exactly what she was talking about.
We seldom publish alternate history in its purest form—that is, a story that simply shows how some portion of Earth's history might have gone differently—without linking it to our own version by some such interaction as time travel or contact between the “branch universes” of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And yet we did publish, proudly, Harry Turtledove's “sims” series (beginning in 1985 and later published as A Different Flesh), in which not Homo sapiens but Homo erectus crossed the Bering Land Bridge to become the “Native Americans” waiting when the first Europeans got here a few hundred years ago.
A few of our stories have been fairly close to “mainstream,” though in one case, ironically, such a story was mistaken by at least one reader for something entirely different. When we published Thomas R. Dulski's “The Case of the Gring's Mill Goblin” (December 1985), I got an irate letter from a reader protesting our decision to publish “fantasy.” It turned out he hadn't read the story, but simply jumped to a conclusion from the title. In fact, the story was rigorously dependent on chemistry so close to what we already know that I would have been less surprised by a complaint that it wasn't speculative enough.
We did get a few such complaints about Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's first story here, “Hand-Me-Down Town” (Mid-December 1989). It's true that it was essentially contemporary and involved no new technology or scientific principles—but it did involve what amounted to a sociological experiment, a kind of social organization that to our knowledge had never been tried and might help solve some of our real problems. Sociology isn't (at least so far) a rigorous science in the sense that physics or even biology is, but finding new ways to make civilization work is certainly one of the prime occupations of science fiction (and most readers agreed).
Finally, how about some examples that are beyond the foggy zone and clearly beyond the line—stories that, no matter how well crafted they are or how much I might personally like them, I couldn't use in Analog because most readers wouldn't accept them as science fiction? Here I will not name names, because I wouldn't want to embarrass anybody; but I can give descriptions. And don't be surprised if you see stories fitting those descriptions elsewhere, because some have been written that richly deserve publication and will find it elsewhere.
I regularly see, for example, stories in which computers carry out wish fulfillment or punitive functions indistinguishable from those of a fairy godmother, a genie in a bottle, or a wicked witch. The mere presence or even prominence of technology does not make a story science fiction. If you show the hardware doing something far beyond what we have a
ny reason to suppose it can do, and you provide no basis for supposing that it can, then the story is fantasy, pure and simple, and our readers won't buy it.
If your characters fly about in spaceships and fight with lasers, but interact in the same ways as nineteenth-century cowboys on horseback or pirates on sailing ships, then your story isn't science fiction—it's mainstream in a transparent disguise and won't fly here.
If the change that generates your alternate history is just who won a battle or how somebody made a decision at some juncture in recent history, that doesn't make it science fiction in the eyes of our readers. A Different Flesh succeeded admirably as both alternate history and science fiction because it postulated a much bigger change, involving a whole ecosystem developing in a completely different way than it did in our past.
So there are some things that fall clearly enough outside “our” borders, and I hope you might find these comments helpful in getting a better idea of what they are. But I hope they will also leave you with the realization that there's an awful lot of territory inside those borders—and that some of the most memorable stories may be set in those foggy borderlands.
Copyright ©2007 Stanley Schmidt
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Analog SFF, June 2007 Page 1