Analog SFF, November 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Some Rangers simply do the gods’ bidding. Some are actual avatars. All travel up and down and across the stream of time by twisting a spiral ring, singing a snatch of song, and grabbing a bit of momentum from whatever is moving in their vicinity. Files opens as cadets Nancy Brown, Jake Stockley, and Ed Brown travel so to the Transept of Death, where Lady Olivia Wexford, legendary as a Bacchante who dances with Lord Riot (Dionysius) to destroy cities and worlds, is being brought back from death. Time Rangers serve the Lord of Reason, Apollo, but their mission on this day is to escort the Lady.

  Later, they will take on the task of protecting and cultivating a political family and its final scion, Timothy Macauley, who will become U.S. President twice and, perhaps, represent the last, best hope of the human future. All does not go smoothly or logically, for the gods work often at cross-purposes and always at whim, but there is an inevitability to the tale that suggests that the Fates, whom we never see as gods, must nevertheless be at work behind the scenes.

  Recommended.

  Paul Di Filippo's latest collection, The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories, serves up a bouillabaisse quite worthy of the author of A Mouthful of Tongues (reviewed here in January 2003). The stew is also as strange as one made of the sorts of things one might have found in the waters lapping the edges of the ancient supercontinent, but the title story has less to do with the Earth of eons ago than with the weirdness one can find online. The protagonist is a nerdy drone who discovers micronations—fictitious realms that issue passports, stamps, and currency and whose “citizens” claim for them status equivalent to France or Bulgaria in the real world. (You can visit the League of Micronations at lom.4t.com.) He discovers a discussion forum in Gondwanaland, offers his opinion on the imminent death of the emperor, and finds that he has a chat buddy. Before long he is in love with said buddy. But when she invites him to visit and offers a Gondwanaland address, quite as if Gondwanaland were the real world, what's the poor fellow to do?

  Paul's having fun, and he does it with an infectious laugh that will soon have you thinking he runs a heckuva party.

  Steve Aylett was named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Slaughtermatic. Now he tries to convince us that he deserves the Dickian mantle with Lint, a fictional biography of a fictional and highly eccentric writer who has some Dickian affinities. Subject Jeff Lint does not receive infusions of gnostic wisdom via pink light beams from space, but he does have a continuing obsession with color and late in life “gem-yellow eye blasts kicked neon through his head."

  Yet Dick fans may well take offense, for Lint's stories are remarkable for pointlessness, plotlessness, and senselessness (one critic wonders how fast he was going when he hit a story). Quotations betray resonances with the most cryptic of blank verse, perhaps assignable to his association with the Beats. Surprisingly, editors did buy his work, perhaps because they just wanted to get this lunatic out of their office (he had the idea that one must wear a dress when delivering a manuscript), and fans—some, anyway—grew quite obsessive in their attempts to extract meaning from his gnomic prose.

  SF fans can take offense too, for Lint's career begins in the forties with a sale under the pen name “Isaac Asimov.” If this does not strike you as a derisory comment on the real Isaac, consider the names of some of the magazines Lint sold to: not just Amazing, Startling, and Astounding, but Troubling Developments, Tales to Appall, Baffling, Useless, Terrible, Awkward, Beyond Absurdity, and Pull the Other One. Do they reflect a jaundiced opinion of SF and its history? Or a loving if satiric opinion? I suspect the latter, for Aylett displays a deep familiarity with the history of the genre, its writers, and its fans, and elements of Lint's career echo elements of the lives of many writers besides Dick. Further, the magazine names, the senselessness of the Linty oeuvre, and the looniness of the fans can be taken as echoing the larger society's opinions in the matter rather than Aylett's.

  Is he satirizing SF itself? Or the larger society's misperceptions of it? Perhaps the greatest difficulty with Aylett's effort is that he never really makes it clear what his target is. As a result, Lint is a struggle to read, though one cannot help but admire the effort and dedication that had to go into writing it.

  Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future suffers from no such ambiguities. Weller begins by admitting frankly that he is a lifelong Bradbury fan. He then delves into his subject's childhood and genealogy (an ancestress stood trial in the Salem witch trials), early efforts and mentors, and the long life of achievement and recognition. The tale is well and smoothly told, but the tone is distinctly adulatory. The reason lies partly in Weller's fanhood, but also perhaps in the nature of Bradbury's gift. Unlike the bulk of SF and fantasy which indeed drew the accusations of pointlessness, plotlessness, and senselessness which Aylett mocks, Bradbury's work was rooted in home-town America and it made sense not just to fans, but to everyone. He was accessible, and it didn't take long for him to move out of the pulps and into the mainstream. The book ends in November 2004, when President George W. Bush gave Bradbury the National Medal of Arts.

  That level of recognition is unique in the genre. Those writers who aspire to anything similar might do well to read and compare the Aylett and Weller books.

