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Cover art by Jean-Pierre Normand
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: GROWING PAINS by Stanley Schmidt
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: PAGE TURNER by Rajnar Vajra
Poetry: SKIPPY THE ROBOT by David Livingstone Clink
Science Fact: ROBOTS DON'T LEAVE SCARS: WHAT'S NEW IN MEDICAL ROBOTICS? by Stella Fitzgibbons, MD
Novelette: HANGING BY A THREAD by Lee Goodloe
Novelette: A TALENT FOR VANESSA by David W. Goldman
Department: BIOLOG: DAVID W. GOLDMAN by Richard A. Lovett
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE ICE MAN COMETH: THE ICY RESERVOIRS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM by John G. Cramer
Probability Zero: QUARK SOUP by Bond Elam
Novelette: FISHING HOLE by Rick Cook
Novelette: TEACHING THE PIG TO SING by David D. Levine
Novelette: THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by H.G. Stratmann
Novelette: FARALLON WOMAN by Walter L. Kleine
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXX No. 5 May 2010
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor
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Stanley Schmidt: Editor
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: GROWING PAINS by Stanley Schmidt
Most people experience growing pains, both physical and emotional, which they'd rather avoid if they could—but without which they couldn't become the adults they eventually do. Is the same true for civilizations, or even species?
The term “growing pains,” I'm told, originally referred to literal, physical aches and pains associated with bodies growing, resulting, for example, from various parts not growing at compatible rates[1]. If skin, for instance, doesn't expand as fast as the muscles or bones under it, it can feel uncomfortably tight. Teething pains are an early example in which one part of the body is literally, slowly but relentlessly, pushing itself through another.
What sticks in most people's memories, though, is emotional pain, which comes in a wide range of types and intensities: uncertainty about whether they're developing as they should; awkwardness in social situations; guilt or embarrassment about things they did because they didn't know any better, which they later regret and from which they would rather dissociate themselves. If you're like most of us, and you haven't buried them too deeply, you can probably remember things you did in your youth by which you unnecessarily hurt yourself or someone else. If you could, you might erase them from your past—but of course you can't.
You might, however, take some consolation from the fact that you probably learned something from those experiences, and what you learned helped make you who you are now. You may, for instance, have made a nuisance of yourself in classrooms in ways that repeatedly earned you detention, and eventually got the message that those kinds of behavior were best avoided, for your own good as well as others'. You may have gone through periods of believing whatever you were told by “authorities” until experience taught you that sometimes authorities make mistakes or tell lies, so you started being more critical of what you heard. But how well would you have learned that lesson if you had never been hoodwinked and had to deal with the consequences?
Or maybe you were the one telling lies or bullying, until the aftermath of some incident showed you how badly that could hurt somebody you really cared about. Would you have learned your lesson as well if someone just told you that lying and bullying were bad? Well, maybe, if you had a really good innate knack for thinking about such things and picturing yourself in another's shoes. But children don't start out that way. Babies quite reasonably see themselves as the center of their universe, and only gradually develop a more realistic understanding of how they really fit into the larger picture. Being able to empathize with their fellow creatures and interact with them in mutually comfortable and beneficial ways takes a lot of sophistication that can only be developed through a long period of trial, error, and feedback. On the way there, almost anyone will do things they would later consider unthinkable—but the younger self's tentative steps and missteps are the source of the older self's wisdom.
And, of course, the same principle applies to more academic forms of learning, too. Most of us can remember struggling with at least one subject that we found difficult before we were even able to attempt things we now find routine. You can't become fluent in calculus if you haven't mastered arithmetic and algebra, and there may have been a time when the multiplication table seemed insurmountable.
To me it seems clear that cultures do go through similar stages, and need to recognize that fact and not be too hard on their ancestors who lived through the earlier ones. Alchemy was widely reviled and/or ridiculed in its own time, and is perhaps even more so now—and not entirely without reason. Some of its practitioners were outright charlatans. Much of what even the honest ones believed was wrong, and many of their efforts were directed down blind alleys. That's easy for us to say, but some of the alchemists were genuinely trying to learn what made matter tick, with very little to go on—and without their efforts we might well have never got modern chemistry. A similarly tangled historical relationship exists between astrology and astronomy: one is largely nonsense, but we may have had to go through it to get to the other.
