Asimov's SF, January 2010 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, January 2010

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2010 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 for “The Jekyll Island Horror” by Jeroen Advocaat

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: A MAGAZINE BY ANY NAME by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE ANTIKYTHERA COMPUTER by Robert Silverberg

  Department: ON THE NET: DUDE, WHERE'S MY HOVERCAR? by James Patrick Kelly

  Novelette: MARYA AND THE PIRATE by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Short Story: CONDITIONAL LOVE by Felicity Shoulders

  Short Story: A LETTER FROM THE EMPEROR by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Short Story: WONDER HOUSE by Chris Roberson

  Poetry: DOT ACOLYTES by Ruth Berman

  Novelette: THE GOOD HAND by Robert Reed

  Short Story: WILDS by Carol Emshwiller

  Poetry: LOUISA DRIFTING by Mark Rich

  Novelette: THE JEKYLL ISLAND HORROR by Allen M. Steele

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL READERS’ AWARD

  2009 INDEX

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 34, No.1. Whole No. 408, January 2010. 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. © 2009 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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  ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION

  Sheila Williams: Editor

  Brian Bieniowski: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Irene Lee: Production Artist

  Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager

  Evira Matos: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

  Susan Mangan: Executive Director, Art and Production

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

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  Stories from Asimov's have won 46 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 manuscript guidelines. To obtain this, send us a self-addressed, stamped business-size envelope (what stationery stores call a number 10 envelope), and a note requesting this information. Please write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. The address for this and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. 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: A MAGAZINE BY ANY NAME

  by Sheila Williams

  We were participating on an interesting panel about whether professional magazines deserve Hugo Awards at the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal, Canada, when Gardner Dozois brought up the very Wittgensteinian question: “What is a magazine?” Although not obviously esoteric, this question once precipitated a minor dispute between Asimov's and the US Post Office. In the early eighties, the USPS suddenly informed us that Asimov's was not a magazine, and thus not eligible for the cheaper second-class postage rates. They thought we might actually be a series of anthologies disguised as a periodical. Our publisher asked the editor, Shawna McCarthy, to write a defense for Asimov's that would prove it really was a magazine.

  The Post Office seemed to be contending that since we didn't have pictures of swimsuit models, short pithy news items, and ads for automobiles and makeup, and since we were filled with works of fiction, we couldn't be a “magazine.” Second-class postage was renamed periodical postage in 1996, but the rules still state “material that has been, or is intended to be, distributed primarily as a book may not be converted into an issue of a periodical by merely placing a periodical's title on it, placing the material within a periodical's cover, or using similar superficial methods.” Taking a seemingly obvious route, Shawna saved the day by pointing out that in addition to fiction, we had an editorial, a letters column, a book review and a small number of classified and display ads. We might not look like People, Newsweek, or Sports Illustrated, but, somehow, we still fit within the Platonic ideal of what constitutes a magazine. Indeed, despite the USPS's insistence on a diversity of material, there have been magazines like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which, before its redesign in the early eighties, published only stories and hadn't any nonfiction columns.

  It's probably just as well that neither Shawna nor the USPS resorted to the Oxford English Dictionary to resolve this conundrum. The word “magazine” can trace its root to “makhazin,” the plural of the Arabic word for storehouse. After wading through fifteen hundred words to reach definition 5. a., we discover that the first recorded use of the word in a figurative sense similar to the way we use it today was in fact a reference to a book as “a storehouse of information on a specified subject or for a particular class of persons.” It's not until 1731, a hundred years later, that we find the word used in the modern sense of definition 5. b. “A periodical publication containing articles by various writers; chiefly, [one] intended for general rather than learned or professional readers, and consisting of a miscellany of critical and descriptive articles, essays, works of fiction, etc.”


  For its own purposes, the Post Office further insists that “periodical publications must be formed of printed sheets.” Older regulations specified that these sheets were made out of paper, but they can now be “paper, cellophane, foil, or other similar materials.” While we don't go in for cellophane or foil, we here at the magazinary* tend to think of a magazine as a paper product. Indeed, even the online dictionary.com says that a magazine is “usually bound in a paper cover.”