  Those of us who read SF have heard of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robots, silicon adjuncts to the brain that let people control prosthetic limbs or machinery, mental up- and downloads, memory boosters, life extension, post-humans, transhumanism, and the Singularity or Spike. If we also read the science news (Technology Review, Scientific American, New Scientist, and the like), we know that much of what we are accustomed to seeing in fiction exists in embryo already. It's in the lab, or even in commercial prototype. But it's not in a store near you—yet!

  Most of the rest of the world hasn't a clue, for the stuff that fascinates us tends not to get into the daily news until it is a lot closer to the store. These are the people who will pick up journalist and futurist Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human and experience a major WOW! moment. They just aren't prepared for talk of how genetic, robotic, information, and nano technologies (what Garreau calls the GRIN technologies) are about to enable engineered humans with such startlingly new capabilities that they transcend human nature and may no longer be “human” in any traditional sense. The consequences may be quite utopian or quite catastrophic (Bill Joy has written that robotics, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering threaten to make humanity extinct; thus research into these areas should be cut short immediately).

  People fear potential catastrophes. But the idea of transcending human nature really gives them the willies. The idea that humans might turn themselves into something that isn't really human anymore is frightening. So is the idea of people becoming somehow unnatural, which has driven protests against vaccines, antibiotics, organ transplants, and assisted reproduction, among other things that go against the traditional “natural order.” It provides the rhetoric being used against the idea of changing the body with such things as computer implants and genetic engineering. Yet, says Garreau, human nature is not just a matter of doing things the same way we always have. It is human nature to search for meaning, to better ourselves, to be creative, and to devise rituals to validate our actions. Given this, whatever we do with the GRIN (and other) technologies is human nature.

  We might also note that in the search for whatever it is that makes humans uniquely human in a world full of our animal cousins, people have suggested communication, speech, tool-using, laughter, and several other things, all of which soon turned out to have parallels in animal behavior. The differences are of degree, not kind. But there is one thing we do that other animals don't: If we have a tool, a language, a religion, a costume, a recipe, a political system, we tinker with it. We change it. We do not leave it alone. Thus, if we wind up changing human nature, well, that's hum
an nature.

  Garreau's writing is smooth and convincing, and his book is an excellent summary of the technological developments that will shape the lives of the next generation. Recommended.

  Fred Hoyle invented the “big bang” term, played a major role in the development of astronomy and astrophysics, championed continuous creation and germs that fall from space (Diseases from Space, with Chandra Wickramasinghe), and in general was a seminal fellow with a gift for controversy. Why, he even wrote SF (The Black Cloud and A for Andromeda)!

  Simon Mitton's Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science tells the story, from his origins in poverty to his success at the University of Cambridge to his eventual status as outcast. Along the way, Mitton makes it clear that Hoyle was a fascinating fellow who deserved better treatment from his peers (perhaps even including a Nobel Prize) than he received.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  The last paragraph of your June editorial coincided with some things that have been bothering me for some time. Since cutting down on consumption requires significantly less change than windmill farms or “the hydrogen economy,” why are the others so popular in certain circles?

  (There was a builder in the Chicago region more than fifty years ago who provided houses that conserved heat so well that he sold them without furnaces, but with the guarantee that he would install a furnace if the purchaser ever wanted one. None of his purchasers ever did.)

  One reason for the emphasis on futuristic energy sources, of course, is that these require changes from somebody else. If the car companies would deliver a hydrogen-burning car and the gas companies sell hydrogen at their pumps, then I can still drive to the gym to get my exercise. If the power companies would just build enough windmill farms, then I could still use all my appliances.

  I think a deeper problem is that we humans envision the future as the present with minimal change. We have power grids, so our children will have power grids. Call it the “horseless carriage” effect; the men who invented the automobile—hardly unimaginative, as humans go—built things which were carriages with engines providing the power that horses had previously.

  We in SF are far from innocent. Every time I look at the illustrations in The High Frontier, I see farms just like those in Kansas and houses just like those in Princeton.

  Frank Palmer

  Chicago, IL

  * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt:

  Your editorial on the ecological consequences of “pollution-free” technologies was well reasoned and timely. The musings on the potential effects of large-scale wind harnessing were particularly interesting.

  As every resident of the Gulf Coast knows, the west coast of Africa each summer blows low-pressure systems out into the Atlantic like a showoff uncle blowing smoke rings to amuse a child. Sadly, we in the Gulf and Caribbean are the victims of “second-hand smoke” in the form of devastating tropical storms and hurricanes.

  Your essay made me wonder if it were possible to erect a series of large wind farms, with mills that could be adjusted to increase torque, and thus wind resistance. As meteorologists see hurricane-spawning systems building, the windmills could be “stiffened” to interrupt the development of the protostorms and reduce the number of systems that develop into cyclonic tropical storms.

  As we are in a period of increased tropical activity and development of coastal areas grows, the economic and human consequences of land-falling storms grow more significant every year. A method to help throttle down tropical systems before they reach the warm waters of our neighborhood would be easily as valuable as the energy produced by such wind farms, which could aid in the development of the countries of west and central Africa without crippling those nations with the hydrocarbon addiction that threatens our own economic well being.

