Asimov's SF, July 2006 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, July 2006

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

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  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

  July 2006

  Vol. 30 No. 7 (Whole Number 366)

  Cover Art by Alan Bean

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  NOVELETTES

  THE WORLD AND ALICE by L. TIMMEL DUCHAMP

  THE DJINN'S WIFE by IAN MCDONALD

  SHORT STORIES

  NANO COMES TO CLIFFORD FALLS by NANCY KRESS

  YOU WILL GO TO THE MOON by WILLIAM PRESTON

  BITTERSEED by TED KOSMATKA

  IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS by TIM PRATT

  SNAIL STONES by PAUL MELKO

  FIREFLIES by KATHE KOJA

  DEPARTMENTS

  EDITORIAL: MOON DAY by SHEILA WILLIAMS

  REFLECTIONS: THE THUMB ON THE DINOSAUR'S NOSE by ROBERT SILVERBERG

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: PRESERVING THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE by THERESE LITTLETON

  SUDOKU CONTEST RESULTS—SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU by DOMINIC J. VITACCO & LYLE WIEDEMAN

  ON BOOKS by PAUL DI FILIPPO

  THE SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by ERWIN S. STRAUSS

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 30, No. 7. Whole No. 366, July 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. © 2006 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: MOON DAY by SHEILA WILLIAMS

  REFLECTIONS: THE THUMB ON THE DINOSAUR'S NOSE by Robert Silverberg

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: PRESERVING THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE—AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF THE SCIENCE FICTION MUSEUM AND HALL OF FAME by THERESE LITTLETON

  NANO COMES TO CLIFFORD FALLS by NANCY KRESS

  YOU WILL GO TO THE MOON by William Preston

  THE WORLD AND ALICE by L. Timmel Duchamp

  BITTERSEED by Ted Kosmatka

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU CONTEST RESULTS

  IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS by Tim Pratt

  SNAIL STONES by Paul Melko

  FIREFLIES by Kathe Koja

  THE DJINN'S WIFE by Ian McDonald

  ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  SF CONVENENTIONAL CALENDAR

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU SOLUTION

  NEXT ISSUE

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  Asimov's Science Fiction

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  EDITORIAL: MOON DAY

  by SHEILA WILLIAMS

  Howard Waldrop, in his story “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance?” (Asimov's SF, August 1988) reminds us that in 1969 Richard Nixon took office and the Vietnam war raged. Abbey Road was released late in the year, Woodstock occurred that summer, and the disastrous Altamont Race Track concert took place in December. Slaughterhouse Five was published, Charles Manson, The Weathermen, The Black Panthers, and NOW were in the news, and, on July 20, we landed on the Moon. Later in the story, which is about the twentieth reunion of the class of ‘69, he adds “PS: Nobody's been to the Moon in sixteen years."

  I remember celebrating that hot summer night in 1969 with my family. I baked a chocolate cake, and we stuck my brother's model of the Eagle—the lunar landing module—and a couple of plastic astronauts on the top. I still have the photo. My mother took another picture of her four daughters lying on the floor watching TV as the Eagle landed. Nothing shows up on the screen, but I've always been struck by the image of my three-year-old sister because she fits on my mother's king-size pillow.

  Sometime around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moon landing, I decided to institute an annual celebration. My actual holiday is fluid. Depending upon my schedule, it shifts from the day the Eagle landed to the day Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the surface of the Moon. In the beginning, I always baked a chocolate cake to celebrate the day. I'd bring the cake and appropriate decorative plastic figurines to work and hold a party in my office.

  Once my older, and very opinionated, daughter gained a say in the proceedings, I had to alter the festivities slightly. Naturally, she wanted cake, too. For some reason, though, she and her fath
er are unduly fond of lemon cake (they even think this cake is a legitimate option on Valentine's Day! Thankfully, I had a second child, and, although she's only three, she votes firmly for chocolate.)

  Fortunately, I hit on a very happy solution. I bake what I call my “compromise cake.” While my first Moon cake was made from scratch, these days I never seem able to find time for such creativity. I've turned this problem to my advantage, however. I use two boxes of cake mix—one lemon and one chocolate. I make two cakes, and each cake has a lemon layer and a chocolate layer. I cover the first layer with chocolate frosting, then ice the sides with lemon. I use the rest of the lemon frosting to draw a generous half moon on top of the cake and fill in the other side with chocolate frosting. If I'm feeling really ambitious, I draw little moons around the sides of the cakes. This solution results in a cake for the office and one for home. Some wag at work is sure to helpfully inform me that I should have made cheesecake, but my patience for that joke wears thinner every year.

