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Asimov's SF, December 2007
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com
Copyright ©2007 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover art for All Seated on the Ground by Michael Carroll
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CONTENTS
Editorial: REVISITING APOLLO 8 by Sheila Williams
Reflections: REREADING HEINLEIN by Robert Silverberg
Novella: ALL SEATED ON THE GROUND by Connie Willis
Short Story: THE LONESOME PLANET TRAVELERS’ ADVISORY by Tim McDaniel
Poetry: CLASSICS OF FANTASY: ‘A CHRISTMAS CAROL’ by Jack O'Brien
Short Story: STRANGERS ON A BUS by Jack Skillingstead
Short Story: THE RULES by Nancy Kress
Poetry: FUTURE TOAST by Bruce Boston
Short Story: do(this) by Stephen Graham Jones
Serial: GALAXY BLUES: PART TWO OF FOUR: THE PRIDE OF CUCAMONGA by Allen M. Steele
Poetry: THE VOID WHERE OUR HEARTS USED TO BE by Robert Frazier
ON BOOKS by Peter Heck
SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss
NEXT ISSUE
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Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, No. 12. Whole No. 383, December 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) 2007 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. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. 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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Editorial: REVISITING APOLLO 8
by Sheila Williams
In our February 2007 issue, Kristine Kathryn Rusch revisited the Apollo 8 mission of 1968 and imagined a catastrophic development that never happened in our own timeline. Staying close to our own history, she crewed the space ship with the same astronauts. As we know, our astronauts survived this flight and are still alive today. In Kris's work of fiction, though, the outcome is different. Apollo 8 and its brave crew are lost. The story celebrates the courage of the early space explorers. It also imagines a way in which this tragedy changes and revitalizes the space program.
Reader reaction to this story was mostly enthusiastic. Jack McDevitt wrote to say, “Kris Rusch's novella in the February issue is one of the two or three best pieces of short fiction I've seen this year. Magnificent.” Others described it as science fiction at its finest.
Not every reader agreed, however. Richard Wallace, MD, poignantly described his own feelings about the story.
I am upset and concerned after listening to/reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's novella, “Recovering Apollo 8.” Suddenly, I must imagine a hero from my youth in a story where his major accomplishment is his untimely death. Why use such a macabre plot device to drive a story of one man's obsession. Was the crew of Apollo 8 or their families contacted by the author or your editorial staff before publishing this “speculative fiction"? The odd feeling in my gut came when my fourteen-year-old who listens to these tapes with me asked if I remembered when these men died. I have read and enjoyed the standard alternate history tales before, but I never remember using subjects who are still alive and remarkable.
This letter seems to bring up several questions. Is it all right to use living people in a work of fiction? Is it okay to kill them off? Will spinning tales about real people affect how they are remembered and is that memory or false reputation something writers and editors should be held accountable for? I'm not going to make an attempt here to offer universal answers to this question. I'm just offering my own thoughts on them as they pertain to Kris's story.
Legally, of course, there's no issue. The event was a public one, the astronauts are public figures. In addition, “Recovering Apollo 8” is clearly a work of fiction. It doesn't claim to tell the true story. Professional writers do their best to get as many facts right as possible, but they are also professional liars. It's their job to tangle us up in the webs that they weave. The departure from the truth is often the beginning of the story. Kris Rusch was not writing a documentary about what happened to Apollo 8. She was writing a story about what didn't happen.
Is it wrong to imagine that the crew died? Their death is an inevitable result of the events in the story. Kris could have c
ome up with a new crew. That might have been hard to do convincingly, though, in a story that otherwise stays so close to the historical record. But, should she have considered the feelings of the real people and their families? Kris handles the situation tactfully. The astronauts are not shown. Their behavior is a matter of conjecture, but their actions are as brave as I'm sure they would have been if they'd been placed in this situation. These actions seem to be in agreement with the fortitude and training that it takes to be an astronaut. The real crew has been back on terra firma for a long time now. Surely the worst time for their families must have been the anticipation beforehand and the wait for them to arrive home. It's hard to imagine that any anxiety engendered by reading “Recovering Apollo 8” could compete with the real thing.
