Analog SFF, March 2006 Read online




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  Analog SFF, March 2006

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.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.

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  ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT

  Vol. CXXVI No. 3, March 2006

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  Cover Art by Jean-Pierre Normand

  Serial

  SUN OF SUNS conclusion, Karl Schroeder

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  Novella

  THE LITTLE WHITE NERVES WENT LAST, John Barnes

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  Novelette

  WASTING TIME, Grey Rollins

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  Short Stories

  THE SKEEKIT-WOOGLE TEST, Carl Frederick

  WILDLIFE, Henry Melton

  PLAYHOUSE, Larry Niven

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  Science Fact

  WORLDS ENOUGH, Joel Davis

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  Reader's Departments

  THE EDITOR'S PAGE

  IN TIMES TO COME

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton

  BRASS TACKS

  UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis

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  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Associate Editor

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  CONTENTS

  The Real and the Readable: Editorial by Stanley Schmidt

  The Little White Nerves Went Last by John Barnes

  Worlds Enough by Joel Davis

  The Skeekit-Woogle Test by Carl Frederick

  In Times To Come

  Wildlife by Henry Melton

  The Universe of Choice: The Alternate View by John G. Cramer

  Playhouse by Larry Niven

  Wasting Time by Grey Rollins

  Sun of Suns: Conclusion by Karl Schroeder

  The Reference Library by Tom Easton

  Brass Tacks Letters from Our Readers

  Upcoming Events Anthony Lewis

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  The Real and the Readable:

  Editorial by Stanley Schmidt

  As you read this, a highly unusual medical drama series will probably be well into its second season on network television (or, depending on the moods of the fickle gods of ratings and network managers, relegated to history). My subject today is not that show per se, but it and some of the reactions I've heard to it make a good example for some general observations about creating fiction and drama.

  House, in case you haven't seen it, is unusual (and rather Analog-ish in flavor) in that solving a difficult scientific mystery is a central element (but not the whole) of each episode's plot, and the details of that mystery are usually far more carefully researched than you might expect of network television. Dr. Gregory House (a spiritual descendant of Sherlock Holmes) is a cantankerous guy who likes solving really difficult cases—indeed, it's hard to get him to work on any other kind, because he won't bother unless he's really interested. He's been fortunate enough to find a job at a teaching hospital that lets him head up a department of diagnostic medicine, surrounded by several bright young residents. He is not a corporate team player, he has no bedside manner whatsoever, and he's perfectly willing to use unorthodox methods that skirt legality to get information he needs. The only reason anybody puts up with him is that he gets results: Usually (but not always) he and his team manage to solve medical cases that have baffled everyone else.

  My wife and I happened to stumble onto the show from its very first installment, which is unusual for us. We don't watch much television, and seldom try new network shows until they've been around for a while and somebody we trust tells us that this or that is unusual in ways we'd like. In this case our curiosity was piqued by a feature story about the show before it started. So we tried it, and were immediately struck by the general sharpness of the writing (on a network not generally noted for that) and especially by the fact that the medical mysteries were genuinely complex and baffling and the details of their solution, in most cases where we could judge, were quite accurate. The number of cases where we could judge was pretty high: Joyce is a medical technologist with many years of clinical experience, and I've picked up a pretty good layman's smattering of medical knowledge from conversations with her and doctors I've worked with in other capacities (such as writing for Analog). When neither of us was sure offhand whether something said in the show made sense, we could easily consult one of the medical reference books in our library, and usually it did.

  When we did have quibbles, they were usually minor and peripheral things, not too hard to overlook. In one episode, the investigators claimed New Jersey has three native species of poisonous snake; actually (unless one has drastically extended its range since my references were printed) it only has two. On several occasions, Joyce couldn't suppress her skepticism when doctors were shown doing their own lab work, since in her experience they almost never do and seldom even know how. But overall we were impressed by the level of medical thinking that had evidently gone into these shows, compared to what's usually seen on television; and we wondered what doctors thought of it.