  Nowadays, though, most people would agree that a definition of “magazine” that limited the word to mean a paper artifact would be much too narrow. Although we've coined terms like “e-zine” and “webzine” to refer to certain electronic entities that exist in cyperspace, it's clear that these sites share many of the same figurative aspects of a storehouse that magazines do. In addition to fiction, sites like Clarkesworld and the now defunct Baen's Universe have had beautiful covers and thoughtful editorials. Strange Horizons has poems, insightful book reviews, and nonfiction articles. Although Asimov's has a web presence, we don't exist online as an “e-zine” or a “magazine.” On the other hand, we are available from Fictionwise, the eBook retailer, and on Amazon's Kindle in a downloadable electronic format, and we expect to be offered at other electronic venues soon. The number of subscribers to our print edition is almost exactly the same as last year, but we've seen explosive growth in electronic subscriptions. More than 10 percent of you now take delivery of the magazine as an electronic download.

  The Worldcon panel didn't resolve the question of whether the Hugo Award for professional magazine should be reinstated any better than this editorial establishes a rigid definition for “magazine.” The twentieth century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, looked at the equally thorny concept of “game” in his groundbreaking work, Philosophical Investigations. That term can refer to such diverse activities as football and solitaire as well as chess, ring-around-the-roses, and Call of Duty. After discussing a number of different games, Wittgenstein said, “the result of the examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” Rather than look for the one thing these activities all had in common, he wrote, “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances.'”

  From the early Hitchcock to People, and from Newsweek to Strange Horizons, we're quite happy to continue having fun on the playing field with the rest of our kin. We'll do so in both our print and electronic editions, and in other distribution formats now in existence or hereafter known or devised.

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  *A word I learned while perusing the OED with my magnifying glass. Wags at the office allowed that the term made sense since our place is so much like a cannery or a brewery—not.

  Copyright © 2009 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE ANTIKYTHERA COMPUTER

  by Robert Silverberg

  The Mediterranean has been a busy maritime waterway since prehistoric times, but it is often a stormy sea; and, inevitably, an uncounted number of the ancient mariners’ vessels came to grief and finished their voyages many fathoms deep. A darkening of the sky, a sudden storm, and a majestic ship bound for Spain or North Africa or the coast of Asia Minor might capsize in a moment. The Mediterranean is littered with the remains of ships of all ages, going back to the dawn of shipping some four or five thousand years ago.

  It was no secret that those vessels were down there, laden with treasure—gold and silver bullion, works of art, cargoes of pottery or weapons. The problem was to reach them, something that was almost impossible before the development of modern diving gear. In recent centuries fishermen would, from time to time, bring up some fragment of a statue, some slime-encrusted vase, to remind modern inhabitants of the region of the sunken ancient treasures in that sea, but such finds were few and far between.

  Once diving bells and diving suits came into general use in the nineteenth century, it became more feasible to search the ocean floor for these ancient treasures, and many significant discoveries resulted. One of the most spectacular such finds came in 1900, when two Greek ships bearing divers returning from a sponge-gathering expedition off the coast of Tunisia were compelled by one of those Mediterranean storms to take refuge off the island of Antikythera, at the very tip of the Greek archipelago not far from Crete. While waiting for the storm to blow itself out the thrifty captain decided to look for marketable sponges right there, and sent a diver named Elias Stadiatis, equipped with a helmet and weighted boots, down 150 feet to the bottom. There Stadiatis found himself wandering in a confused tangle of statuary—a marble goddess, huge stone horses, and much more, dozens of statues, marking the site of some ancient shipwreck.

  It was plainly a major archaeological find. The sponge-divers reported it to the Greek government, which, in November 1900, sent a Navy vessel equipped with the most modern diving equipment of the day to explore the site. Nine months of difficult and dangerous work produced a life-sized bronze head, two large marble statues, and many smaller pieces. Archaeologists determined that the ship bearing these treasures had gone to the bottom somewhere around the dawn of the Christian era on a voyage from Athens to Rome. The bronze statues could be dated, from their style, to the era of Socrates and Plato, about four hundred years before the time of the shipwreck. The marble ones were newer—first-century copies of much older Greek work. The leaden bases of many of the statues were bent and torn, as though the statues had been ripped up violently, and that led archaeologists to speculate that they might have been the booty of Roman marauders who looted the temples of Greece in 86 bc, under the dictator Sulla.