Dr. Wallace's letter obviously gave me a lot to think about. It also instigated an interesting dinner discussion with my own thirteen-year-old. I brought up my day at work and the letter writer's concerns. My daughter had never before heard of the Apollo 8. Before that night's dinner conversation, the only astronaut she could name was Neil Armstrong. She still might not be able to name the crew, but at least she knows about the mission. If she reads the story, I'm sure that the names Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders will stick with her longer than if she came upon them in a history book. I imagine that Dr. Wallace set his child straight about the fate of the Apollo 8's crew. I hope they had a terrific conversation about the mission and the heroes of his youth. Perhaps it was a conversation that might never have occurred if they hadn't read the story.
Should Asimov's editors and authors be worried about spreading disinformation? We all know our heads are filled with false facts, Johnny Appleseed didn't walk around with a saucepan on his head, George Washington didn't chop down his father's cherry tree, and Bill Gates never claimed that “640K ought to be enough for anybody....” I don't believe that it is the fiction writers’ responsibility to untangle all the facts from the tall tale. The writer's job is to entertain us, and possibly to make us think about what is and what isn't, what was and what could be. Thankfully for Asimov's, this is a job that Kristine Kathryn Rusch, like so many of our other authors, is very good at, indeed.
Copyright (c) 2007 Sheila Williams
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Reflections: REREADING HEINLEIN
by Robert Silverberg
The summer of 2007 saw the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein's birth—an event well worth celebrating for those of us who love science fiction, because Heinlein is the writer from whom all that is significant in modern science fiction descends. It behooves me, therefore, to take a look at Heinlein next in this ongoing series of rereadings of science fiction classics, and the book of his that I've chosen to revisit is one of his earliest—Beyond This Horizon, his third novel. It was first published in the April and May 1942 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and is still in print in book form.
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Heinlein was so prolific back then at the beginning of his career that he needed to put a pseudonym, “Anson MacDonald,” on Beyond This Horizon so that it wouldn't seem to the readers of Astounding that one man was writing the entire magazine. He made his debut there in 1939 with two short stories, and then his fiction was present in six 1940 issues, eight of the twelve 1941 issues (with two serialized novels and eight short stories), and four 1942 issues before he went off to do military research in World War II. By the time Beyond This Horizon appeared, his distinctive writing style must have been so familiar to Astounding's readers that no one could have failed to recognize the Heinlein touch behind the “Anson MacDonald” false whiskers. These are the novel's astonishing opening lines:
Hamilton Felix let himself off at the thirteenth level of the Department of Finance, mounted a slideway to the left, and stepped off the strip at a door marked:
BUREAU OF ECONOMIC STATISTICS
Office of Analysis and Prediction Director
PRIVATE
He punched the door with a code combination, and awaited face check. It came properly, the door dilated, and a voice inside said, “Come in, Felix."
What is so astonishing about that passage, which must seem to modern readers as though anybody could have written it, is that no one had ever written science fiction like that before. Mounted a slideway. Heinlein doesn't describe it. He just tells you that that's how you move around in the future. Awaited face check. The door is scanning people. The door dilated. It didn't simply open; it dilated. So we know that we are in a future where iris-aperture doors are standard items. And we are only a dozen lines or so into the world of Beyond This Horizon.
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In an essay on Heinlein that I wrote on the occasion of his death at the age of seventy-nine, in 1988, I said this, which needs no rephrasing now, about the way Heinlein wrote:
In one flabbergasting two-year outpouring of material for a single magazine, Heinlein had completely reconstructed the nature of science fiction, just as in the field of general modern fiction Ernest Hemingway, in the 1920s, had redefined the modern novel. No one who has written fiction since 1927 or so can fail to take into account Hemingway's theory and practice without seeming archaic or impossibly naive; no one since 1941 has written first-rate science fiction without a comprehension of the theoretical and practical example set by Heinlein.
The nature of his accomplishment was manifold. His underlying conceptual structures were strikingly intelligent, rooted in an engineer's appreciation of the way things really work. His narrative method was brisk, efficient, and lucid. His stories were stocked with recognizable human beings rather than the stereotypes of the mad-scientist era. And—his main achievement—he did away with the lengthy footnotes of the Gernsback school and the clumsy, apologetic expository inserts of the pulp-magazine hacks and found an entirely new way to communicate the essence of the unfamiliar worlds in which his characters had to operate. Instead of pausing to explain, he simply thrust character and reader alike into those worlds and let communication happen throughexperience. He didn't need to tell us how his future societies worked or what their gadgets did. We saw the gadgets functioning; we saw the societies operating at their normal daily levels. And we figured things out as we went along, because Heinlein had left us no choice.
