Asimov's SF, February 2006 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, February 2006

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

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  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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  Asimov's Science Fiction

  February 2006. Vol. 30, No. 2. Whole No. 361

  Cover Art for “Kin” by Dominic Harman

  NOVELETTES

  Under the Graying Sea by Jonathan Sherwood

  Unbending Eye by Jim Grimsley

  Teen Angel by R. Garcia y Robertson

  SHORT STORIES

  Change of Life by Kat Meltzer

  Are You There by Jack Skillingstead

  The Hastillan Weed by Ian Creasey

  Kin by Bruce McAllister

  POETRY

  Alien Invasion by Peter Payack

  Chaos Theory by William John Watkins

  Top Five Hints That You May Be Falling Into A Flat-Screen Black Hole by Robert Frazier

  It's Not Easy Being Dead by Bruce Boston

  Dear Schrodinger by David Lunde

  DEPARTMENTS

  Editorial: Alternate History by Sheila Williams

  Reflections: The Days of Perky Vivienne: by Robert Silverberg

  On the Net: In Your Ear by James Patrick Kelly

  Thought Experiments: Cyberpunk is Alive and Well and Living In—Where Else?—Japan by Brooks Peck

  On Books by Peter Heck

  The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 30, No. 2. Whole No. 361, February 2006. 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) 2005 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. 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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  CONTENTS

  Editorial: Alternate History by Sheila Williams

  Reflections: The Days of Perky Vivienne by Robert Silverberg

  On the Net: In Your Ear by James Patrick Kelly

  Thought Experiments: Cyberpunk is Alive and Well and Living In—Where Else?—Japan by Brooks Peck

  Under the Graying Sea by Jonathan Sherwood

  Alien Invasion by Peter Payack

  Change of Life by Kat Meltzer

  Are You There by Jack Skillingstead

  Chaos Theory by William John Watkins

  The Hastillan Weed by Ian Creasey

  Top Five Hints That You May Be Falling Into A Flat-Screen Black Hole by Robert Frazier

  Unbending Eye by Jim Grimsley

  It's Not Easy Being Dead by Bruce Boston

  Kin by Bruce McAllister

  Teen Angel by R. Garcia y Robertson

  Dear Schrodinger by David Lunde

  On Books by Peter Heck

  The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss

  Next Issue

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  Editorial: Alternate History

  by Sheila Williams

  Science fiction, even hard SF, is filled with acknowledged tropes that many scientists consider implausible. We often take faster-than-light travel, time travel, and developments in nanotechnology for granted without worrying too deeply about the science and technology needed to bring these concepts into existence. Recent correspondence from an Asimov's reader made me ponder the nature of another established subgenre of science fiction. The letter writer, Charles M. Barnard, questioned the publication of Harry Turtledove's “He Woke in Darkness” in Asimov's. Mr. Barnard wrote, “[this] is a wonderful, engaging, thoughtful story. It is, however, not science fiction. It's not even fantasy."

  For those of you who haven't read the story, “He Woke in Darkness” takes place in an America that never happened—at least in our universe. It features events similar to ones that occurred in the 1960s, but it turns the religion of some of the participants, and the race of all of them, on their heads. It's a horror story, but it's also an alternate history story.

  But, what is alternate history? Some writers go to great lengths to make alternate history sound like science fiction—it's one of those many universes next to ours that arose out of the quantum flux, or whatever—but most authors tweak the history of the world that we know and just sort of plonk their characters down. There's no real explanation for the discrepancy, it's just some kind of thought experiment. Does that make it fantasy? Well, probably not in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, but perhaps in the sense that “fantasy” is a term that can be used as a gigantic umbrella to describe all works of fiction—even science fiction. Does it make it mainstream? Again, perhaps in the obvious sense that fiction is always about alternate realities, worlds that aren't truly real. If fiction were something else, it would be called nonfiction. One can make a case that alternate history is some weird off-shoot of historical fiction, but the subgenre is generally considered science fiction, and it is marketed in the SF section of the bookstore.