  In 1911, when my dad's father was six, he and his family immigrated to Springhill, Nova Scotia. Only one person in town owned a car. My grandfather spoke proudly of having lived to see the awesome technical revolution that spanned from that single car to a man walking on the Moon. I mentioned this comment to my twelve-year-old the other day in the middle of a discussion about the fast pace of change. Her father quipped, “And if you live long enough, perhaps you and your sister will see someone walk there, too.” The latest papers bring news of further cuts to NASA's budget. Compelling arguments are made for why we should focus our attention, and most of our money, on education, healthcare, levees, and other serious problems here at home.

  Still, I want to celebrate the science and the technology, the scientists and the engineers, the spirit and the adventure, and the brave astronauts and test pilots who made the initial space program possible. I want to celebrate the men and women in the public and private sectors that continue to work on space exploration. The current cover is part of that celebration. Alan Bean, the captain of the second manned mission to the Moon, and the third person to walk there, painted this portrait of Charlie Duke, a retired brigadier general, USAF, and the lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. Captain Bean also spent fifty-nine days as the spacecraft commander of the second manned mission to Skylab 3. He retired from NASA in 1981 and took up a new career as an artist. We're proud to have the chance to bring one of his visions of the Moon to you.

  You can help me create a holiday that celebrates the indomitable aspect of human nature that sent men to the Moon and continues to send brave men and women into space. Join me on July 20 or 21. You don't even have to support the space program to have fun on Moon Day or to recognize this tremendous achievement. Anyone can read a science fiction story, bake my Moon cake, or eat Chinese Moon cakes, or MoonPies, or even cheesecake. And remember, in three years, the class of ‘69 will hold its fortieth reunion.

  PS: Nobody's been to the Moon in thirty-three years.

  Copyright 2006 Sheila Williams

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  REFLECTIONS: THE THUMB ON THE DINOSAUR'S NOSE

  by Robert Silverberg

  Perhaps it's only a coincidence. But something about having the World Science Fiction Convention take place in Glasgow, Scotland, seems to bring to life the fascination with dinosaurs that I've had, on and off, since childhood. After the first Glasgow convention in 1995 I went to nearby Edinburgh and bought a dinosaur. And last summer, just before the second Glasgow event, I visited a London park where the earliest and strangest life-sized reconstructions of dinosaurs ever made have been on display for a century and a half.

  I wrote about my Edinburgh dinosaur in a column called “The Dinosaur in the Living Room” that was published in this magazine in 1996. “The dinosaur,” I said then, “is a fairly small one, as dinosaurs go. I suppose it was about the size of a cat during its pre-extinct days, and not a very large cat at that. Its name is Mesosaurus brasiliensis, which is not anything I would want to call a cat.... As I said, not one of your truly enormous dinosaurs. Distinctly sub-brontosauran, in fact: an array of delicate and elegant reptilian-looking bones still contained in the stone slab in which their fossilization had taken place, a couple of geological epochs ago. The slab, maybe two feet by three feet by three inches, was neatly displayed in the middle of the shop window, with the usual fossil-shop array of ammonites and trilobites and such deployed around it."

  We bought it. We keep it in our living room. I'm probably not the only science fiction writer who has a dinosaur in his living room (Alan Dean Foster, what about you?), but I don't currently know of any others.

  As for last summer's Glasgow-Dinosaur connection, it came about because I decided, finally, to visit Crystal Palace Park, a twenty-minute train ride south of London, where fabulous dinosaur models that I had known about for many years, but never seen, are to be found. The Crystal Palace was a spectacular structure of glass and iron, 1851 feet long, 456 feet wide, and 66 feet high, that was erected in London's Hyde Park in 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first of what we now call World's Fairs. Thirteen thousand exhibitors filled its eight hundred thousand square feet of display space with all manner of displays of arts and science. When the fair closed, the entire gigantic building was dismantled and re-erected in the London suburb of Sydenham to be the central feature of a huge amusement park. The park would also include a cricket field, a race track, a concert hall, a zoo, a boating lake—and an artificial island populated by life-sized replicas of dinosaurs.

