Analog SFF January-February 2010 Read online

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  Analog SFF, January-February 2010

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.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 image courtesy NASA

  Cover design by Victoria Green

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  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE FUTURE OF FUTURES by Stanley Schmidt

  Novella: NEPTUNE'S TREASURE by Richard A. Lovett

  Science Fact: TWINS: NEVER IDENTICAL by Victor Raggio, MD

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Special Feature: MAKING UNREALITY RING TRUE: WRITER'S TRICKS FOR BRINGING STORIES TO LIFE by Richard A. Lovett

  Short Story: SHAME by Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn

  Short Story: ON RICKETY THISTLEWAITE by Michael F. Flynn

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ALIENS AMONG US by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  Short Story: REJIGGERING THE THINGAMAJIG by Eric James Stone

  Short Story: A WAR OF STARS by David L. Clements

  Novelette: SIMPLE GIFTS by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Special Feature: ACROSS MY LIFE... by Ben Bova

  Poetry: UNDOCUMENTED ALIEN by Robert T. Lundy

  Science Fact: TAKE OFF YOUR HAT: YOU'RE IN THE PRESENCE OF CULTURE by Stephen R. Balzac

  Novella: THUS SPAKE THE ALIENS by H. G. Stratmann

  Department: BIOLOG: KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH by Richard A. Lovett

  Novella: THE POSSESSION OF PAAVO DESHIN by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Reader's Department: 2009 INDEX

  Reader's Department: ANALYTICAL LABORATORY BALLOT

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXX, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2010

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Vice President for Editorial and Product Development

  Susan Mangan: Vice President for Design and Production

  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Lynda Meek: Production Artist/Graphic Designer

  Laura Tulley: Senior Production Manager

  Jennifer Cone: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

  Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales

  Bruce W. Sherbow: VP, Sales, Marketing, and IT

  Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services

  Advertising Representative: Robin DiMeglio, Advertising Sales Coordinator, Tel:(203) 866-6688 Fax:(203) 854-5962 (Display and Classified Advertising)

  Editorial Correspondence Only: [email protected]

  Published since 1930

  First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

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  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE FUTURE OF FUTURES

  by Stanley Schmidt

  This essay represents an unusual almost-coincidence of anniversaries. You're reading it in the issue marking the 80th anniversary of Analog (though it has gone through a few name changes during those 80 years). I'm writing it very close to the 40th anniversary of Apollo XI, the first craft that carried humans to a successful landing on a natural body other than Earth—and back.

  Both of those are accomplishments worth celebrating, but my main interest here—as usual—is not in the past, but in the future. Where do we go from here, and how have our visions of the future changed from what they used to be?

  In the case of Apollo, that event marked the climax of a period of long-term optimism and expansive vision, which had also been reflected in much of the science fiction of preceding decades. Science fiction (especially in this magazine) had often embodied a view that intelligent beings such as ourselves could do worthwhile and even astounding things by learning to understand the universe and apply its rules. The Apollo program provided living proof of that belief: in just a few years, teams of human beings actually did something that, even just a few years earlier, had been widely regarded as a quintessential example of “impossible.” Suddenly it became the opposite kind of example: we often heard exuberant cries of, “If we can put a man on the Moon, we can...”

  But then a reaction set in. We started hearing that phrase distorted into a sneering, “We can put a man on the Moon, but we can't...” A wave of pessimism started sweeping across the planet as people downplayed the wonderful things they could accomplish and dwelt increasingly on the problems that came with new abilities. Well, of course there are problems—but, as John W. Campbell (who edited Astounding/Analog for 34 years) once observed, “Problems are things that engineers solve for a living.”

  However, engineers can't do it all. They can handle the technical aspects, but the rest of us have to deal with the myriad subtler problems of deciding how, if at all, to integrate new knowledge and technologies into our lives. Those, not the technologies themselves, are—and will continue to be—the main business of science fiction.

  And a great deal of nonsense has been written about them and eagerly embraced by a public that too readily jumps on bandwagons and too seldom thinks critically or beyond the moment.

