Asimov's SF, December 2011 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, December 2011

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

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  Copyright ©2011 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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  Cover Art by Duncan Long

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: SLIDING DOORS by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE PATAGONIAN GIANTS by Robert Silverberg

  Novelette: SURF by Suzanne Palmer

  Novelette: STRAWBERRY BIRDIES by Pamela Sargent

  Short Story: THE LIST by Tim McDaniel

  Novelette: EPHEMERA by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Short Story: THE COUNTABLE by Ken Liu

  Short Story: “RUN,” BAKRI SAYS by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Novella: ALL ABOUT EMILY by Connie Willis

  Department: ON BOOKS by Peter Heck

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 35, No. 12. Whole No. 431, December 2011. 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.

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  ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION

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

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  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.

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  Department: EDITORIAL: SLIDING DOORS

  by Sheila Williams

  The University of Kansas in Lawrence has always seemed like a slightly mythological place to me. Although I'd traveled the Eastern Seaboard with my family, I reached my late teens without ever having been west of Pennsylvania. When it came time to look for a college or university, my mother had her heart set on two Western Massachusetts schools and my guidance counselor suggested a small liberal arts college hundreds of miles away in Western New York, but I thought I might go to Kansas and study science fiction with the even more mythological entity, James Gunn.

  James Gunn had authored The Listeners. A book I'd treasured and reread. I'd given it to my (Unitarian) minister to read and shelved it alongside the works of Samuel Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and Roger Zelazny—all writers who'd made deep impressions upon my teenage mind. My father had tried to introduce me to Professor Gunn at a Worldcon, but I'd been way too terrified to talk to someone I so much admired.

  As it turned out, I batted five hundred with college acceptances. To my relief, I did not get into the local schools. While these rejections broke my mother's heart, they meant that I was free to follow Horace Greeley's advice—at least a little of the way. I was deeply torn between my two choices. As one of the shyest seniors ever to contemplate going off to college, I was warned that I'd be lost at a large university. I was reassured that I would blossom at a small school. Though I was still wavering, the final blow came when someone planted the fear that I might not even get into the SF course at KU.

  So I turned my back on the Jayhawks and went to a small liberal arts college in Elmira, New York. Wonderful things happened there. I founded the science fiction club, just as I had in high school, and got to interview Gene Roddenberry for the school newspaper. I met supportive college teachers and even got to take a course in SF from two science profs. Then, after a series of adventures, I became the editor of this magazine. Still, I've often wondered what path my career would have taken if I'd chosen the other road.

  I managed to get to Kansas once or twice, and finally met and even published Jim Gunn, but I'd never found the ruby slippers that would take me to the University of Kansas. Then, on June 1 of this year, Jim sent me a personal invitation to the annual Campbell Conference. The John W. Campbell Memorial Award for SF novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for short story are bestowed at the conference. A couple of Asimov's stories from 2010—Steve Rasnic Tem's “A Letter from the Emperor” and Geoffrey A. Landis's “The Sultan of the Clouds"—were on the Sturgeon Award ballot and Jim thought it would be ni
ce if I could be there for the ceremony.

  I was delighted to accept Jim's invitation. Having become reacquainted with the college atmosphere while touring schools with my seventen-year-old daughter during the past year, I felt at home the moment I set foot on the KU campus. I arrived on Thursday, July 7, and was almost immediately whisked off to Watson Library for a special presentation.

  After a lovely reception, Noel Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon's daughter and trustee of the Sturgeon Literary Trust collection, announced that the definitive collection of Theodore Sturgeon's books, papers, manuscripts, and correspondence had been bestowed on KU's Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Guests at the reception were allowed to peruse correspondence between Ted Sturgeon and writers like Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Ted Sturgeon suffered from long periods of writer's block, and one long letter from Robert Heinlein was filled with wonderful story ideas that he was gifting to his friend.