There is now a great deal of talk (and occasionally even some action) about the horrors of industrial pollution and the need to clean it up. (Ironically, there's more talk about it now, but less actual pollution [of at least some kinds], than a few decades ago. I remember what the Ohio and Hudson Rivers, and the air near them, looked and smelled like back when coal-burning was common, and it wasn't pretty.) Whether the current trend is up or down, it would be hard to deny that industry and its products have caused much pollution of air, water, and even soil. But we had to go through a dirty industrial revolution before we could have a clean one. You have to learn to burn things and make motors at all before you can learn to do it cleanly. Crude almost inevitably comes before refined.<
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Those who would now have us try to avoid all environmental impact would, if they'd been obeyed earlier, have left us confined to the Olduvai Gorge. To get where we are now, our ancestors surely had to kill other animals, level forests, and dig holes. Vegetarians now have the luxury to be vegetarians because meat-eating enabled their ancestors to have enough free time to build a culture in which they could. Animals that subsist entirely on natural plants, without benefit of technology, have to spend practically all their waking hours finding and eating food because the energy content of what they eat is so low.
That last statement will undoubtedly ruffle some feathers, but other examples strike even closer to home and will make people even more uncomfortable if they're made to look at them. Most of us can agree on the horrors of war and oppression, but much of what is widely considered great art and literature has been created in response to those horrors. As Justin Davidson said in a New York magazine article (November 2, 2009), “Attempting to crush a culture often winds up enriching it."
Most of us can agree on the horror of slavery, but much of what we regard as the proud heritage of classical western civilization probably depends on the existence of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome. As the 2008 Encyclopaedia Britannica states, “Slaves were responsible for the prosperity of Athens and the leisure of the aristocrats, who had time to create the high culture now considered the beginning of Western civilization.” And that doesn't just mean pretty pictures and statues; the same article adds (perhaps ironically), “The existence of large-scale slavery was also responsible, it seems logical to believe, for the Athenians’ thoughts on freedom that are considered a central part of the Western heritage."
In other words, some of our democratic ideals had their roots in reaction to slavery within the culture that produced them. Would they have arisen without slavery to react against? I don't know, but the possibility gives one pause.
Far be it from me to suggest that every youthful indiscretion or misjudgment, whether of an individual or a society, is a good thing or was justified by any good side effects it might have had. A teenager who drives drunk to impress his friends and winds up paralyzed for life might understandably feel that the price of the lesson was way too high. I'm not sure any redeeming good ever came of the Inquisition or the Third Reich. Without them we would not have George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan or Anne Frank's Diary, but is their value to us worth the price paid by millions of innocent victims, including Joan and Anne?
That, in miniature, is the fundamental dilemma posed by the observation that many of the things we have and value depend for their existence on our ancestors having done things that we would be ashamed to do ourselves and would not tolerate others doing if we could stop them. What if we could have prevented all the past atrocities—and in the process prevented all the good later things to which they directly or indirectly contributed? Would we and our world be better for it, or should we view these past evils as necessary growing pains of civilization? Are our present exalted sensibilities luxuries that we can afford only because our ancestors went through these growing pains?
Anywhere but in science fiction, such questions would be little more than intellectual games—purely hypothetical speculations about how now might be different if then had been different. But in science fiction—and, less likely but not inconceivably, in a real future with science and technology that we don't have—they can take on a more practical aspect. Instead of merely wondering, “What if things had been otherwise?” we can consider, “What if somebody can go back and make them otherwise?” Suppose, for example, that a group of time travelers could go back and abolish slavery in Athens. Would the resulting world of 2010 be better or worse? How, and to what extent, could we justify either making the change or not making the change if we had the ability?
And what of the future? Right now, at least in our part of the world, few of even the kinds of people who in past times would have kept slaves would consider the practice necessary or justifiable. Machines provide the same sorts of advantages slaves used to, giving some people (many more than in past eras) enough free time to think about things other than making a living. Until recently, machines were all pretty simple-minded; indeed, no one would think of saying they had minds at all. We still had to tell them what to do, even if they did the physical act of mixing and baking bread or crunching the payroll numbers. Now, though, we're getting machines that do more and more of their own decision-making and can take limited sorts of initiative. The science-fictional goal of actual artificial intelligence is beginning to look potentially achievable, and if we get machines with that plus the mechanical ability to do a wide range of tasks, we can liberate ourselves from most tedious chores. We'll have something that can effectively replace a human being, without being one. It will be, as I said in The Coming Convergence[2], “like having slaves, but without the guilt."
