Analog SFF, December 2005 Read online

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  Analog SFF, December 2005

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.com

  Copyright ©2005 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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  CONTENTS

  Editorial by Stanley Schmidt

  Sun of Suns: Part II by Karl Schroeder

  Audubon in Atlantis by Harry Turtledove

  Do Neanderthals Know? by Robert J. Howe

  A Christmas in Amber by Scott William Carter

  Hotel Security by Carl Frederick

  The Slow Ones by Larry Niven

  Testosterone Replacement: Beyond Viagra to Successful Aging by Fran Van Cleave

  The Alternate View by John G. Cramer

  Brass Tacks: Letters From Our Readers

  Upcoming Events by Anthony Lewis

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  December 2005: Vol. CXXV No. 12

  First issue of Astounding®

  January 1930

  Dell Magazines

  New York

  Edition Copyright © 2005

  by Dell Magazines,

  a division of Crosstown Publications

  Analog® is a registered trademark.

  All rights reserved worldwide.

  All stories in Analog are fiction.

  Any similarities are coincidental.

  Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  (Astounding) ISSN 1059-2113 is pub—lished monthly except for combined

  January/February and July/August double issues.

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  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Assistant Editor

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Shirley Chan Levi: Astnt Art Director

  Abigail Browning: Sub-Rights & Mktg

  Peter Kanter: Publisher & President

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  Editorial

  by Stanley Schmidt

  Occasionally I get letters complaining that stories and articles in Analog have become “too political.” Even though it doesn't happen often, it raises an important question that probably deserves periodic reexamination: just what is the proper role of politics in a science fiction magazine?

  I must begin with a couple of wry observations. “Too much politics” seems to mean, with few if any exceptions, “too much politics different from mine.” I can't recall ever getting a letter from anyone saying, “I'm a conservative and your magazine is too full of conservative propaganda” or “I'm a liberal and your magazine is too full of liberal propaganda.” It's always “I'm a conservative and your magazine is too full of liberal propaganda” or “I'm a liberal and your magazine is too full of conservative propaganda.” And we do get both—sometimes about the same story or article. Either accusation is pretty ridiculous, of course, when you consider, for example, the amount of emphasis our writers often place on individual responsibility (often regarded as a “conservative” trait) and also on individual rights and freedoms (often regarded as “liberal"). The fact is that we're not here to push any one ideology, but to explore a wide range of ideas and viewpoints, some of which can be considered political.

  “Politics,” of course, has at least two main categories of meanings. One is the real-world, real-time business of actively campaigning for or against specific politicians and policies. The other is the more abstract, general kind, dealing with principles of governing a society as they might apply at any time, present or future—what The American Heritage Dictionary defines as “The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society” and Webster's Third New International Dictionary as “A branch of ethics concerned with the state or social organism as a whole rather than the individual person; a division of moral philosophy dealing with the ethical relations and duties of governments or other social organizations."

  The first category, campaigning for policies and politicians, is almost always impractical and inappropriate for a magazine like Analog, and we almost never do it, if only because of lead time. Our production methods are necessarily geared to economy, not speed, and it takes a minimum of four or five months to get anything into print. If we tried to do up-to-the-minute commentary on truly current events, those events would usually be fairly old history and our comments rendered obsolete before they could be read. For that reason we almost never deal specifically with the hot topics of the moment, or name names, except as illustrations of more broadly applicable principles.

  Yes, I know there are, rarely, apparent exceptions. To save you the trouble of writing to point them out, I will confess right up front that I did mention James Watt when he had just become Secretary of the Interior in the early ‘80s and was pushing irreversibly destructive environmental policies; and just a couple of years ago I advocated support of President Bush's reelection-year manned space initiative (or something like it) whether or not you agreed with his general political stance. In those particular instances, the issues involved had arisen in an early stage of a regime and were likely to remain relevant for even longer than our lead time—and, more important, they illustrated general considerations that would remain important long after Watt and Bush had passed into history. (Many of the comments in my “Watt” editorial, for instance, are again acutely pertinent as I write this 24 years later.)

  The second kind of “politics” and “political” is and has long been one of the central concerns of science fiction—and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The first purpose of science fiction, the one to which all else is subordinate, is to entertain the readers; but there are lots of ways to do that. Certainly imagining interesting gadgets and worlds is an important part of the process, but most readers (or at least most Analog readers) now want that plus more. They want their thoughts provoked.

