Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He greatly underestimates the pace of scientific advance. “It did not take the Fifth Men many centuries to devise a tolerable means of voyaging in interplanetary space,” he tells us, though the Fifth Men are a wondrous race of near-immortal superbeings, and we pitiful primitive First Men managed the trick only a decade after Stapledon's death. As for gene-splicing, which we have already developed, Stapledon finally allots it to the Third Men, forty million years in our future, who begin with “simple breeding experiments, but later ... by crude physiological manipulation of the young animal, the fetus, and (later still) the germ plasm.” On the other hand, the Martians get to Earth by traveling on the solar winds, possibly the first mention of this concept in science fiction.

  Again and again Stapledon shows himself to be an amateur novelist by a curious lack of specificity: the chain reaction that destroys the world of the Second Men is caused by a “critical element,” but he doesn't tell us which one, and the historical records of that era are stored on metal plates “constructed of an immensely durable artificial element,” a Gernsbackian construction that no modern SF writer would have used. He speaks of “ingenious methods” for solving a problem, and “a certain marine salt” as a cause of infant mortality, but doesn't specify. Such vagueness recurs many times. But these flaws don't matter. The book is a breathtaking vision, one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written. And—after a dark epilog that seems to foreshadow the terrible war only nine years in Stapledon's future—comes a marvelous epilog to the epilog, with the dazzlingly endowed Eighteenth Men at the brink of extinction, summing up humanity's two billion years of cyclical striving: “Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Silverberg

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  Department: IN MEMORIAM: JANET KAGAN: 1946-2008

  Janet Kagan, who died on February 29, 2008, of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, was an author whose work was immensely popular with the readers of Asimov's. From 1989-1992, she practically owned the annual Readers’ Award novelette category. Her first Mama Jason story, “The Loch Moose Monster” (March 1989), about the plucky settlers on the planet Mirabile and their adventures and misadventures with the genetic chimerae hidden in their daffodils and otters, came in first, while her next tale, “The Return of the Kangeroo Rex” (October 1989) came in second. The following year, “Getting the Bugs Out” (November 1990) won the award while “The Flowering Inferno” (March 1990) came in third. A year later, her last two Mama Jason stories, “Raising Cane” (March 1991) and “Frankenswine” (August 1991) took second and third place. In 1992, these wonderful stories were knitted together and published by Tor Books as the highly regarded novel, Mirabile. In addition to winning Janet her last Readers’ Award, her 1992 non-Mirabile story, “The Nut-cracker Coup” (December), was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the winner of the Hugo Award. Janet's work was the inspiration for my young adult anthology The Loch Moose Monster: More Stories from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (Delacorte Press 1993), and I was grateful to her for allowing me to borrow the name of her story for the title of the book. Janet was well able to combine warmth and humor with dramatic plotting. We hadn't seen anything new from her for many years, but the legacy that she left in the pages of Asimov's will last for a very long time.

  —Sheila Williams

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  Department: LETTERS

  Dear Editor,

  I just read a back issue of your magazine that I'd overlooked for some reason or other, and wanted to send in some reader comments. The issue was the February 2007 one, and the story that got me to write in was called “A Portrait of the Artist,” by Charles Midwinter. I loved this story. The author does a nice job of leaving enough up for grabs, while grounding everything in some pretty good character interaction. The turn-arounds at the end are solid and the plotting in general is short-story gold. This is precisely the type of stuff I want to read when I sit down with a short-story mag. Please try to get some more material from him. You already may have, and I just haven't gotten there yet, but keep up the pressure, all the same. Thanks for a great read!

  Al Wilson

  * * * *

  Dear Editor,

  I just finished the September issue of Asimov's, and feel that I have to write. “How Music Begins” was a compelling story, probably made even more so by my personal experience in both playing in a concert band in junior high and high school and my much later completion of a Bachelors in music. (I originally went for a degree in Music Education, but had to change to Jazz Studies when I lost my sight—it doesn't seem wise to try to lead a room full of young adults with thousands of dollars worth of musical instruments if you can't see them). The story was enticing and well written. However, it left me wanting more. I want to now hear the story from Elise's point of view, perhaps with the mystery explained at the end. Many reasons spring to mind as to why the band was abducted, and I'm sure the author probably has yet another I haven't thought of. It's stories like this that inspire me to work harder on my own writing.

  On the other hand, the story “What Wolves Know” was an interesting tale, but I seem to have missed the science fictional or fantastic aspect of the tale. I'm not sure why it was in the magazine. I kept waiting throughout the story for it, but it never materialized.

  Nicole Massey

  Arlington, TX

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  Dear Editors,

  Greg Egan's story “Dark Integers” in the October/November 2007 issue is well written and entertaining, BUT...