  So, one might ask, what is science fiction? That's not a question that I've ever contemplated deeply, because I have no intention of limiting my enjoyment of the field, both as a reader and as an editor. The SF writer Jeffrey A. Carver has made an honorable attempt to define it on his free online writing course www.writeSF.com. Jeff characterizes it as “[those] stories ... that could not happen without some element of science, or some imagined change (futuristic or otherwise) from the world as we know it today.” He adds that, “fantasy also takes place in otherworldly settings, but in this case, the worlds are usually magical or mythical. SF stories tend to be based on, well—science, or worlds that seem possible or plausible, based on what we know or can guess about science."

  This fairly traditional definition of science fiction doesn't seem to encompass the type of alternate history that isn't brought about through time travel or quantum mechanics. Perhaps it could be loosely argued that alternate history falls under the “some imagined change from the world we know it today” clause. I think, though, that Jeff meant “if-this-goes-on-scenarios,” such as over-population or global warming, rather than unexplained changes in our past.

  The Encyclopedia of Science Fic
tion may offer us a way out of this predicament. It attempts to define alternate history as speculative fiction. Alternate history tales can often be described as “What if...” stories. What if the Nazis had won the Second World War? What if the Chinese had “discovered” and colonized America instead of the Europeans? What if the United States had been more interested in developing rocket science than atomic weapons? The “what if” or “speculative fiction” monikers do seem to apply to many alternate history stories, but speculative fiction is another broad umbrella term that can also be used to describe much of science fiction. What if we master time travel, what if we encounter alien civilizations, what if we can travel faster than the speed of light, what about instantaneous transportation?

  If we think of science fiction as speculative fiction, it's easier to welcome alternate history into its folds with or without the quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and time-travel conundrums that are used to dress some alternate history up in science fiction clothing. With the lack of rigor in its definition, however, “speculative fiction” may, like “fantasy” or “mainstream,” be too broad a term to adequately describe the literature that makes up the canon of science fiction.

  Despite the problems with terminology, Asimov's is, and always has been, home to stories about all sorts of alternate realities. Some of those alternate realities are alternate histories. Mike Resnick has spun several stories about alternate Teddy Roosevelts, Robert Silverberg and Robert Reed have both meddled with Roman history, as has Harry Turtledove, himself, in his Byzantium series. Not long ago, Lois Tilton allowed the Persians to defeat the Athenians, and an upcoming story by Beth Bernobich will feature a nineteenth-century ascendant Ireland with emancipated women quite unlike the historical women of that era. In a Paul Melko story that will appear in our April/May issue, a young man faces his personal alternate histories.

  Roads Not Taken, a collection of stories drawn from Asimov's and Analog, and edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt for Del Rey Books remains our best-selling anthology. It contains such Asimov's stories as Gregory Benford's 1989 “We Could Do Worse” (where Eisenhower dies young and Joe McCarthy is elected president), and Bruce McAllister's 1993 “Southpaw” (where Fidel Castro doesn't say “no” to the New York Giants’ scout). Some of these stories have tried to explain their characters’ predicaments. Others have left the explanation for the reader to work out. I'm sure that no matter how they're defined, alternate history stories will continue to appear in Asimov's. At least in this timeline!

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  Reflections: The Days of Perky Vivienne

  by Robert Silverberg

  We live in the twenty-first century. Philip K. Dick helped to invent it.

  The standard critical view of Dick, the great science fiction writer who died in 1982, is that the main concern of his work lay with showing us that reality isn't what we think it is. Like most clichés, that assessment of Dick has a solid basis in fact (assuming, that is, that after reading Dick you are willing to believe that anything has a solid basis in fact). Many of his books and stories did, indeed, show their characters’ surface reality melting away to reveal quite a different universe beneath.

  But the games Dick played with reality were not, I think, the most remarkable products of his infinitely imaginative mind. At the core of his thinking was an astonishingly keen understanding of the real world he lived in—the world of the United States, subsection California, between 1928 and 1982—and it was because he had such powerful insight into the reality around him that he was able to perform with such great imaginative force one of the primary jobs of the science fiction writer, which is to project present-day reality into a portrayal of worlds to come. Dick's great extrapolative power is what has given him such posthumous popularity in Hollywood. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and half a dozen other Dick-derived movies, though not always faithful to Dick's original story plots, all provide us with that peculiarly distorted Dickian view of reality which, it turns out, was his accurate assessment of the way his own twentieth-century world was going to evolve into the jangling, weirdly distorted place that we encounter in our daily lives.