  After the festivities, I revisited my college days as a biker's girlfriend (if my boyfriend's 250cc possibly counted as a motorcycle) by accepting a ride to a local restaurant on the back of Chris McKitterick's scooter. Chris is a writer and the director of KU's Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The center was founded by James Gunn, and it is the nexus for all the amazing SF workshops, classes, and conferences that take place at the university. I'll go into more detail about the SF programs at KU in next month's editorial.

  The Campbell Conference is held under the center's aegis and the next evening I attended the conference's award ceremony and banquet. Noel presented the Sturgeon Award to Geoff Landis, who attended the conference with his wife, Mary Turzillo. Writer and scholar Elizabeth Anne Hull presented the Campbell Award to Ian McDonald for his novel The Dervish House. Other participants and guests at the conference included Kij Johnson, Robin Wayne Bailey, and Bradley Denton.

  While nurturing writers like Kij, Chris, and Brad, as well as John Kessel, Pat Cadigan, and many others, James Gunn established a vibrant home for the study of science fiction. I'd love to go back to Lawrence and spend a lot more time among the collections. In addition to Ted Sturgeon's letters, I could wend my way through the papers of Brian Aldiss, Algis Budrys, Cordwainer Smith, and A.E. Van Vogt. I could spend hours in the center's own SF library and sit in on some of the classes and workshops. It's too bad I don't have nearly enough time to pick up a Ph.D. in science fiction.

  In the alternate universe where I slid open the door that led to the University of Kansas when I was seventeen, I'm sure I studied SF with Jim. I had adventures and I blossomed. I'm almost certainly active in the field of science fiction today. Perhaps I'm even the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE PATAGONIAN GIANTS

  by Robert Silverberg

  A few months ago I wrote about Sir John Mandeville, the lively fourteenth-century writer whose book of travels told many a tale of purported wonders in far corners of the earth: cannibals thirty feet high, and men without heads who had their eyes in their shoulders, and the like. Mandeville, who may never have seen any of the world beyond western Europe, was essentially a medieval fantasist, writing at a time when little of our planet had been properly explored. His purpose may simply have been to entertain. But what can one say about a real explorer who comes back from afar and tells us a tall tale of Mandevillean wonders that he claims to have encountered in his voyaging?

  Consider, if you will, the case of the Patagonian giants—a tall tale in the most literal sense—that kept Europeans buzzing for nearly three hundred years. It originated with Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian gentleman who sailed with Magellan on his pioneering voyage of circumnavigation in 1519 and was the official chronicler of the expedition. In June 1520, Pigafetta wrote, when the explorers were traveling in high latitudes along the eastern coast of what is now called South America, they came upon a strange figure of colossal size “singing and dancing on the sand.” Magellan sent some men ashore to inspect him. “This man,” we are told, “was so tall that our heads hardly came up to his belt. He was well formed; his face was broad and colored with red, excepting that his eyes were surrounded with yellow.” Pigafetta estimated his height at about eight feet. Magellan gave him some bells, a comb, and a pair of glass beads. This encouraged other giants to appear—eventually eighteen in all, including some females, also gigantic in size. Magellan captured several to take back to Spain as curiosities, but they died soon afterward aboard his ships.

  Pigafetta's account of the giants, whom Magellan called patagones, meaning “big feet,” caused a great sensation in Europe, creating far more commotion than the successful circumnavigation itself, and thereafter every expedition to that part of the world—the name “Patagonia” having become attached to the place where they dwelled—made a point of looking for the Patagonian giants, with highly variable results.

  Sir Francis Drake, the second circumnavigating voyager, saw them too in 1578, although the first account of the journey, published fifty years later, asserts that they were seven and a half feet tall at most. A Spanish captain, Pedro Sarmiento, claimed to see giants in the same area in 1580, according to the not entirely trustworthy historian of his voyage. An equally unreliable narrator, Anthony Knyvet, who accompanied the circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish in 1592, wrote of two Patagonians twelve feet tall, and a boy whose height was over nine feet. Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, two Dutch circumnavigators, touched down in Patagonia in 1615 and found some graves made of heaped stones, one of which they opened and saw within it “the bones of human beings ten and eleven feet in stature.” And there were other similar reports.