  Many SF and fantasy stories require a suspension of disbelief, but this story requires one that I just cannot make. I cannot make myself think that mathematics follows in some way from the behavior of the real world, or that altering mathematics can change the real world. It is just too strongly ingrained in me that mathematics is entirely the work of man, totally disconnected from the real world. Sure, it's useful for understanding and analyzing the real world, but that does not mean that one governs the other. No one is watching propositions as if they were real objects to see what axioms they obey (what does “obey” mean in a mathematical context, anyway?). In fact Egan mixes the abstract and the concrete to such an extent that at times his prose descends into meaningless gibberish. ("...send a plume of alternative mathematics back across the border...” ? “...wiggling the border between the two systems back and forth to encode each transmitted bit"? Come on!) And all this without getting specific enough to get a handle on anything. Just what cluster of propositions behave differently? In what way do dark integers play by different rules?

  All this is not to say that I didn't enjoy the story; it's just that reading it made me feel like I was walking on quicksand. I prefer stories based on solid ground.

  Bruce M. Foreman

  Chambersburg, PA

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  Dear Ms. Williams,

  I've read and re-read Chris Butler's short story “The Turn” (October/ November 2007). The story's details seem deliberately to suggest real-world referents, but I've failed to discover the grand analogy. I don't mind being disappointed with myself, as long as I eventually receive enlightenment. But I do mind wasting my time thinking about a story whose every detail turns out to be nothing but a maguffin. Please enlighten me.

  Paul Palmer

  Pittsburgh, PA

  * * * *

  We hesitate to suggest glibly that sometimes “a pipe is just a pipe,” for that would almost certainly negate several renowned graduate programs, so, in the case of interpreting the fiction in
Asimov's, we feel it's best to allow readers to draw their own conclusions, no matter how Byzantine or prosaic these interpretations may be.

  * * * *

  Dear Editor,

  Although I really liked “Leonid Skies,” I was just wondering why Carl Frederick “made” Adrian speak the way he did. It felt like a mix between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the sort of polite American kid one sees on the tele. Nothing like what I hear on the bus in the mornings (not that that would necessarily be printable).

  John Fairhurst

  Stockport UK

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  Another of our readers, Simon Robert of Devon UK, found Carl Frederick's future-slang somewhat outlandish as well. Considering some of the unpleasantly colorful epithets we hear from callow youth on mass transportation, perhaps Carl should only be accused of good-natured wishful thinking.

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  Dear Asimov's,

  What a joyous day when my December issue arrived and I saw that it had a long awaited Connie Willis Christmas story in it. I saved it till I had time (the next day) to sit and enjoy the whole thing at once. It just isn't a great Christmas without a new Connie Willis story. When that December issue arrives without one I feel so let down. You cannot imagine my joy upon seeing the cover this year. Anticipation was running high. I was not disappointed—it was a wonderful story. I'm just glad that I am so forgetful that I will be able to read it a couple more times before the ending doesn't come as a surprise.

  Also, loving the Coyote stories. More, please. Tim McDaniel's “The Lonesome Planet Travelers’ Advisory” was such a hoot that I'm going to have to read it to some of my friends.

  Thanks for all the years of great SF, thoughtful editorials and col-umns, and informative reviews and other columns.

  Sandy Dusel

  Ontario, NY

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  Dear Editor,

  I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed the serialization of Galaxy Blues by Allen M. Steele. I hope we'll be seeing more serialized novels in the near future.

  Cameron LiDestri

  Stratford, CT

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  We're pleased to report Galaxy Blues received uniformly positive reader responses. While we won't rule out the possibility of a new serial if we find one that truly strikes our fancy, serials will never be a regular component of Asimov's.

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  Dear Asimov's,

  I've been reading your magazine now for three years, ever since I picked up a random copy in a used bookstore and I have yet to read a story I didn't enjoy on some level. A few left me wanting more, but these were rare and I've found myself eagerly awaiting each new issue. However, it was not until Connie Willis’ new Christmas novella that an Asimov's story made me want to write in and express my gratitude and joy; no small feat considering we are currently in the middle of a freezing blizzard, when I would much rather be in my cozy bed.

  It's been a long time, in this over-commercialized age, since a Christmas story hit me in such a poignant way as did “All Seated on the Ground.” Not only were tears made to form, but I was laughing out loud in more places than I could count. The characterizations of both Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher had me sympathizing with Meg, and cheering when the Altairi finally put them in their places. And really, I've never seen a more true description of a teenage choir, from the cell phones to the bickering to the camera-happy moms. My toque is off to Ms. Willis and her muses, for giving me a Christmas story that I will be passing down the line for many seasons to come.

  I believe my dog is expecting a written apology, though, for the number of times I frightened her with my sudden and violent giggle fits. That, or she's really an Altairi in Chihuahua form.