  As always, thank you for your thought-provoking editorials, fine fiction and solid science fact articles, a stimulating méélange that makes Analog a tasty gumbo for the hungry mind.

  Louie Ludwig

  New Orleans, LA

  * * *

  Dear Analog,

  As usual, you gave me a solid batch of entertainment in the June issue, but one story inspired me to write; “NetPuppets” is one of the best tales I've read in a good while. Kudos to Richard A. Lovett & Mark Neimann-Ross for crafting a complex, entertaining and ever-so-plausible gem that delivers all the way to the end. I hope to see more work from them in the future.

  Lucas Johnson

  Plano, TX

  * * *

  Dear Stanley,

  Richard Lovett's article [in the June 2005 issue], “Gene Doping and Other Olympic Scandals of the (Not-So Distant) Future,” is the best single article ever written on ergogenic aids in sports. My only comment based on my forty-year opposition to performance enhancing drugs is that the article is already out of date. Sports have been heavily influenced by steroids and the like for over 50 years. Baseball was only a latecomer to the use of drugs to enhance performance. All our records and titles are the results of such techniques. If one takes a look at the physique of the former screen Hercules and 1947 Mr. America, Steve Reeves, one sees not only the most perfect and beautiful male physique, but also the ultimate in natural muscular development. Today, he would not be able to enter a local teenage bodybuilding contest. The competitors in the world's biggest bodybuilding show, the Mr. Olympia contest, are so big that they no longer look human. A friend of mine and I have often joked that the drug-fed Mr. Olympia competitors look like aliens from outer space. The Mr. Olympia contest, which was first held in 1965, has never had a natural competitor win the event. That is now two generations ago! Also, the dangers of these performance-enhancing techniques seem to grow in direct relationship to their effectiveness. Although not widely reported in the general media, deaths and strokes are common with the heavy drug using athletes (1). As Mr. Lovett points out, it is simply impossible to compete in some sports without a commitment to take these drugs. That is why I support alternative drug tested bodybuilding contests and why I must examine whether or not my children should continue to think of college level competition in some sports.

  Clifford J. Ameduri, M.D.

  Webster, NY

  (1) Ciola, Tom, Steroids Kill, Axion Publishers, 2004

  * * *

  Dr. Schmidt,

  Is there any field that Richard Lovett hasn't mastered and can summarize/elucidate/relevate (I invented that word) even better than its own “masters?” I always look for his name when the mag arrives: he gets read first (Sorry, Stan—you are always a close second choice) unless there is a “Probability Zero,” of course—could there be any reader who doesn't read the “Prob-Zs” first?

  Thanks especially for Richard's article a few months ago on suggested memories, which summarized some of Shachter's work at Harvard. With the principles at work in at least a couple of life-wrenching situations close to me, I was moved to get the Schachter book and read the full treatise.

  I have just put down “NetPuppets” in the June issue—wow! (And just a sideways glance—how fitting for the Kelly Freas tribute to appear right there on the facing page. Layout genius!)

  Now I'm eagerly waiting for Richard's analyses and relevation of two works—Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Karen Armstrong's A History of God—don't know if they're on his “to-do” list, I hope so.

  John L. Fallon

  Longmont, CO

  * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  In the June 2005 Analog, the appreciation of Kelly Freas on p. 131, unsigned, must be by you. It's quite wonderful, including the delicious use of “astounding."

  So was Kelly.

  Thank you, and for the last in the letter column being about him too. “What shall I do without him?” asks the writer, whose name, quite wonderfully, is Gray.

  I suppose you get Chronicle, and have seen my piece, in the March issue (No. 257). Warren
Lapine kindly chose to print the pictures I mentioned, and took my suggestion for the cover—three of five being from your magazine, for which I must also thank you.

  Your magazine nourished Kelly. He certainly gave good exchange. Now it remains for us fans, and you pros, to continue; to cherish his work; to go on worthy of his achievement; to find and raise the like again. Somehow. Somehow.

  John F. Hertz

  Los Angeles, California

  * * *

  Dear Analog,

  First, let me say I was gratified to read Trevor Quachri's response to Paul Basile's letter (in the June “Brass Tacks"). The explanation of how editorial mishaps can cause good writing to seem unduly sloppy was suitably apologetic and very much to the point. I can commiserate with the editors. More than once I have had the experience of spending a lot of time and effort updating a computer program and subsequently had to deal with problems that occurred because somebody had inadvertently installed an old, uncorrected version.

  Second, with regard to Jeffery Kooistra's “Alternate View” column on Lord Kelvin (also in the June issue): I enjoyed the article, but I must object to the characterization of “Degrees Kelvin” as a “common mistake.” It would be more polite (and more accurate) to call it an anachronism, since the use of “kelvins” instead of “degrees Kelvin” is a fairly recent change.

  I can remember the first time I encountered the new unit (kelvins) in reading; I recall being amused (certainly not shocked, but surprised) by the neologism, and being mildly surprised again upon discovering that the change seemed very pervasive. I realize that “kelvins” is two syllables shorter than the earlier “degrees Kelvin,” and even one syllable shorter than “degrees K."