Asimov's SF, September 2006 Read online

  -----------------------------------

  Asimov's SF, September 2006

  by Dell Magazine Authors

  -----------------------------------

  Science Fiction

  * * *

  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  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.

  * * *

  * * * *

  Asimov's Science Fiction

  September 2006

  Vol. 30, No. 9. (Whole Number 368)

  Cover Art by Donato Giancola

  * * *

  NOVELETTES

  SUNLIGHT OR ROCK by John Kesse

  GODBURNED by Karen Jordan Allen

  POSTSINGULAR by Rudy Rucker

  SHORT STORIES

  THE GIRL IN THE EMPTY APARTMENT by Jack Skillingstead

  PRIMATES by David D. Levine

  WE ARE THE CAT by Carl Frederick

  SILENCE IN FLORENCE by Ian Creasey

  POETRY

  WIDOW OF THE ANDROID-ROBOT TIME WARS by Vincent Miske

  THE TWO FRIENDS by Tom Disch

  DEPARTMENTS

  EDITORIAL: 2006 READERS’ AWARDS by Sheila Williams

  REFLECTIONS: THE KRAKEN by Robert Silverberg

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: BARBARIAN CONFESSIONS by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU by Ruhan Zhao & Lee Martin

  ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  THE SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 30, No. 9. Whole No. 368, September 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.

  * * *

  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL: 2006 READERS’ AWARDS by Sheila Williams

  REFLECTIONS: THE KRAKEN by Robert Silverberg

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: BARBARIAN CONFESSIONS by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  WIDOW OF THE ANDROID-ROBOT TIME WARS by Vincent Miske

  SUNLIGHT OR ROCK by John Kessel

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU

  GIRL IN THE EMPTY APARTMENT by Jack Skillingstead

  PRIMATES by David D. Levine

  GODBURNED by Karen Jordan Allen

  WE ARE THE CAT by Carl Frederick

  SILENCE IN FLORENCE by Ian Creasey

  POST- SINGULAR by Rudy Rucker

  ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU SOLUTIONS

  NEXT ISSUE

  * * * *

  * * *

  EDITORIAL: 2006 READERS’ AWARDS

  by Sheila Williams

  There was little tension to be found in ballot counting for the 2006 Asimov's Readers’ Awards. Commanding leads for first place held true in the three fiction categories as well as the cover art contest. The awards were announced at a lovely breakfast reception at the Holiday Inn's Duck's Restaurant in Tempe, Arizona, on May 6. We were fortunate to have our best novelette winner, Daryl Gregory, on hand to pick up his certificate. Daryl's story, “Second Person, Present Tense,” which was first published in our September 2005 issue, will be reprinted in a couple of best of the year anthologies. The story also received an honorable mention for the Fountain Award and is currently short listed for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Our novella winner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, had planned to attend the breakfast, but, unfortunately, illness kept her away. Kris's story “Diving Into the Wreck” received the distinguished UPC award as well.

  Guests at our reception included Connie Willis, whose story “Inside Job” tied for second place in the novella category with Ian McDonald's “Little Goddess.” Both of these tales are currently finalists for the 2006 Hugo awards. Joining Connie at the breakfast were her husband Courtney and her daughter Cor-delia. Later that same day, Connie put on a wonderful performance as toastmaster of the 2006 Nebula Awards Banquet.

  In addition to Connie, our guests included author Cynthia Felice and book reviewer and author Peter Heck. Of course, Asimov's associate editor, Brian Bieniowski, and I were there as well.

  Traveling from England to Arizona was a bit too far for Stephen Baxter, the author of our award winning short story “The Children of Time.” We also missed Michael Whelan, our cover artist award recipient, and Timons Esaias. Timons’ poem, “Newton's Mass,” won our poetry category in a photo finish. Indeed, there was a mere five points spread from the first-place poem to the poem that came in fourth.

  The Anlab award was bestowed at the same event. Analog attendees included Stan and Joyce Schmidt, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Trevor Quachri, Richard A. Lovett, David Bartell, Eric James Stone, and George Krauter. The press was represented by Charles N. Brown and Liza Groen Trombi of Locus, Mark Kelly of Locusonline, and Scott Edelman of SF Weekly.