But would it really? Or would we instead find that we had drifted by insidious stages back to a new era of slavery, in which the slaves are manufactured rather than born? And will that one be even harder to justify—and free ourselves from—than the ones of bygone ages?
It's a question that we may have to face in reality sooner than we'd think. Science fiction writers have, of course, already been thinking about it for quite a while; but I suspect we've barely scratched the surface and there are still plenty of new angles to explore.
Meanwhile, I leave you with one final question in this vein. How many—and which—of the things we do now will be seen by future generations as the growing pains and embarrassing adolescent awkwardness of an immature species?
Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt
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[Footnote 1: Actually it has a narrower medical meaning referring to a particular kind of muscle pain, not well understood, sometimes occurring in children. But I'm using it in a broader sense of any aches or pains associated with growth.]
[Footnote 2: Prometheus Books, 2008, p. 194.]
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Vincent Di Fate's cover for our June issue illustrates “The Anunnaki Legacy,” a far-ranging adventure by relative newcomer Bond Elam. What do you do if you're a long way into a quest so big, for a goal based on evidence so tenuous, that you don't even know whether the agencies supporting you still really do? And what if you then find that what you were looking for is not what you thought it was, but something even stranger? Then your response can't be what you thought it would be....
Linguist Henry Honken is back with another article about an aspect of human linguistics that's likely to stretch your thinking about what alien—and even future human—languages might be like. It's called “Der Mann, Die Frau, Das Kind,” and if you think your high school classes in German or Latin gave you a good idea of what gender means in linguistics, think again—they probably just scratched the surface!
And, of course, we'll have a diverse array of stories by such writers as Jerry Oltion (with Elton Elliott), Kyle Kirkland, Edward M. Lerner, and Michael F. Flynn.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Novelette: PAGE TURNER by Rajnar Vajra
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Illustrated by Mark Evans
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Extraordinary events can happen in very ordinary places....
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Let me hand you the whole picture. I'm in trouble, real trouble, and can't do a blessed thing about it. And I'm hurting and tired and cold, and God knows I'm scared. So the game's name for me right now is SURVIVAL, which means I've got to invent distractions and more distractions to fight this urge I'm getting to—to just give up.
Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I reviewed the high spots of my life—more hills than mountains, sad to say—then told myself every joke I could remember. None of that pleased me much, but at least it killed a few hours. Then I decided to indulge in acting out the fantasy that's molded my daydreams for the last two years. Don't laugh. The idea is that
I'm at the bookstore where I work, during a weekly session of our writer's club, the Literary Lions. But instead of being a salesperson cum barista cum waitress merely serving the wordsmiths, I'm one of them, reading her latest baby out loud. Don't you think that would be so satisfying, sharing something you've created with a group that can appreciate and intelligently critique your art?
That may not be your fantasy, but it's mine, and I tried to really get into it, imagining I was ensconced in one of the big circles of dusty armchairs, sitting with a writer's typical bad posture: shoulders rounded, head jutting forward, back slumped. But when I started my tale, just making stuff up impromptu, the love was missing. Took me a while to figure out why.
What I crave is the feeling of doing an official reading—or what I imagine that's like. And that's something I can't get here without having a story, actually created by me, memorized well enough to get a sense that I'm reading it as I recite it. Crazy? I know, but I've never had more time or reason to pamper myself. Ever notice how you can't do a blessed thing until you do something else first?
So I started gluing a plot together in my head and ran headlong into another snag. I guess my . . . situation has squashed my creativity along with other things. Pure fiction was out. What I finally came up with is basically a glorified report on some stuff that's actually happened. And though I said the writing itself wasn't my goal, it's been more involving than I expected. Be interesting to try this for real if I ever get out of here.
Anyway, I've completed my masterpiece and gone over it a dozen times and had a long if not good nap. Now I'm ready to give my fantasy a second try. A word of warning: real life doesn't always have much of a plot or character development or even conflict—all the stuff the Lions blab about every week. So I guess what you'll hear isn't a good story, but I've tried to make it interesting despite that. You can tell me how well I've succeeded.
Analog SFF, May 2010 Page 1