  Initially, the show attracted few watchers and generated little comment by critics. It eventually built a substantial following by the old television trick of being scheduled right after another show, much more popular (if pretty silly); more and more people found themselves watching a little, getting interested, and sticking around for the rest. And in July, the weekly science section of The New York Times (7/19/05) carried an essay about the show and reactions to it by a medical doctor named Sandeep Jauhar. He offered no complaint about its medical foundations; indeed, his essay concluded, “The show reminds me of the wonders of medicine. It allows me an hour each week to relish the magic and mysteries of my profession, even if it's only on TV.”

  Both he and his wife (also a doctor) did find certain aspects of the show “unrealistic,” for different reasons. His wife, like Joyce, often said, “Doctors don't do that"—Joyce in reference to doctors doing their own lab work, Dr. Jauhar's wife in regard to individual doctors doing work that would normally be done by several different kinds of specialists. Dr. Jauhar saw it as unrealistic because, “It portrays a world where doctors have time to solve problems,” and the rest of his essay is a sort of wistful lament for a world in which they usually don't. In our world, he says, doctors are under such intense pressures that few of them have time to put House-like effort into solving difficult cases, and it doesn't happen. Instead, questions are tossed out to consultants; the unspoken but hard-to-avoid corollary is that really difficult cases may not get solved at all. Dr. Jauhar sees House as unrealistic because real doctors wouldn't have time for its kind of sleuthing, but he likes watching it as a depiction of medicine as it should be rather than as it is.

  They're both right, and the questions they raise, both practical and philosophical, are ones that bear periodic reexamination in connection with any kind of dramatic or fictional writing. For example, Dr. Jauhar makes two points: House is unrealistic, in that the doctors and work environment it shows are far from typical of the real world; but it's worth watching anyway because those charact
ers and their setting generate highly interesting situations that might arise in a few rare real situations and in any case serve as a needed reminder of what could be. Those observations, I submit, are relevant to anyone trying to write drama or fiction.

  Readers and critics sometimes say they want their plays and stories to be “realistic,” and sometimes they explicitly or implicitly use that word to mean “typical” of reality. In a medical show, for example, this might mean that they would want writers to avoid situations in which doctors have time to really delve into a difficult case, because real ones seldom do. But “typical” situations are seldom very interesting. Quite often what makes a situation interesting—able to hold a reader's or viewer's attention and make him or her think—is the way it's atypical. Dr. Jauhar is right that the biggest way in which House is atypical is that it features a doctor with an intense interest in solving hard cases and a work environment (which nobody denies is quite unusual) giving him the luxury of being able to do so.

  There are other ways in which it's atypical, even unrealistic, too. House, for example, not infrequently uses the services of a resident with experience as a juvenile delinquent to surreptitiously gather crucial information about his patients’ lives that they're unwilling to volunteer. Few doctors would dare risk that in reality; still fewer could get it away with it if their bosses found out. But the fact that House does it in his highly unorthodox way makes him far more interesting to watch or read about than a typical “realistic” doctor who rushes from patient to patient, spends far too much time on paperwork, and farms all the details out to unseen labs and specialists.

  Readers and audiences don't really want realism, in the sense of fiction that faithfully mimics the commonest and therefore least interesting forms of reality. They want verisimilitude: the feeling that what they're watching could be real, no matter how atypical it might be.

  And creating that feeling for readers and audiences also involves practical considerations and some necessary artistic license. Joyce and Dr. Jauhar's wife are quite right that real doctors seldom do their own lab work and tests involving different medical specialties will really be divided among a like number of different specialists. But if you tried to show that in a script, it would lead to a great proliferation of characters, making it hard for viewers to follow the action and requiring the producer to hire too many actors. The latter problem doesn't arise in prose narrative, but the problem of confusing the reader does. A storyteller is generally well advised to pare his or her cast down to a necessary minimum where every character is contributing something significant to the story. (But I can't resist an aside, directed at writers generally: Don't forget that there are stories surrounding those “backstage” characters, too, and sometimes it would be nice to see somebody like a medical technologist or a radiologist onstage and center. It's been done, but far too seldom.)

