Asimov's SF, January 2012 Read online

  -----------------------------------

  Asimov's SF, January 2012

  by Dell Magazine Authors

  -----------------------------------

  Science Fiction

  * * *

  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2012 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.

  * * *

  Cover Art by Michael Whelan

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: CENTERING SCIENCE FICTION by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: RARE EARTHS, GETTING RARER by Robert Silverberg

  Department: ON THE NET: SON OF EBOOKS, THE NEXT GENERATION, VOL. III by James Patrick Kelly

  Novelette: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN by Paul McAuley

  Short Story: RECYCLABLE MATERIAL by Katherine Marzinsky

  Poetry: TRAIN DELAYS ON THE SOUTH CENTRAL LINE by Fiona Moore

  Short Story: MAIDEN VOYAGE by Jack McDevitt

  Poetry: SEEING ONESELF by Robert Frazier

  Short Story: THE WAR IS OVER AND EVERYONE WINS by Zachary Jernigan

  Short Story: THE BURST by C.W. Johnson

  Short Story: FRIENDLESSNESS by Eric Del Carlo

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Novella: IN THE HOUSE OF ARYAMAN, A LONELY SIGNAL BURNS by Elizabeth Bear

  Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  Department: TWENTY-SIXTH ANNUAL READERS’ AWARD

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  * * * *

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 36, No. 1. Whole No. 431, January 2012. 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 $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (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, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2011 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. Please visit our website, www.asimovs.com, for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual 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 Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3.

  * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * *

  ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION

  Sheila Williams: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Emily Hockaday: Editorial Administrative Assistant

  Jayne Keiser: Typesetting Director

  Suzanne Lemke: Assistant Typesetting Manager

  Kevin Doris: Senior Typesetter

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Cindi Tiberi: Production Artist

  Laura Tulley: Senior Production Manager

  Jennifer Cone: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

  Bruce W. Sherbow: Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing

  Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services

  Advertising Representative

  Robin DiMeglio: Advertising Sales Manager

  Phone: (203) 866-6688 ext. 180

  Fax: (203) 854-5962

  [email protected]

  (Display and Classified Advertising)

  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Vice President, Editorial and Product Development

  Susan Mangan: Vice President, Design and Production

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

  * * * *

  Stories from Asimov's have won 51 Hugos and 27 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

  * * * *

  Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them online at www.asimovs.com or send a self-addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope, and a note requesting this information. Write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic submissions, but the address for manual submissions and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

  * * *

  Department: EDITORIAL: CENTERING SCIENCE FICTION

  by Sheila Williams

  Last month, I promised to follow up my editorial on one of the roads not taken in my life with an editorial about the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The Center serves as an umbrella for a variety of science fiction programs available at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Although officially founded in 1982 by James Gunn, the CSSF actually traces its beginnings back to 1970. That was when Jim's first course in science fiction was offered at KU. Those early courses are the ones I longed to enroll in as a graduating high school senior. While I'm sure they would have been wonderful, the diversity of programs at KU has exploded in the intervening years.

  The Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction was launched in 1975 and became an annual event in 1977. In the early days, Jim brought in three visiting writers: Gordon R. Dickson, Theodore Sturgeon, and Frederik Pohl, and they became fixed parts of the program for a number of years. In 1985, Jim, with Fred as a visiting author, began offering an intensive writers workshop.

  The Center, which had begun presenting the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best SF novel of the year at the first annual Campbell Conference and Awards Banquet in 1979, added the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short story to its roster in 1987. In 1996, the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and the CSSF created the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  In 2004, The Hall of Fame moved to the EMP Museum in Seattle, Washington, but the Center continued to foment new ideas and programs. In 2005, the Center started AboutSF, “a resource to help educators and librarians better understand and teach science fiction.” This educational outreach program offers reading guides, teaching kits, and sample projects. It provides a conduit for finding guest speakers and links to lectures and interviews, as well as a myriad of other helpful tools. Benjamin Cartwright, a Ph.D. candidate at KU, is the program's current coordinator. Information on this invaluable program can be found at Aboutsf.com.

