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Analog SFF, July-August 2006
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2006 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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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVI No. 7 & 8, July/August 2006
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by Bob Eggleton
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SERIAL
A NEW ORDER OF THINGS, Part III of IV, Edward M. Lerner
NOVELLA
KREMER'S LIMIT, C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley
NOVELETTES
WITHERSPIN, Alexis Glynn Latner
THE KEEPER'S MAZE, Joe Schembrie
ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE, Ian Stewart
STRING OF PEARLS, Shane Tourtellotte
SHORT STORIES
TOTAL LOSS, James Hosek
THE SOFTWARE SOUL, Brian Plante
WILLIES, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
THE TELLER OF TIME, Carl Frederick
SCIENCE FACT
MESSENGERS FROM THE EARTH'S CORE? THE GREAT PLUME DEBATE HEATS UP, Richard A. Lovett
READER'S DEPARTMENTS
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
IN TIMES TO COME
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Associate Editor
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Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: WHEAT AND CHAFF by Stanley Schmidt
THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY
WITHERSPIN by ALEXIS GLYNN LATNER
IN TIMES TO COME
SCIENCE FACT: MESSENGERS FROM THE EARTH'S CORE? THE GREAT PLUME DEBATE HEATS UP by RICHARD A. LOVETT
TOTAL LOSS by JAMES HOSEK
THE KEEPER'S MAZE by JOE SCHEMBRIE
KREMER'S LIMIT by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: PLANETS OF BINARY STAR SYSTEMS by JOHN G. CRAMER
THE SOFTWARE SOUL by BRIAN PLANTE
WILLIES by MAYA KAATHRYN BOHNHOFF
THE TELLER OF TIME by CARL FREDERICK
ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE by IAN STEWART
STRING OF PEARLS by SHANE TOURTELLOTTE
A NEW ORDER OF THINGS: PART III OF IV by EDWARD M. LERNER
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by TOM EASTON
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS
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EDITORIAL: WHEAT AND CHAFF
by Stanley Schmidt
One of the most useful things about history is its way of putting present problems and propensities into perspective. Consider, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, the seventeenth-century English scientist and mathematician widely (and with good reason) considered the most important person in the entire history of science. His most significant work was summed up in his book usually known by the abbreviated title Principia Mathematica and described by Isaac Asimov (and many others) as “the greatest scientific work ever written."
Just what a landmark it was is hard for a modern person to fully appreciate, if only because so much of what it says now seems so simple and obvious to even a beginning student of physics and is taken for granted in virtually all everyday scientific work. At the time, though, none of it was obvious and hardly anyone else had come at all close to codifying so much so concisely. What we now see as its simplicity was its greatest virtue; nobody previously had realized it could be summarized so succinctly. Part of it was the precise, detailed description of the way everything moved and responded to forces in three brief, simple laws (two of which, in today's notation, are further consolidated into a single short equation), and in particular how things fell under the influence of gravity. Not just mundane objects on Earth, either; perhaps Newton's greatest intuitive leap was the realization that gravity acts in exactly the same way between any two celestial bodies as it does between, say, an apple and the Earth.
Almost incidentally, as part of the process of working these things out and confirming that they agreed precisely with all the observations available to Newton, he invented calculus—one of the most powerful and elegant of all mathematical tools, and still the everyday language of many fields, not only in the physical sciences but in some areas of biology and even economics. He also did groundbreaking work, eventually published in a separate thesis, Opticks, on the nature of light, including the discovery that white light is a mixture of such colors as red, yellow, and violet, and the invention of a telescope using a mirror instead of a lens to avoid the chromatic aberration that had plagued earlier scopes.
Do all of these monumental accomplishments mean that Newton should be revered as a scientific saint and whatever he said taken as the last word on the matters whereof he spake? Of course not. A person with the benefit of the ensuing centuries of research by others—the last century in particular—might reasonably say that Newton's theories contained “gaps,” though Newton and his contemporaries could hardly have known about them. His laws of motion, for example, describe reality less and less accurately as you examine smaller and smaller or faster and faster objects. When they're small enough and/or fast enough, you need relativity and/or quantum mechanics—but nobody in Newton's time had ways of seeing objects that small or that fast.