  We modern folk, familiar with dinosaurs from childhood on, accustomed to encountering them in museums and movies and theme parks and taking them pretty much for granted by now, can barely comprehend the impact that these prehistoric monsters had on the Victorian imagination. In 1854, when the new Crystal Palace Park opened to the public, the word “dinosaur” itself was only twelve years old. Giant fossilized bones had been turning up in the course of construction work ever since the Renaissance, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that naturalists realized that they belonged to some sort of colossal reptilian creatures no longer to be found on Earth. One fossil, unearthed in England in 1822, was given the name of Megalosaurus, “giant lizard.” Soon after came one that was dubbed Iguanodon, “Iguana tooth,” because of the resemblance of its teeth to those of the familiar tropical lizards. But its discoverer calculated, comparing the size of the fossil teeth to those of the living animals, that the Iguanodon must have been seventy-five to one hundred feet long.

  It was already dimly apparent that these creatures had been structurally different from modern reptiles, but it remained for the British anatomist Richard Owen to show the extent of that difference. About 1840 he began a study of the bones found thus far and concluded from their pelvic structure that they must have walked upright on four legs, in contrast to existing lizards and crocodiles, whose legs extend sideways and permit only a crawling or scampering kind of motion. This difference, and their great size, Owen wrote in 1842, “will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.” That word came from the Greek deinos, “terrible,” and sauros, “lizard,” though Owen made it clear that he regarded the great beasts as belonging to a group quite separate from modern lizards.

  The world's first wave of dinosaur mania, thus touched off by Owen, brought forth from British artists a host of attempted reconstructions of the extinct monsters. Most of these were done with great care, under scientific supervision, but only a few fossilized dinosaur bones had been discovered as yet, and the drawings and paintings that resulted were wildly fanciful things that depicted the dinosaurs as gaudy dragons of a grand and glorious strangeness. (You can find reproductions of some of these wonderful early drawings in a delightful book called Scenes from Deep Time, by Martin J.S. Rudwick, which the University of Chicago Press published in 1
992.)

  The planners of Crystal Palace Park thought it would be a fine idea to include a dinosaur display among its attractions, and, in 1852, the sculptor and illustrator Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was duly hired to create it. Waterhouse Hawkins, who had had extensive experience in scientific illustration, would work in collaboration with Richard Owen to replicate not only all known dinosaurs for the park, but also such other antediluvian creatures as mastodons, giant ground sloths, and the precursors of tapirs and camels.

  He set up a workshop on the park grounds and began by making sketches and then scale models of his subjects—no simple task, even with Owen's help, because they were working only from scattered bones, not complete skeletons. Small wonder, then, that the results were as much fantasy as science. Nevertheless the scale models took shape, and from them came the full-sized sculptures, which were built of brick and concrete over iron frames. Some of them called for thirty tons of clay. Enabling these behemoths to stand on their four legs alone, with no other props, was a formidable technical challenge. “In the instance of the Iguanodon,” Waterhouse Hawkins wrote, “[it] is not less than building a house on four columns, as the quantities of which the standing Iguanodon is composed, consist of 4 iron columns 9 feet long by 7 inches diameter, 600 bricks, 650 5-inch half-round drain tiles, 900 plain tiles, 38 casks of cement, 90 casks of broken stone, making a total of 640 bushels of artificial stone. These, with 100 feet of iron hooping and 20 feet of cube inch bar, constitute the bones, sinews, and muscles of this large model, the largest of which there is any record of a casting being made."

  Waterhouse Hawkins's stupendous Iguanodon was to be the centerpiece of this phenomenal stone menagerie, and accordingly it attracted much attention while it was under construction. You may wonder why this fairly obscure dinosaur and not one of the species that every small child is familiar with today was chosen as the focal point of the display, rather than such showy items as a Brontosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus, or a Stegosaurus. The answer is that those awesome beasts were all still unknown in 1852; they were not to be discovered until decades later, when such great American dinosaur hunters as Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope began roaming the immense Jurassic bone-fields of Colorado and Wyoming. So it was the Iguanodon around which most of the early Crystal Palace publicity was centered.