  While our guests at the breakfast enjoyed the culmination of the voting process, they didn't get to see the hundreds of ballots that showed up in our offices. The average person does not expect to be exposed to the inner machinations of our system, but I feel lucky that I do get to look over and read through all the Asimov's Readers’ Award ballots. As usual, these ballots were suffused with interesting comments. Many readers mentioned how difficult it was to choose only three stories in each category from among their lists of favorites. Several readers noted that while they enjoyed the works of the masters, their cover art ballots would be cast for living artists who might benefit from the encouragement, and who would certainly be in a position to better appreciate the award. Some readers had been voting since the inauguration of the award. For others, this was their first chance to cast their ballots. All of the comments were appreciated. Joy Gatewood Fulton summed up the thoughts of many of her fellow subscribers when she wrote: “I have been an Asimov's subscriber since 1980, and cherish all the rich and varied stories, feelings, and ideas that the magazine has brought into my life. Thank you."

  * * * *

  * * * *

  From left: Brian Bieniowski, Daryl Gregory, Sheila Williams

  * * * *

  Perusing the ballots gives me a delightful opportunity to get to know our readers. Attending
the Nebula weekend gave me the delightful opportunity to meet Daryl Gregory, one of the authors of those rich ideas, for the first time. After breakfast on Saturday, Brian and I brought him along to lunch with Paul Melko, Jack Skillingstead, and Ted Kosmatka.

  The awards weekend also gave me the chance to have dinner with long-time Asimov's author, Jack McDevitt, whose story “Fifth Day” will be appearing in an upcoming issue; spend time with my hotel roommate and Asimov's Nebula nominee, Nancy Kress (whose story, “Safeguard,” will also be appearing soon); and chat with the Science Fiction Writers of America's brand-new grandmaster, Harlan Ellison. As always, the awards weekend gave me a terrific opportunity to rekindle old friendships and acquaintances and embark on new ones.

  Copyright © 2006 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  2006 READERS’ AWARD WINNERS

  * * * *

  BEST NOVELLA

  1. DIVING INTO THE WRECK; KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  2. Inside Job; Connie Willis (tie)

  2. The Little Goddess; Ian McDonald (tie)

  4. Shadow Twin; George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Daniel Abraham

  5. Solidarity; Walter Jon Williams

  * * * *

  BEST NOVELETTE

  1. SECOND PERSON, PRESENT TENSE; DARYL GREGORY

  2. Bad Machine; Kage Baker

  3. Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck; Neal Asher

  4. The Edge of Nowhere; James Patrick Kelly (tie)

  4. Dark Flowers, Inverse Moon; Jay Lake (tie)

  * * * *

  BEST SHORT STORY

  1. THE CHILDREN OF TIME; STEPHEN BAXTER

  2. The Fate of Mice; Susan Palwick

  3. A Rocket for the Republic; Lou Antonelli

  4. The Ice-Cream Man; James Van Pelt

  5. Down Memory Lane; Mike Resnick

  * * * *

  BEST POEM

  1. NEWTON'S MASS; TIMONS ESAIAS

  2. Our Robot President; Bruce Boston

  3. The Physicist's Warning; Sandra J. Lindow

  4. Destination; Tim Pratt

  5. How to Keep an Aging Werewolf Happy; Bruce Boston

  * * * *

  BEST COVER

  1. JANUARY; MICHAEL WHELAN

  2. February; Donato Giancola

  3. December; Jean-Pierre Normand

  4. October/November; John Allemand

  5. August; Chesley Boneste

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  REFLECTIONS: THE KRAKEN

  by Robert Silverberg

  In a column published here three or four years ago, I told of the powerful impact that that great monster of the seas, the giant squid, has had on my imagination since I first encountered it as a boy of seven or so in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As everyone who has read the book or seen the movie knows, Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, is attacked by a whole pack of giant squids, immense creatures eight yards long, with huge writhing tentacles, horrid gnashing beaks, and great staring green eyes as large as saucers. The valiant crew of the Nautilus drives the swarming attackers off, finally, but the struggle is a frantic one, and Verne milks it for every milligram of excitement inherent in it. Every little boy loves a good monster story, and the battle with the giant squids made a deep impression on my very impressionable young mind.

  I had another giant-squid experience a couple of years later in a scary radio drama—radio, back then, featured dramatized stories all day long—called “The Kraken,” in which a German submarine, cruising off the Norwegian coast in World War II, blunders into the habitat of an enormous squid and becomes entangled in its tentacles, each of them as thick as a hundred-year-old oak. The sub's captain—one of those scholarly Nazis so common in popular entertainment—immediately identifies the squid as the Kraken, long known as a menace to fishermen in northern waters. The great beast drags the sub down to the cave that is its undersea lair, and when the captain sends a man in a diving suit out to investigate the situation, the monster swallows him alive, imposing on him a fate that he himself describes, step by step, in a particularly grisly way. Eventually the Kraken is harpooned—why German submarines were equipped with harpoons is something I can't tell you—but the roof of the cave collapses, crushing the sub, and only a few members of its crew manage to escape. I can never forget the nightmarish force of that broadcast.