  The Apollo program, for example, should have been the beginning of something really big—but too many people saw it instead as the culmination of something big. The last Moon-landing mission—for whose launch I was present, and which I regard as one of the few things I've experienced for which the word “awesome” actually fits—occurred a mere three years after the first. No person has set foot on the Moon or any other planet since, and it is not yet clear that any ever will. There have been other strides in space, to be sure; but it's been an uphill battle, and one of the most promising (and important) paths—direct human exploration of other bodies—has been at least temporarily abandoned. It became all too fashionable to say, in effect, “We've been out there; there's no need to go again.”

  For a telling analogy to illustrate how sensible that attitude is, imagine an alternate Earth on which all of our species were confined to mainland Europe, and a few intrepid souls managed to make it to the nearest shore of England—and then said, “Well, we've seen the rest of the world. Time to put the boat away and forget about it!”

  Part of the problem with Apollo, of course, was that the reasons too many people saw for it were the wrong ones. They saw it as a game, a race to beat the Russians—and once that race was won, there was no reason to do more. It was, they “thought” (though “felt” would be a more accurate word), time to look for other amusements.

  But in the cosmic scheme of things, beating the Russians to the Moon was a pathetically petty motivation. The real importance of Apollo should have been as a stepping stone to bigger things, like exploration, use of off-Earth resources to build better lives for ourselves and our descendants, and—most basic of all—long-term survival. If we really care about having our kind continue far into the future, building on our considerable past accomplishments and learning to grow beyond our past shortcomings, we're going to have to start moving back into space. I recently heard such a claim dismissed with a flippant, “Why worry about long-term survival? The Sun isn't going to become a red giant for billions of years.” True enough—but there will be extinction-level collision events much sooner than that, and we need to learn how to deal with them and get some of us established elsewhere before that happens.

  And we may not have “all the time in the world,” even on that more modest scale. My own story “The Unreachable Stars” (which appeared here in April 1971) showed a not-too-distant future in which our descendants had painted themselves into a corner, irrevocably throwing away the chance ever to go into space by buying too completely into the “We must solve our problems at home first” fallacy.

  It could happen here.

  Meanwhile, there are indeed plenty of other problems we must solve, but there are also plenty of opportunities to aspire to. It is the job of science fiction to explore both. Not to predict the future—to tell what will happen—but to explore the possibilities and help us choose the paths we'd like to follow.

  And I can't overemphasize the importance of choice. There are those who think we must all go wherever the current takes us; some of them relish the idea and talk about “riding the flow,” while others dread it and complain of being “swept up” in it. Both views, like the extremes of most such “dichotomies,” are simplistic and have generated their own share of silliness.

  I'm reminded, for example, of some that has recently appeared on a couple of websites commenting on this magazine's practices. Much of it originated with a young writer who was miffed that, at least up to the time of th
is writing, Analog chose not to accept submissions by e-mail rather than on paper. He thought we should, not just because it would be more convenient for him (which hardly constitutes a reason), but because “everybody's doing it” (which was not true, and in any case would not be a reason either).

  New technologies offer choices, and both individuals and societies are entitled—and obligated—to make those choices in what they see as their own best interests. Among the nonsense this discussion thread generated was an assertion that we and other magazines that still preferred hardcopy for initial submissions were “no longer dedicated to exploring the future, but to preserving the past.” This is so easily refuted by actually reading our content that it hardly warrants a response, but even in the matter of editorial practices (which every publisher is free to set as it sees fit) it makes no sense. It makes it sound as if we were clinging to all old practices and rejecting all new ones solely for the sake of oldness or newness. It ignores the fact that initial submissions are the only phase for which we want hardcopy; once we buy a story, everything else is done electronically.* As new methods become available, we adopt the ones that we think make our lives better, and pass on the ones that don't—which I respectfully submit is the most sensible approach for anyone, individual or society, to follow with respect to any new technology.

  That's plenty about the trivial details of publishing practices and preferences (though far less than appeared in these threads). How about the meat of the matter—what science fiction is about?