  The statues were magnificent ones. But the most important single find of the Antikythera expedition was a battered and badly corroded lump of bronze that the archaeologists originally tossed aside as worthless. In 1902, Valerios Statis of the National Museum in Athens took a close second look and was startled to see that it had dials, gear-wheels, and inscribed plates. It was, in fact, a complex machine, which was—and still is—the only mechanical object that has come down to us from ancient Greece. Modern study has shown that it is nothing less than a highly complicated device for performing astronomical computations.

  Discovering exactly what the mechanism's purpose had been took many years. First, certain associated bits and pieces had to be inserted in the main body of the instrument. Then the rust and calcification had to be cleared away. The dials and inscriptions thus revealed left little doubt that it was some sort of astronomical device. For a long time archaeologists thought it was a navigational instrument, perhaps an astrolabe, an instrument used for fixing a ship's position by the stars.

  The task of cleaning the mysterious mechanism took more than half a century. In 1955, the Yale historian Derek J. de Solla Price, working in association with George Stamires, a specialist in ancient Greek inscriptions, finally succeeded in properly fitting the various fragments of the machine together, and realized that the instrument, whatever it was, was basically intact. Originally, they said, it must have looked rather like an old clock: a wooden box with hinged doors, containing the gears and dials. The wooden parts had vanished over the twenty centuries of submersion. But the rest of the device appeared to be complete.

  Stamires was able to show that the lettering on the inscribed plates was in a style known to be no older than 100 bc and to have gone out of use around the time of Christ. And the words of the inscription supported this observation. They included some astronomical data similar to that compiled by a Greek named Geminos about 77 B.C. The mechanism provided a clear and indisputable way of dating the wreck.

  Price and Stamires's theory of what the thing had been used for became more controversial. One of the dials bore the signs of the zodiac, another the names of the months. As the gears turned, they said, the instrument would provide information about the risings and settings of the importan
t constellations throughout the year. Other dials gave much more complicated astronomical data. Price and Stamires concluded that the machine was indeed some type of navigational instrument. But if it was an astrolabe, it was one that was far more complex in conception than any previously known astrolabe of the era.

  Other scientists doubted that the first-century Greeks could have been capable of constructing what was essentially a mechanical computing machine, as Price and Stamires suggested it was, and their hypothesis was brushed aside. A couple of years ago, though, a team of British, Greek, and American researchers headed by the astronomer Mike Edmunds of the University of Cardiff, Wales, and the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth, took a new look at the Antikythera gadget, making use of three-dimensional X-ray tomography and high-resolution imaging systems, and provided a startling confirmation of the device's technological significance and a better understanding of its function.

  Previously unseen inscriptions came into view, which appeared to relate to lunar and planetary movements. At least thirty bronze gear-wheels were identified, and there may have been as many as thirty-seven. A pin-and-slot mechanism linking two of the wheels produced a representation of the Moon's elliptical journey around the Earth that was in accordance with the calculations of the Greek astronomer Hipparchos, who flourished in the second century bc and was the first to arrive at an understanding of the motions of heavenly bodies that approximates our modern ideas.

  The new Antikythera findings suggest that the instrument—which was probably built between 150 and 100 bc, and might even have been the work of Hipparchos himself—does not seem to have been a navigational device, as most twentieth-century students of it had speculated, but could have been used to calculate calendars for planting and harvesting, or to set the dates of religious festivals according to the positions of the planets. We may never know its exact purpose. But what is not in doubt is that it demonstrates, as the recent researchers noted, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period,” far exceeding in complexity any similar instruments of the next thousand years. Not until the heyday of Arabic science around 900 ad did any such geared calendrical devices reappear. It would not be improper, really, to call the Antikythera mechanism the oldest known computer.