  Some years afterward, when I began to collect old science fiction magazines, I discovered that the story from which the radio play had been adapted had originally been published in one of them—the June 1940 issue of John Campbell's famous fantasy magazine, Unknown. It was the work of L. Ron Hubbard, the future creator of Dianetics and the founder of the Church of Scientology, under the pseudonym of “Frederick Engelhardt."

  My next encounter with the Kraken came in my teens, when as I prowled through poetry anthologies I discovered that Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written a sonorous poem about the undersea giant that stirred the same feelings of wonder in me that the radio broadcast and the Engelhardt story had engendered:

  Below the thunders of the upper deep,

  * * * *

  Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

  About his shadowy sides; above him swe

  Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

  And far away into the sickly light,

  From many a wondrous grot and secret ce

  Unnumber'd and enormous polypi

  Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

  There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then, once by man and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

  * * * *

  In the 1960s, when I turned my hand to writing books of popular science, I devoted a chapter of my book The World of the Ocean Depths (1968) to the Kraken of literature and its real-world counterpart, the giant squid, Architeuthis. The first published reference to the Kraken, I noted, was in Archbishop Olaus Magnus’ 1555 History of the Northern People, in which he told of “monstrous fish on the coasts or sea of Norway.... One of these sea-monsters will drown easily many great ships provided with many strong mariners.” The archbishop reported that the Kraken was so huge that sailors had been known to mistake it for an island, landing on its back and going to their dooms when the annoyed Kraken sank beneath the waves.

  Another Norwegian clergyman, Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Ber-gen, provided a further account of the Kraken in his Natural History of Norway, 1751. Calling it “incontestably the largest sea-monster in the world,” and estimating its size—conservatively, he said—at “about an English mile and a half in circumference,” Pontoppidan asserted that fishermen often catch sight of the Kraken close to the surface on a summer day. “It looks at first like a number of small islands,” he wrote. Sometimes “several bright points or horns appear, which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the surface of the water, and sometimes they stand up as high and large as the masts of middle-sized vessels. It seems these are the creature's arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom."

  By the late nineteenth century, when Jules Verne was writing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, scientists felt reasonably certain that sea-creatures the supposed size of the Kraken did not actually exist. But it seemed clear that the giant squid, Architeuthis, was a genuine prototype for the Kraken legends. The first authenticated description of one, and the direct inspiration for that horrific scene in the Verne novel, was the work of Lieutenant Frederic-Marie Bouyer, commander of the French sloop Alecton. Sailing off the Canary Islands in 1861, the men of the Alecton caught sight of what Bouyer took to be a giant octopus. It made no attempt at an attack—that pa
rt was Verne's own invention—but remained at the surface close by the ship, “moving about with a kind of intelligence.” Bouyer recognized it as an unknown species and after rejecting the idea of sending out a boat to capture it for scientific study, fearing that “in such a hand-to-hand struggle the monster might capsize the boat with its long tentacles, and perhaps use these formidable whip-like weapons, armed with suckers, to strangle several of my sailors,” he tried to snare it from shipboard with a noose. But the animal escaped, leaving behind a forty-four-pound chunk of tentacle. This is Bouyer's description: “The body seemed to measure fifteen to eighteen feet in length. The head had a parrot-like beak surrounded by eight arms between five and six feet long. In aspect it was quite appalling, brick red in color, shapeless and slimy, its form repulsive and terrible."

  In the following decade, several similar monsters were washed ashore on the coast of Newfoundland. From them it could be determined that what Bouyer had seen was a giant squid, not an octopus, for they had ten tentacles, not eight: two very long ones and the eight that Bouyer had seen. (He had mistaken one of the long tentacles for a tail.) Fishermen in a boat off Newfoundland were attacked by one, and fought it off, severing two of its tentacles with a hatchet. One of these limbs was nineteen feet long and 3.5 inches thick. Another giant squid found in New Zealand had tentacles forty-nine feet long. Fragments of tentacles as thick as a man's body were found in the stomachs of sperm whales, the chief enemy of the giant squid. From the study of these and other specimens, it was estimated that the biggest of these squids, which roved the seas in many parts of the world, could reach an overall length of some sixty feet.

  But almost all the information we had about giant squids came from dead or dying specimens. No one had managed to make detailed observations of the living giant squid in the wild until a Japanese research team succeeded in photographing one in the North Pacific in September, 2004, at a depth of nearly three thousand feet.