  A case in point is the announcement last spring that a Hong Kong company, Artificial Life, Inc.—what a Dickian name!—is about to provide the lonely men of this world with a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne, who can be accessed via cellphone for a basic monthly fee of six dollars. If you sign up for Vivienne's friendship, she will chat with you about matters of love and romance or almost anything else you might want to discuss, and you will be able to buy her virtual flowers and chocolates, take her to the movies, even—a beautifully creepy Dickian touch—marry her. (Which will get you a virtual mother-in-law who will call you in the middle of the night to find out whether you're treating her little girl the right way.)

  What this news item brought to mind for me was two of Phil Dick's works—the early (1953) short story, “The Days of Perky Pat,” and the dazzling 1965 novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in which Dick recycled the Perky Pat concept into a breathtaking rollercoaster-ride of a book.

  In both of these, Perky Pat is a kind of Barbie doll that becomes the object of intense cult-like fascination. The earlier story, set in a world devastated by thermonuclear war, shows the survivors building their own Perky Pat dolls, providing them with wardrobes, miniature homes, and tiny hi-fi sets (her virtual boyfriend, Leonard, gets little replicas of tweed suits, Italian shirts, and a Jaguar XKE), and then using the dolls as centerpieces in a sort of Monopoly game in which whole towns participate. The far more sophisticated Dick of Palmer Eldritch eliminates the post-nuclear idea and turns Perky Pat into an electronic device adored by millions throughout the Solar System, who enhance their visits to the fantasy-world she provides by chewing a hallucinogenic drug.

  So wrote Philip K. Dick, forty years ago, in a science fiction novel that probably didn't earn him more than five thousand dollars and quickly went out of print. (Like Cassandra and various other unlucky prophets, he went unrewarded fo
r his visionary powers in his own lifetime. All the big Hollywood money for his books arrived after his death.) And now, when we move out of classic twentieth-century SF into the hyped-up world of twenty-first-century reality, we get—

  Vivienne, at six dollars a month. She's supposed to be available to owners of 3G cellphones (3G means “third generation", the kind of phone that comes with computerized voice-synthesis capabilities, streaming video, and text-message capacity) in Singapore and Malay-sia already, will be arriving in Europe later this year, and should be available to American users around the time you read this, barring last-minute technical snafus.

  She looks three-dimensional, a hot little number indeed, lithe and slender. She can move through eighteen different backdrops, among them a restaurant, an airport, and a shopping mall. She's programmed to discuss thirty-five thousand topics with you—philosophy, films, art, and, very likely, the novels of Philip K. Dick. She'll translate foreign languages for you, too. Give her an English word and you'll get its equivalent in Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Chinese, or Italian. (You key the words in as if you were doing a text message on a cellphone, but Vivienne will answer both in text and in synthesized voice. If you want your steak well done in a Tokyo restaurant, you ask her for the right phrase, and she replies out loud, so that the waiter can hear and understand.)

  Vivienne will flirt with you, too. She'll tell you how cute you are, she'll blow kisses to you, she'll parade across your phone's video screen in a scanty gym suit. She will not, however, take the gym suit off, nor will she engage in phone sex with you. Vivienne is not that kind of girl. You can try all your fancy moves on her, if you like, but she's equipped with a number of gambits to use in fending off your advances, you heavy-breathing pervert, you. Although she won't let herself get drawn into anything seriously erotic, Vivienne does engage in a certain degree of badinage that can be usefully instructive to young men who are, shall we say, a bit backward in conversing with actual flesh-and-blood women. Draw her into a conversation on some intimate boy-and-girl matter and her extensive data-base will provide you with an elaborate rehearsal for the real thing, if moving on from virtual romance to something more corporeal is among your ambitions.