  John W. Campbell, Jr., is commonly and justly credited with revolutionizing the field of science fiction when he took over the editorship of this magazine (then called Astounding) in the late 1930s. An important part of the way he did that was an increased emphasis on using real science in the stories, accurately extrapolating the implications of what was already known or imagining new kinds of science that might conceivably be discovered in the future without contradicting what was already known. Perhaps even more important was an increased emphasis on how discoveries and inventions might affect human lives, rather than on the mere novelty of the ideas themselves. Where an earlier writer might have been content to imagine the automobile before it existed, Campbell would want him to imagine the interstate expressway system
, drive-in theaters, suburban sprawl and shopping malls, licensing systems and the insurance business.

  You will note from that example that an important part of imagining how new science and technology affects human life involves such questions as how the consequences of inventions and discoveries should be regulated and funded, and how they might be used or abused by government itself. Readers complaining about our consideration of such questions as if it were new might benefit from a reminder that Campbell himself explicitly recognized them as an important concern of science fiction quite early. In his introduction to The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (published in 1952 and still worth careful reading) he wrote:

  “Science fiction is the literature of the Technological Era. It, unlike other literatures, assumes that change is the natural order of things, that there are goals ahead larger than those we know. That the motto of the technical civilization is true: ‘There must be a better way of doing this!'

  “'This,’ however, doesn't refer solely to gadgets and machines. Only in its early childhood did science fiction consider that facet solely, or even primarily. ‘This’ is a method of living together; a method of government, a method of thinking, or a method of human relations. Machines and gadgets aren't the end and the goal; they are the means to the true goal, which is a better way of living with each other and with ourselves."

  Computers and the internet, for example, have already had a huge impact on how people live, do business, and interact at every level. (I recently attended the wedding of a niece who met her husband in an online chat room.) We can see, if only dimly, a multitude of ways that that pervasive influence is likely to grow even greater, not just by degrees, but by leaps and bounds. Surely it is the business of science fiction, and science fiction writers writing nonfiction about the subjects they consider in their stories, to try to imagine where those leaps might take us, whether exhilarating heights or bottomless pits. It is likewise the business of science fiction writers to consider, for example, how and whether future space programs should be financed and regulated, and how they should be divided between manned and unmanned programs. Or whether and how stem cell research and cloning, human or otherwise, should be done. And so on.

  For that matter, even though psychology and sociology are (at least so far) less rigorously predictive than the “hard” sciences, they are surely areas in which we need and can hope to find answers. None of the many social or governmental systems tried by our species in the past has been perfect; why shouldn't science fiction writers try to imagine others that might serve us better in the future, and “try them out” on paper?

  That's what authors try to do here; that's the meaning of Analog in our title. Campbell changed the name in 1960 in part because he thought Astounding sounded too sensational for what he and the authors were actually doing in its pages, and he wanted the new title to more accurately reflect the content. He thought of each story as an analog simulation of a possible future, a way to try out a way things might change and explore the likely consequences on paper before doing it in the real world, where real people might get hurt.

  But how do writers decide which possibilities to explore? At least one person has said that all science fiction, no matter when and where it is ostensibly set, is really about the present—the world in which the writer is writing. I think that's too strong a statement; at least some futures are imagined not because of the author's angst du jour, but simply because someone, perhaps in a moment of whimsical thinking about “What if?,” happened to think of a possibility with implications that would be fun to play with. But it's surely true that what's happening around writers, and what they care about, will often influence what kinds of problems they'll inflict on their characters, and what kinds of problems they'll ponder when they're writing nonfiction.

  If many writers feel that the future is threatened by a dumbing-down of education by ultraliberal educators who think self-esteem is more important than competence, or the future of science by religious ultraconservatives who think they should redefine “science” for everybody, it is both unsurprising and reasonable that writers will explore the possible consequences of such trends. In the same way, it is natural that they explore the implications of new biology, whether they feel threatened by the “inhumanity” of cloning or the shortsightedness of narrow restrictions on stem-cell research. Or that some writers explore the dangers of withdrawing from space (as I did in “The Unreachable Stars,” back in 1971), or of using new information technology to wield excessive government control—or failing to use it to keep terrorists in check.