  The English and technical writing departments continue to offer semester-long courses in science fiction. The intensive science fiction
literature course, which is invaluable to students of science fiction and academics who intend to teach courses about SF, is now a two-week course that runs on either side of the Campbell conference. The yearly focus alternates between the novel and the short story, but beginning in 2012, the Institute will also be available as a full-semester course, alternating with the prior summer's SF Institute topic. This means that while the 2012 Institute's summer focus will be on the novel, the fall course will be on the short story. In the summer of 2013, the intensive course will be about the short story and the fall course will concentrate on the novel. This course is also available online for teachers who cannot attend the class on campus.

  July is a hot month for SF in Kansas. Although James Gunn retired from directing the short story workshop in 2010, he still drops in to “meet with workshoppers and offer words of writing wisdom.” Chris McKitterick, an author and one of Jim's former students, began co-teaching the workshop in 1996. He is now the director of the CSSF. Chris teaches many of the courses on SF at KU and he and guest author Bradley C. Denton lead the workshop. Another former student of Jim's is the Nebula- and Hugo-Award-winning author Kij Johnson. Kij co-taught the workshop from 1996 until 2002. Since 2002, she has offered her own science fiction and fantasy novel writers workshop during the same two-week period.

  KU's bookstore, Jayhawk Ink, gets into the act with their annual Sci Fi July Book Signings and Readings. Visitors can have works signed by noted authors and editors and then stick around for three or four hours of invigorating readings. The event is free and open to the public. This summer, readers presented some of the works of Frederik Pohl. The affair's exquisite poster, which incorporated classic art from an old SF magazine cover, was designed by Laura Fisk.

  I got a taste of what was going on in Lawrence during my visit to the Campbell Conference, but more information about these classes, workshops, and events can be found at sfcenter.ku.edu. Anyone familiar with the science fiction field knows that there are a number of terrific writers workshops. Still, it's remarkable to think that most of the exciting activity at the University of Kansas owes its inception to one man's vision and dedication. Science fiction is richer for James Gunn's guiding influence, and I was lucky that I had the chance to spend some time with him this summer and to see firsthand the world that he has set in motion.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: REFLECTIONS: RARE EARTHS, GETTING RARER

  by Robert Silverberg

  About four years ago I did a column for this magazine about our vanishing supplies of certain scarce elements that are essential to the functioning of our technological society. This quote from it will give you the idea:

  It isn't just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

  Copper and zinc are well-known elements, but gallium, hafnium, and indium are unfamiliar names, esoteric members of the periodic table. They are used in making the liquid-crystal displays of flat-screen television sets, the control rods for nuclear reactors, and computer chips, and we will be hard pressed to do without them. But there is another group of elements that have even stranger names—the so-called “rare earths,” the fourteen metals that occupy the 58th through 71st rungs in the list of elements, plus three more, elements 21, 39, and 57, that are usually included with them. Praseodymium? Ytterbium? Lutetium? Dysprosium? The names don't run trippingly from the tongue. All of us can name dozens of the 92 natural elements—gold, silver, lead, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and on and on. Uranium! Oxygen! Iron! But—Thulium? Erbium? Promethium? Not exactly household words. And they, too, are essential to our technological society.

  They aren't all that rare. Nineteenth-century chemists dubbed them “rare earths” because it was difficult then to extract them in pure form. In fact, the rare earth cerium is the 25th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, less rare on our planet than tin, thulium is as plentiful as gold or silver, and most of the others are reasonably abundant. Only radioactive promethium is truly rare, because it has a half-life of 17.7 years and keeps using itself up. The trouble is that these elements are found only in a few select places on Earth, and extracting them from those places is a messy and environmentally dangerous business; the ores are very closely entangled with the radioactive element thorium, which makes them hard to refine, and because of that geographical fluke and the thorium problem we are facing a critical shortage of them.

  China, for example, produces 99 percent of the world's supply of the rare earth dysprosium, which is used in those wiggly looking fluorescent light bulbs that our legislators want to make mandatory, and in the sleek little smartphones that almost everyone carries these days. Rare earths are also used in laser-guided weapons and hybrid-car batteries, portable X-ray machines, welding goggles, self-cleaning ovens, and many another twenty-first-century specialty. China also controls 92 percent of the cerium and lanthanum supply, elements needed in the manufacture of a great many useful devices. The latter two rare earths, and some others, come mainly from an unusual geological formation running across China's southern provinces of Jiangxi and Guandong, the only known deposit of them in the world that is not contaminated with radioactive thorium. These are the “light” rare earths, those with lower atomic numbers. The main supply of dysprosium and others in the group of “heavy” rare earths is found in a desert region near Baotou in northern China.