  There's at least one more practical consideration that applies to “realism” in both drama and fiction. Not only are atypical cases more likely to be interesting than typical real ones, but a writer could seldom get away with describing either a typically dull or an interestingly atypical situation in a completely realistic manner—that is, as it most typically would happen in reality. If you ever pay close attention to almost any real conversation—what's actually said, not the edited gist that you remember it as—you'll notice that it's just full of awkward pauses, empty noises like “uh” and “like,” grammatical awkwardnesses, and sentences tentatively begun and then restarted, sometimes three or four times before they're completed. Nobody wants to read that; nobody will read that. A fiction writer has to learn to write dialog that doesn't sound like real dialog, but rather like what readers want to believe is real dialog—smooth, rolling trippingly off the tongue, occasionally glittering with wit, but not so blindingly that readers find their attention drawn to the cleverness of the words instead of the significance of their meaning.

  For several years fairly early in my tenure at Analog I had the privilege of working with a prolific and talented writer named Joseph H. Delaney, who is regrettably no longer with us. My first contact with Joe was a long letter from him as a reader, wishing that the handling of law in our stories could be as careful and rigorous as our handling of physical sciences. Since he was a trial lawyer, and he wrote a really good letter, I encouraged him to write his own stories of science fiction in which law figured prominently. He did, sometimes brilliantly; but first I had to convince him that you cannot write completely realistic courtroom scenes because nobody would be willing to slog through them. You have to streamline that kind of dialog, introducing necessary inaccuracies into the details for the sake of readability, but without introducing major ones such as types of interaction that simply wouldn't happen in reality. He taught me a good deal about what those might be, and I haven't been able to watch Perry Mason the same way since—because every episode I've ever seen has featured, predictably as clockwork, a climactic barrage of leading questions that wouldn't be tolerated in any real courtroom.

  Realism in stories is important and commendable, as long as you interpret it as maximizing verisimilitude in portraying interesting situations. But you must not interpret it as limiting yourself to the commonest and therefore dullest situations, and depicting every excruciating detail of those exactly as they would happen. Without readability, none of the rest matters.

  (c)Copyright 2006 by Stanley Schmidt

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  “The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the fastest thinkers."—William Hazlitt

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXVI, No. 3, March 2006. 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 for $43.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, in all other countries, $53.90 (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. (c) 2005 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 stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  The Little White Nerves Went Last

  by John Barnes

/>   Illustration by John Allemand

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  People can behave rationally, but it can be one of the toughest challenges we face.

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  “The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I ground my teeth and stayed there till the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid, and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers."—H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

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  “We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectations ... and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance."—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

  * * * *

  Giraut? Are you waking up?*

  *Hello, Shan.*

  *What's our situation?*

  *Pretty bad.*

  *I guessed that. We're in restraints, and people are talking about us in a way I don't like.*

  After psypyx implantation, normally the personality on the psypyx wakes up one to two hours earlier than the host. *You haven't communicated with them?*

  *The brain monitors told them when I woke up. Since then they've been talking about my being awake, and that I haven't shut myself down. I gather I did that before.*

  *That's right,* I thought back. I was surprised at how quickly and easily the skill of communicating within the head had come back—I had had Raimbaut in my head for just over two stanyears, but that had been more than a decade ago. *Here's the situation, Shan. The people who have us are a completely different aintellects’ conspiracy from the one you remember. A lot of the aintellects in this new lot are, or have been, full-on chimeras—I know we thought aintellects would never do that, but we were wrong. Some of them have spent several lifetimes in human bodies, along with being robots and running on servers.