Hence that slideway. Hence that dilating door. We all write that way today. But no one had written like that before Heinlein.
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Beyond This Horizon is short, as novels go—sixty thousand words or so. It covers an amazing amount of thematic ground: a society built on mandatory eugenic manipulation that enforces civility in daily life by legal and ritualized duels with hand weapons, plus an examination of how telepathy works, plus the search for the meaning and purpose of life, plus the exploration of a post-capitalistic non-socialist economic system, and much more. About five pages into the book Heinlein shows us—in 1942!—a computer collecting and processing economic data so that production and consumption can best be balanced by the bureaucracy in charge of such matters. ("All of these symbols, the kind that jingle and the kind that fold and, most certainly, the kind that are only abstractions from the signed promise of an honest man ... passed through the bottle neck formed by Monroe-Alpha's computer, and appeared there in terms of angular speeds, settings of three-dimensional cams, electronic flow, voltage biases, et complex cetera. The manifold constitutes a dynamic abstracted structural picture of the economic flow of a hemisphere.") This is followed by a quick trip through the futuristic economic system and then a demonstration of how that archaic weapon, the Colt .45 pistol, worked. All this in the first half-dozen pages.
A few pages later, just in passing, Heinlein invents the waterbed. ("The water rose gently under the skin of the mattress until he floated, dry and warm and snug.") And we see the way legitimized dueling serves to maintain common courtesy. ("An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.") Anyone w
ho was driving the Los Angeles freeways in the early 1980s, when angry drivers were likely to express their displeasure with pistol-shots, will understand that principle. Blasting away at drivers who annoy you is not the best way to encourage safe driving, perhaps, but the fad, while it lasted, did tend to make everyone extremely aware of the rules of the road. Heinlein saw that forty years before.
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Beyond This Horizon, short as it is, is a sprawling, chaotic novel. By the usual conventions of plot construction it's downright disorganized. (The first two thirds of the book, covering perhaps a couple of months, deal with the attempt by government eugenicists to convince the superman-protagonist that he really ought to pass his superior genes along to the next generation. Then, after a brief and strikingly clumsy depiction of a failed revolution against that government, the final third of the story takes five years to show the protagonist marrying, siring two superchildren, and involving himself in a project that seeks to determine whether there is life after death.)
Flaws in narrative technique abound. A man who has been in suspended animation since 1926 is brought back to life, and one expects Heinlein to use him the way Huxley used the character known as the Savage in Brave New World, a foil against which the special features of his futuristic utopia can be more clearly depicted. But in fact Heinlein does almost nothing with him, forgetting him for nearly a hundred pages and then bringing him back in the most perfunctory way. There are sudden shifts in viewpoint, too. Crucial scenes take place off stage. Coincidences coincide. Et cetera, et cetera.
One can explain this odd excuse for conventional narrative method by saying that Heinlein in the fourth year of his career was still a novice writer who didn't really know what he was doing. Maybe so: no doubt that his plotting skills would improve vastly over the decades, as a glance at such mature work as 1966's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will prove. But I think that's too glib a dismissal. What is going on in Beyond This Horizon, I believe, is that Heinlein's basic intention is to take us on a tour of a fascinating future society built out of many of his own libertarian social concepts, and he does it by putting his characters through the rudiments of a standard pulp-magazine story, just well enough constructed so that we move willingly through event after event toward some understanding of what his future world is all about. He was concerned, in all his novels, with the Big Issues: How can we construct a workable commonwealth? How must we conduct ourselves within such a society? Why, for that matter, are we alive at all? His novels are moral parables. He asks the same sort of hard questions that Socrates did, couching them in the form of science fiction rather than as philosophical dialogues. And he holds us, as did Socrates, through his personal charm, through the clean lines of his efficient unfancy prose, and through the sparkle of his ideas—not through the tightness of any kind of unified plot.
Asimov's SF, December 2007 Page 1