  China maintains tight export controls over these prized substances, thereby keeping their prices high, and sometimes cuts off shipment of them entirely for political reasons, as it did in September 2010, when it banned all rare-earth exports to Japan for two months during a territorial squabble. (And kept close watch over other countries’ reshipment of rare earths to Japan to make sure that the Japanese electronics industry suffered properly from the shortage.) Rare earth ores are also found in South Africa, India, Brazil, even California; China has only a third of the world's ore reserves. But mining the deposits of rare earths in places other than China is complicated by the fact that such mining involves the creation of vast quantities of toxic radioactive waste, and China seems much more willing to incur such environmental damage than, say, the United States. Thus the entire world is dependent on China's whims for its supply of these vital elements.

  Of course, when a rare and desirable commodity is kept under government control like this, smuggling is an inevitable consequence, even in a tightly regulated country like China. It's been estimated that close to half the world's supply of heavy rare earths is illegally exported from China, and one seventh of the light rare earths. The Chinese government is, naturally, distressed by this. In the north, at Baotou, it has begun to discourage smuggling by putting up electrified fences around the dysprosium mines. Preventing illegal rare-earth traffic in the southern provinces has been more difficult, because a wild, lawless atmosphere prevails down there and local officials are thought to collude with crime syndicates to carry out illicit strip-mining and refining of the substances. Late in 2010, therefore, the central government announced that it was placing the southern mines under national authority. The ostensible reason was environmental protection—even though radioactive waste is not a significant issue in the south, the pirate miners were ruining the landscape in other ways, flagrantly ripping up hillsides and dumping acid-rich mine taiLings into local streams and rivers—but the chief effect of the takeover was to give the Chinese government absolute control over these valuable mineral deposits. Whereupon China's tight export restrictions on the rare earths became even tighter.

 
What to do? How to assure a steady flow of rare earths to the factories of the western world?

  President Obama took the issue up with President Hu Jintao of China during Hu's visit to Washington in 2010, but was unable to extract any sort of rare-earth trade agreement from him. The administration has also appealed to the World Trade Organization, asserting that China is illegally limiting its rare-earth exports in order to stimulate its sales of green-technology apparatus, in which several rare earths are used. (The WTO prohibits export quotas that are designed to favor the exporting nation's own industries.) Since China claims that its mining of rare earths has to be restricted because it does environmental damage, environmentalists find themselves in an odd conflict on that point: protecting the environment in China brings about a reduction in the supply of equipment used in cleaning up other parts of the world.

  Meanwhile everybody is stockpiling rare earths against the day when no more exist to be mined, China included, and that makes current supplies even scarcer. China wants to build a stockpile of one hundred thousand metric tons of various strategically important rare earths. Japan and South Korea are amassing reserves also, and the U.S. is talking about a similar project. This hoarding, by itself, is driving the price of these much-craved elements even higher.

  One compensating factor is the current construction in Malaysia by Lycas, a giant Australian mining company, of a huge plant for refining rare-earth ore—the first such facility to be built in almost thirty years. Malaysia has already had a bad experience with rare-earth refining: its last refinery, operated by the Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, left an enormous radioactive wasteland all around it that has required an immense cleanup program. The new plant will make use of advanced refining technology that Lycas hopes will minimize the local environmental hazards the process entails. Malaysia was so eager for the new refinery that it offered Lycas a twelve-year tax holiday. Perhaps, when it is in production, it will mitigate the current shortages somewhat. And in the United States, a company called Molycorp intends to mine and refine rare earths near Death Valley, where the environment is pretty bleak already. Molycorp knows that it must avoid turning the area into the sort of toxic wasteland that surrounds the Chinese rare-earth facilities, and thinks that it can. Programs are under way, also, to recycle rare earths from defunct electronic gizmos—Japan alone sees hundreds of thousands of tons of these objects as reclaimable.