His optics was based on a particle model of light, and we now know that some phenomena are much better explained with a wave model—in fact, the models generally used now incorporate both wavelike and particle-like aspects. The gaps in Newton's optics were more serious than those in his mechanics, because optical phenomena not explainable by his particle model were already known in his time. Francesco Grimaldi had observed diffraction, albeit rather crudely; Newton chose to ignore it because the effect was small (because of light's small wavelengths, we now say) and inconvenient. And Erasmus Bartholin had observed birefringence, or double refraction, but couldn't explain it with either particles or waves (because wave theory was not sufficiently developed at the time). So even during Newton's life, people (including him) knew that his optical theory didn't fully explain everything. But for a considerable time, though some scientists still pushed a wave model, most rode the Newtonian optics bandwagon, apparently in large part because his mechanics was so robust that many found it hard to dispute his other ideas—a likely instance of “treating him as a saint” delaying further progress in one field.
But his incomplete optics was by no means the least “saintly” of Newton's intellectual endeavors. Most of us have read that he “dabbled in alchemy,” but he did far more than dabble. Particularly in his later years, he devoted a lot of time and effort to experimentation, none of it successful, aimed at things like transmuting lead into gold. He wrote, as Isaac Asimov put it, “half a million worthless words on chemistry.” He was also deeply religious (albeit in some ways heretical, secretly rejecting some key tenets of his church that would have got him in serious trouble had he done so publicly) and wrote even more theological speculati
on about the possible meanings of obscure biblical passages. He was a “young-Earth creationist” and did his own calculation of the day of creation, coming up with a figure of about 3500 BC.
Should we accept that date, or accept his pure-particle model of light, because such a great scientist believed them? Not at all; the extreme power and usefulness of his mechanical theories do not in any way validate any other ideas he may have had that were less powerful, less useful, or just plain wrong. Should we reject his mechanics because they were put forth by someone who spent a lot of time and energy on “the occult"? Not at all; his belief in some kinds of nonsense in no way invalidates the ideas he produced that were by far the best anyone had conceived up to his time and that still stand up to extensive testing and scrutiny today. (And Newtonian mechanics does just that. The discoveries that led Albert Einstein to develop relativity did not prove Newtonian mechanics was all wrong and had to be scrapped, but only that it didn't cover all possible situations and needed to be expanded and generalized. Relativity becomes indistinguishable from Newtonian mechanics under a wide range of everyday and not-so-everyday experience, and Newton's mechanics can now be viewed as a special limiting case of Einstein's.)
Each idea must be judged on its own merits, and not on the personalities or reputations of the people who propound or embrace it. Just as the same plant produces both valuable wheat and inedible chaff, a single person quite often does or believes some things that are real and true and valuable, and others that go nowhere and may even be outright nonsense. And just as with wheat, a sensible person does not discard the whole plant, but welcomes and uses the wheat while discarding the chaff—not maliciously, but just because it isn't nutritious. Doing that, of course, requires learning to tell the difference—which, in the case of ideas, means learning to judge which ones actually enable us to better understand the universe or live better lives, and which ones don't.
The difference is not always as clear-cut and obvious as we might like. Some ideas are of limited value but can serve useful purposes until someone develops more refined ones. Some that don't pan out are not clearly bad at the time, but simply turn out not to go where their pursuer hoped they would. In Newton's case, his mechanics was and remains of great value, even though later experiments found gaps where it needed to be expanded. His optics was good enough to be useful for solving certain kinds of problems with high accuracy, though even he knew that it could do nothing for others. If pressed, he might well have acknowledged that it would probably be eventually replaced by something that could handle both kinds of problems.
His alchemy could well be viewed as serious scientific efforts to lay the groundwork for chemistry, but the breakthroughs necessary to make a real science of it would have to wait for others to make them. However well-intentioned his efforts in this area may have been, in terms of results, they went nowhere of lasting value. And his efforts to calculate the date of creation had nothing to do with science, proceeding instead from the assumption, so relentlessly drilled into practically everyone then that hardly anyone would have thought or dared to question it, that everything the Bible said had to be literally true.
Newton, of course, is merely one example; the principle applies to practically everyone and everything, in science or other endeavors. Nikola Tesla made enormous contributions to the understanding and application of electromagnetism; the whole huge power grid on which practically everything in our civilization now depends rests upon them. But late in life he went off on what sounded like wild tangents, making bizarre and unsubstantiated claims that led many to assume he had gone “off the deep end.” Some of those claims still lie untested in his notebooks, and among them may be more valuable contributions; but we can't assume that because of his earlier accomplishments. Nor can we rule out the possibility; but even if the later stuff is all purest nonsense, it detracts nothing from those earlier achievements.