  Some will claim that there is no point in spending too much time or thought worrying about trends that look dangerous, because history is full of pendulum swings between extremes and most of these things will just be blips. Yes, it is, and most of them will—but some of them won't. Hitler's Germany was a pendulum that swung right off its mount. Why does that sometimes happen even though usually it doesn't? Well, you have to remember why the social pendulum swings. Basically (as I discussed at greater length in my editorial “Pendulums” in September 1985), it's the same reason a physical pendulum swings: when it's deflected from its equilibrium position, there's a restoring force that tries to pull it back. For a physical pendulum, the restoring force is provided by gravity as the bob is raised farther above its midpoint; for a mass on a spring, the restoring force comes from the elasticity of the spring, where the force required to stretch it a given distance is proportional to the distance. In each case, the bigger the deflection, the bigger the restoring force.

  For the social pendulum, the restoring force comes from part of the population reacting against what they see as growing extremism by another part, and trying harder and harder to pull things back to normal. If nobody bothers to react because everyone just assumes that history is a series of pendulum swings, there's no restoring force and the pendulum doesn't swing. Instead, the current extremism grows out of control, possibly doing irreversible damage to the society. Those social pendulum swings don't occur spontaneously for no reason; they occur because part of the society provides a restoring force that gets stronger as things get farther from “normal.” So it's essential that when people see what they think of as a dangerous trend, they react against it. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Sun of Suns: Part II

  by Karl Schroeder

  People can adapt to a very wide range of circumstances, but one thing remains constant: they must usually act on incomplete knowledge.

  The story so far...

  Imagine sky with no earth: clouds dot the blue, receding to infinity in all directions. To one side a distant sun casts its light across hundreds of miles, sending shafts of shadow radiating from the clouds that surround it. Opposite it, the blue fades to black. There is no gravity here—rocks twirl and balls of water undulate in the chill air. Spinning in the middle distance is a wooden wheel two hundred feet in diameter, its inside surface paved with buildings. And inside one of these buildings, young Hayden Griffin is sulking.

  Hayden is oblivious to the strange beauty that surrounds him. He's lived his whole life here in Virga and is unsurprised at a world where you have to make your own light, heat, and gravity. Virga is a fullerene balloon five thousand miles in diameter, filled with air, tumbling rocks, and water—about a Pluto's worth of volatiles. This artificial habitat orbits alone in the outskirts of the Vega star system; but Hayden knows nothing of that. He's spent his entire young life focused on the political struggles of his own nation, Aerie, in its fight against invading forces from the migratory country of Slipstream.

  Hayden's mother is part of a secret project being undertaken here on the edge of darkness. She is part of a resistance group fighting for Aerie's independence. Since Slipstream destroyed Aerie's nuclear fusion sun ten years ago, Aerie has been utterly dependent on Slipstream for light and he
at. An engineer, Hayden's mother has come here to the cold edge of Winter to build a new sun for Aerie.

  An ominous note enters the ordinary day: it is the sound of approaching jet engines. Hayden runs outside in time to see a fleet of Slipstream warships approaching. The secret project has been discovered. Soon the air is full of snarling jets, each can-shaped engine surmounted by a saddle and gun-toting rider. Dogfights surround the town and the glittering, half-built sun floating a mile away. Determined to help his mother and the resistance, Hayden impulsively mounts one of the town's jets (which are called bikes) and dives into the conflict. He is too young to control the massive bike, however, and it crashes into an approaching warship.

  As Hayden spins helplessly into the unlit airs of Winter, he sees the new Aerie sun explode, with his mother inside.

  Time: eight years later. Place: the city of Rush, capital of Slipstream. Venera Fanning, wife of the admiral of Slipstream, enters the ladies’ lounge of the admiralty, leaving her manservant outside. This is one of the meeting places for the spy network she runs. The men she meets show her some photographs that indicate a military buildup in the neighboring nation of Falcon Formation. Disturbed, Venera goes to warn her husband.

  Her manservant is none other than Hayden Griffin. He has infiltrated the Fanning household with the intention of killing Admiral Fanning, whom he blames for his mother's death. Despite his determination, he keeps finding reasons to put off doing the deed.

  That night, there is a sneak attack on Rush while Hayden is wandering the streets of the city. Another of Slipstream's neighbors, Mavery, is blamed—but Venera and her husband Chaison know that Mavery is conspiring with Falcon Formation. The trouble is, they can't convince the government, which has decided to send the Slipstream fleet into Mavery. With the fleet distracted, Falcon will mount an attack on Slipstream. If they are to save Slipstream, they will have to do something themselves—something audacious.