  On the other hand, Sir John Narborough, who spent ten months on the Patagonian coast in 1670, found no giants: “The natives,” he declared, “are not taller than generally Englishmen are.” Seventy years later, another British expedition concluded that the Patagonians “are people of a middle stature . . . tall and well-made, being in general from five to six feet high.” But the older tales of giants persisted, and some theories had it that Patagonia was inhabited by two races, one gigantic, the other of normal size.

  One of the purposes of Commodore John Byron's circumnavigation of 1764-66 was to secure more information about these people. We are now well along in the eighteenth century, definitely a post-medieval era, and it is reasonable to think that Byron, a tough, experienced skipper nicknamed “Foul-Weather Jack” who was the grandfather of the poet, would have brought back reliable information. But in fact the various accounts left the situation more confused than ever.

  The first news to come from the Byron expedition was contained in a letter to the minister in charge of British naval affairs, Lord Egmont, that Byron wrote from Patagonia and carried with him to London when he returned in May 1756. In it he called the Patagonians “people who in size come the nearest to giants of any people I believe in the world.” He did not specify any heights. But an article in the Gentleman's Magazine published two days after his return asserted that they were eight and a half feet tall, and the London Chronicle, three months later, said, “We are informed that the giants found by Commodore Byron measured from eight feet and one half to ten feet in height, and every way stout in proportion. The men's feet measured eighteen inches.”

  There was great furor everywhere. The French, then locked in bitter maritime rivalry with England, insisted the tale was a hoax designed to distract attention from the fact that the British were exploring those regions in preparation for an attack on French possessions in the New World—not an implausible idea, since England was already organizing a new expedition under the command of Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret for approximately that purpose. In 1767, the London Chronicle reported that Wallis and Carteret, following Byron's route, had encountered “some thousands” of giants, ranging in height from seven to eight feet. And in 1768 Charles Clarke, who had sailed as a midshipman with Byron, published an account
that said of the Patagonians, “Some of them are certainly nine feet, if they do not exceed it. The commodore, who is very near six feet, could but just reach the top of one of their heads, which he attempted on tip-toe. . . . There was hardly a man there less than eight feet, most of them considerably more; the women, I believe, run from seven and a half to eight.” Another account of the voyage, published anonymously in 1767 and credited to one of Byron's officers, was embellished by a striking picture of an English sailor standing beside a gigantic Patagonian couple: the Englishman seems no bigger than a child, barely waist-high next to them, and the huge woman carries a baby of immense size in her arms.

  It was British policy then to impound the journals of its explorers and turn them over to professional writers to prepare for publication. Thus in 1773 appeared an account by John Hawkesworth dealing with the voyages of Byron, Car-teret, and Wallis, and a later one by Captain James Cook. Here Byron is made to say of one Patagonian, “He was of gigantic nature, and seemed to realize the tales of monsters in human shape. . . . I did not measure him, but if I may judge of his height by the proportion of his stature to my own, it could not be much less than seven feet.”

  Very tall, yes, but not quite nine to twelve feet, and perhaps not worthy of the descriptive terms Hawkesworth inserted into Byron's journal: “This frightful colossus . . . These enormous goblins.” And Hawkesworth's version of Wallis’ journal offered a more conservative report: “As I had two measuring rods with me, we went round and measured those that appeared to be tallest among them. One of these was six feet seven inches high, several more were six feet five and six feet six inches; but the stature of the greater part of them was from five feet ten to six feet.”

  The full unraveling of the myth of the Patagonian giants—and that is what it was, of course, a myth—took a little longer, though. A French expedition under Louis de Bougainville made a point of looking for the giants: “We made contact with these so-famous Patagonians and found them to be no taller . . . than other men.” There did seem to be a great many who were six feet tall and taller, much bigger than the average European of that era, but these were hardly colossi. Later explorers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century reported the same thing—tall people, yes, but not really giants.