  Another kind of silliness I see from time to time is essays saying that science fiction itself is obsolete or irrelevant because we're already living in the future that science fiction tried to foresee. To put this in perspective, please take another look at my alternate-world example above: “We've already seen England, so we've seen the world.” I often marvel at the perennial ability of people (even ones who really should know better) to believe that the world they happen to be living in is the Finished End Product of all that went before, as if no significant change could happen later. That has never been true, and it isn't likely to be anytime soon.

  Yes, it's true that we're now living in a world with many resemblances to some of the futures imagined by science fiction writers of the past (though not quite like any of them). It's also true that many things that used to be considered “strictly science fiction,” like organ transplants and cell phones and basic space travel, have been absorbed into mainstream literature, so it's harder than it used to be for a casual observer to tell the difference. In my own novel Argonaut (Tor Books, 2002), there's a scene where some of the characters go to a not-so-distant future science fiction convention and find it populated almost exclusively by geezers, since only they still recognize a distinction between mainstream and science fiction.

  But there is still a difference, and the facts that many science-fictional imaginings have become everyday reality and the chasm between mainstream and SF is less obvious does not mean that the show is over. Yes, we live in what people of the past called the future, but we need to remember that anybody's future is somebody else's past. A lot has changed to get us where we are, but at least as much will change in our future—so we'll be constantly looking ahead and finding new subject matter.

  I believe it was Harlan Ellison who, some years ago, answered a reporter who asked “What are you guys going to write about, now that people have actually landed on the Moon?” with, “Lady, there hasn't been a Moon landing story in twenty years.”

  It's true that nobody now is going to score points for novelty by writing about Moon rockets or clones. But it's also true that our real future is going to include a great many other things that both scientists and SF writers have only begun to glimpse—and that those will lead to sweeping changes in how we live. What kind of changes? That's for us to choose, but we can be sure they will include both enormous opportunities and enormous dangers. Exploring those opportunities and dangers, and how we can steer toward them or away from them, will continue to be the very important work of science fiction.

  That's what Astounding/Analog has been doing for the last 80 years, as Ben Bova—the only person on the planet who has gone from being an Analog reader to being a writer for it, then its editor, and then back to writer and reader—recalls in his essay elsewhere in this issue. And it's what we expect to continue doing, in one form or another, for a good many more years. The specific scientific developments and technologies we write about will not be the same ones that concerned us in the past, but I expect to keep finding new ones as far downstream as we can look—and we'll always face new concerns about how to survive, live with, and ultimately thrive on the new possibilities. Even if we ever reach a point where we know everything that could be learned (don't hold your breath!), I doubt that that will lead to an unchanging world, because people will continue to get restless and change their minds about what to do with all that knowledge.

  So please think of this anniversary issue not as the end of our first 80 years, but as the beginning of the next 80—and enjoy!

  Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

  * One participant in the discussion wrote, “If they want manuscripts as hardcopy, doesn't somebody have to retype the manuscript?” Of course not; that would be ludicrous. We prefer hardcopy only for the initial reading; for the small percentage of stories we buy, we want an electronic copy because that makes all later stages much easier. And, of course, we reserve the right to change our preferences at any time—conceivably even before you read this—but if we do, it will be because our preferences or circumstances changed, not because we felt compelled to go along with somebody who thought everybody should do things his way.

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  ABOUT THE COVER

  On October 31 2009, NASA will launch the first test flight of its next-generation spacecraft and launch vehicle system. The test flight, called Ares I-X, will bring NASA one step closer to its exploration goals—to return to the Moon for more ambitious exploration of the lunar surface and to travel to Mars and destinations beyond.

  The Ares I-X flight will provide any opportunity to test and prove hardware, facilities, and ground operations associated with the Ares I crew launch vehicle. It also will allow NASA to gather critical data during ascent of the integrated Orion crew exploration vehicle and the Ares I launch vehicle stack—data that will ensure the vehicle system as a whole is safe and fully operational before astronauts begin traveling into orbit.

  —text and image courtesy NASA

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXX, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2010. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2009 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Novella: NEPTUNE'S TREASURE

  by Richard A. Lovett

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  Illustration by John Allemand

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