  Andrea Jacobsen

  Thunder Bay, Ontario

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  Dear Ms. Williams,

  Having read your editorial “My Rowboat” in the February issue, I thought you might enjoy hearing about a much earlier use of the rowboat pun. A short story titled “The Astounding Dr. Amizov [sic]", by R.F. DeBaun (Analog, January 1974), centers on a prominent science fiction writer (and scientist, and Shakespeare biographer), who secretly owes his prodigious output to the fact that he has made five clones of himself. Anyway, the story tells us that among his most famous works is the classic “I, Rowboat” which is described (here I quote from thirty-four-year old memory) as the “tragic tale of an intelligent dinghy making its way in a hostile world.”

  Gary W. Lucas

  Salem, CT

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  Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD LOOKED UP

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  * * * *

  The ever-popular Kristine Kathryn Rusch looks at an era when it seemed that the whole world was enchanted with the promise of space travel.

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  We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

  —Oscar Wilde

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  I figured out what inspired me to write science fiction on a dark and lonely afternoon in the New Haven Public Library. I was in Connecticut to research a mystery novel set in 1969 (eventually published as the award-nominated War at Home, under my pen name Kris Nelscott).

  I was going through microfiche of the New Haven Register from July of 1969 and I found an article titled: “Science Fiction A Jump Ahead; Space Journeys Already Forgotten."[1]

  The article had come through the Associated Press, and it was a glowing account of how science fiction had predicted space travel long before the Apollo program started. The article starts like this:

  “To the science fiction writers who predicted it in the first place, the [upcoming] moon flight of Apollo 11 is old hat.”

  I'm sure it wasn't; I'm sure the SF writers quoted in the article, from Isaac Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke, were as excited and worried about the upcoming moon landing as the rest of us were. That they had predicted it didn't mean they weren't nervous about it.

  But none of that nervousness showed in the article. Instead, what the article dealt with in a very serious way was the then-current trends in science fiction. My former boss and editorial predecessor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Edward L. Ferman, was quoted as saying that stories with “space travel as their central theme” were “getting harder and harder to find.”

  John Campbell, the influential editor of Analog, said that “modern” science fiction “ranges even beyond the soft sciences [to] explore concepts the sociologists wouldn't touch.”

  The article is upbeat and interesting. I was so happy to see it that I spent the five cents to make a photocopy and I've kept it on my desk ever since.

  But my story of inspiration doesn't stop there. My journey into 1969 was only beginning in New Haven. From there, I went to New York City and spent hours in the Paley Center for Media. And there I watched a Charles Kuralt television special called, “The Day They Landed.”

  Kuralt and his team spent July 20, 1969, traveling from first light on the East Coast to sundown in Hawaii. His goal for the show was to “to stop time for history, to show 2069 what the world was like the day human beings landed on the moon."[2]

  I clearly needed this for my research into 1969. The piece started with the moon landing itself and surprisingly, I found myself in tears as I watched it, listening to the remembered voices and seeing the film that got filtered back to Earth.

  A little personal history: In July, 1969, I had just turned nine. My life was punctuated with weird outer space moments—broadcasts interrupted as astronauts orbited the Earth or were blasted in tin cans that sent them out into the darkness of space to achieve President Kennedy's dream of a moon landing before the end of the 1960s.

  Each pronouncement by NASA was news, and each astronaut was famous, celebrities for which we have no modern equivalent. In those days, people talked about real-life heroes—and they meant the explorers who risked their lives to expand our vision beyon
d the boundaries of Earth.

  We all believed that by the far away future of 2008, we would have bases on the moon. We would have landed humans on Mars and we would be conquering the rest of the solar system.

  But more on that in a moment.

  In my 1969 research, I learned a few things. Such as the fact that more than three thousand bombs blew up in the United States. Most were created by domestic terrorists, often college students associated with the SDS. So many bombs exploded that they weren't national news. They were local news.

  Like the riots, like the anti-war protests. The press couldn't keep up. A bomb going off in a department store, such as the one that went off at Goldblatt's in Chicago in April, didn't receive coverage outside of Illinois.[3] Now a story like that would be front and center of every national newscast.

  In 1969, there were thirty-seven airplane hijackings, and that was just within the U.S. Nine thousand three hundred Americans died in Vietnam that year. I couldn't find the figures for the Vietnamese and Laotian dead. Or the number of people killed or injured in the various protests across America.

  The upheaval and divisions in this country in 1969 make what's going on in the world right now look like a respite.

  Which made that moon landing even more spectacular. America stopped its war on itself for a brief moment, and everyone looked up. Here are my notes from Kuralt's special, taken while I watched:

  Showed people all over, including army officers, people in their homes, people outside, people in a trailer park watching on a TV. They watched at the commune; showed a priest and altar boys watching; Cronkite and others crying; elderly people in a home watching, along with the nurses, dressed traditionally. They're crying too. And there is applause.

  Kuralt said, “Seventy-five million Americans watched TV that day—pushed by fear, led by hope."[4]