Albert Einstein did more than anyone for several centuries to revolutionize physics, but was unable to accept some of the ideas that still later physicists found it necessary to develop. His rejection of those ideas, despite his stature, did not invalidate them.
One of the first things I learned as an editor, reading all the manuscripts that came to a magazine, was that hardly any writer is always at the top of his or her form. Some are more consistent than others, but many have produced both duds and masterpieces. The masterpieces don't redeem the duds, and the duds do not diminish the masterpieces.
Anyone who chooses to read all this as an allegory for our times is welcome to do so, but my essential point is quite simple and widely applicable: ideas—any ideas—can be meaningfully judged only by their own merit. And that is determined by how well they stand up to testing, how well they improve our understanding and our lives—not by who first said them, who accepts them, or where they are written.
Copyright 2006 Stanley Schmidt
"My political ideal is democracy. Everyone should be respected as an individual but no one idolized.”
—Albert Einstein
"Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy
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Published since 1930.
First issue of Astounding January 1930 ©
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THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY
Thanks again to everyone who voted in our annual poll on last year's issues. Your votes help your favorite writers and artists by rewarding them directly and concretely for outstanding work. They help you by giving us a better feel for what you like and don't like—which helps us know what to give you in the future.
We have five categories: novellas, novelettes, short stories, fact articles, and covers. In each category, we asked you to list your three favorite items, in descending order of preference. Each first place vote counts as three points, second place two, and third place one. The total number of points for each item is divided by the maximum it could have received (if everyone had ranked it 1) and multiplied by 10. The result is the score listed below, on a scale of 0 (nobody voted for it) to 10 (everybody ranked it first). In practice, scores run lower in categories with many entries than in those with only a few. For comparison, the number in parentheses at the head of each category is the score every item would have received had all been equally popular.
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NOVELLAS (2.86)
1. “Sanctuary,” Michael A. Burstein (3.93)
2. “The Diversification of Its Fancy,” John Barnes (3.03)
3. “A Few Good Men,” Richard A. Lovett (2.96)
4. “Chandra's Pup,” Bud Sparhawk (2.70)
5. “Audubon in Atlantis,” Harry Turtledove (2.51)
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NOVELETTES (0.87)
1. “NetPuppets,” Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross (2.15)
2. “Mars Opposition,” David Brin (2.08)
3. (tie) “In the Loop,” Brian Plante (1.22)
“Of Kings, Queens,
and Angels,” Rajnar Vajra (1.22)
“Do Neanderthals Know?,” Robert J. Howe (1.22)
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SHORT STORIES (0.57)
1. “Alphabet Angels,” Ekaterina Sedia & David Bartell (1.79)
2. “The Inn at Mount Either,” James Van Pelt (1.58)
3. “Letters of Transit,” Brian Plante (1.43)
4. “Prayer for a Dead Paramecium,” Carl Frederick (1.32)
5. “A Christmas in Amber,” Scott William Carter (1.14)
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FACT ARTICLES (2.00)
1. “Mission to Utah: A Science Fiction Writer's Adventures at the Mars Society Desert Research Station,” Wil McCarthy (4.26)
2. “The Prehistory of Global Climate Change,” Richard A. Lovett (2.89)
3. “Big Brother Inc.: Surveillance, Security, and the US Citizen,” Laura M. Kelley (2.25)
4. “Gene Doping and Other Olympic Scandals of the (Not-So-Distant) Future,” Richard A. Lovett (1.97)
5. “Where Are They?,” Thomas Donaldson (1.85)
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COVER (2.00)
1. November (for Sun of Suns), by George Krauter (3.63)
2. May (for “Footsteps"), by Vincent Di Fate (2.91)
3. January/February (for The Stonehenge Gate), by Vincent Di Fate (2.62)
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This year fact articles had a conspicuously strong winner; covers, short stories, and novellas had clear winners but not landslides—but the first-place in short stories is a notably strong showing by a new pair of collaborators. Novelettes showed some very tight competition, with a very close race for first and a three-way tie for second.
The number of votes was pretty good, but since AnLab votes are so useful to everyone concerned, we hope to get even more next time. Use e-mail or “snail mail,” whichever you prefer, but please vote! (Please be careful to vote in the right category, as listed in the annual Index. Sometimes a few votes are wasted by being cast in the wrong category, and those simply can't be counted. If you didn't use the online voting on our website [www.analogsf.com] this year, you might want to try it next time; it makes that problem virtually impossible!)
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