Analog SFF, September 2009 Read online

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  Cover art by Alperium/Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WHERE CREDIT IS DUE by Stanley Schmidt

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Novelette: EVERGREEN by Shane Tourtellotte

  Science Fact: FROM ATLANTIS TO CANOE-EATING TREES: GEOMYTHOLOGY COMES OF AGE by Richard A. Lovett

  Novelette: FROM THE GROUND UP by Marie DesJardin

  Novelette: ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT by Eric James Stone

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  Novelette: THE LAST RESORT by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXIX No. 9, September 2009

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

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  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

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  Published since 1930

  First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WHERE CREDIT IS DUE by Stanley Schmidt

  The cover on this issue says “September 2009,” though you're probably reading it a bit earlier than that. That date is why I'm writing this now, though I'm not going to tell you exactly what I mean by that until a bit later. Instead I'm going to start with some general musings about who gets the credit for what, and why—and why who gets credit doesn't always correlate perfectly with who deserves it.

  Take the airplane, for instance. Ask almost anybody who invented it, and you'll probably get the answer, “The Wright Brothers, in 1903.” It's certainly true that Orville and Wilbur made a dramatic and major breakthrough on that December day at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but to say that they invented the airplane then makes the process sound far simpler than it was. It makes it sound as if before them there was nothing in the aeronautical realm, and then suddenly they brought forth a fully formed new technology.

  In fact, dramatic as their first flights were, they were merely the culmination of several lines of work by many people over many decades, many of whom probably had no idea that what they were doing had anything to do with flying machines. And those epoch-making flights could just as easily be viewed not as a culmination, but as the beginning—or one beginning—of another series of events leading to the future development of our current massive air transportation system. Orville and Wilbur couldn't have done what they did without building on the earlier accomplishments of (to name just a few) George Cayley, Otto Lilienthal, and Samuel Pierpont Langley, with their gliders; Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt, with their steam engines; Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who built a gigantic steam-powered tricycle; Jean-Joseph Atienne Lenoir, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, and Nikolaus August Otto, with their internal combustion engines; and the Wrights’ own assistant, Charles Taylor, who played a major role in making the first such engine both powerful enough and light enough for sustained flight.

  Or consider genetics, where expansive and still-expanding frontiers were opened up by the understanding of how DNA functions as a genetic code. That got James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology (though for some reason “Watson and Crick” is the catch phrase that everybody now knows, and Wilkins is largely forgotten). But they couldn't have done what they did if physicists like Max von Laue and William and Lawrence Bragg hadn't first developed x-ray diffraction as a technique for analyzing crystalline and molecular structures. Perhaps even more to the point, their insight depended very critically on an x-ray diffraction scan made by Rosalind Franklin, who was very close to figuring it out on her own and whose crucial role has only recently (and, unfortunately, posthumously) come to light.

  It's been often (and truly) observed that teaching something is one of the best ways to learn it. I became more conscious than ever of connections like these while writing The Coming Convergence, the first parts of which examine some historical examples of the tangled webs that have led to inventions or discoveries commonly credited exclusively (and wrongly) to a single individual or team. One or two people get almost all the credit; a little digging will turn up additional names of people who deserve some but are little known; and there may well be others who are never mentioned in print or online but nonetheless played significant parts in making things as they are.

  Certainly that's been true in my own life. My educational resume, as such things are conventionally done, would list the schools I attended and perhaps, if it were unusually thorough, the teachers with whom I took classes. Some of those were actually important influences, but when I look at who my real major influences were, I find the correlation with conventional measures is surprisingly low. Most of the official curriculum, through grade school and high school, was at best a minor contributor to what I actually learned, and sometimes an outright impediment. On reflection, I realized that I am seriously indebted to some of my teachers, not for what they were employed to do, but for little but far-reaching things that they did on their own initiative. The second-grade teacher who encouraged me to browse in the “extra” books in the back of the room after I'd finished the boring daily assignments, for instance, and to write my own two-page adventure stories and show them to the principal. Or the seventh-grade teacher who turned me and a classmate loose to learn logarithms on our own while the rest of the class did little more than rehash the same material they'd been slogging through since fourth grade. Or the high school music teacher who offered to loan me his harmony textbook, for as long as I wanted to keep it, when I was unable to fit his music theory course into my schedule.

  There were other major influences who weren't even part of my school system. One neighbor and friend of my parents was a schoolteacher, but in a different district; her educational importance to me was that she gave me a couple of books that introduced me to new subjects not covered in school, and let me borrow books from her personal library. She and her husband showed me by example that ordinary folks could do interesting, “exotic” kinds of travel that I'd thought only “other” people did. Her husband showed me that they could do kinds of photography far more
ambitious than the kinds I'd previously known, and gave me the key to learning to do it myself. Then there was the neighbor who gave me my first writing “commission,” inviting me to write a creepy story to be read aloud as the centerpiece of a game at a Halloween party she threw for neighborhood kids. And the friend of my parents who gave me my first long-playing record, and let me borrow some of hers.

  Science fiction is no exception to the principle that important influences are not limited to widely known names. Certainly some of those names are hugely important; John W. Campbell, for example, is widely credited with having revolutionized science fiction in these pages, and Ben Bova with expanding its scope while preserving some defining characteristics of this magazine.

  What characteristics? Most notably, an equally strong emphasis on the “science” and the “fiction” in “science fiction.” Both John and Ben tried to insist on stories that were strong as stories, with engaging characters and coherent plots, and were also consistent with plausible science so integrally woven into the story that it could not be removed without making the whole story collapse. “Plausible” did not necessarily mean rigidly rooted in well-established old science, but it did mean that if a story depended on something that sounded fantastic or even impossible to contemporary minds, the author should provide at least a marginally believable basis to make it conceivable. If that required new science, so be it; but the new science had to be imagined in such a way as to be compatible with what we already knew.

  Furthermore, both John and Ben took as a core tenet that many, if not most, problems can be solved by rational thought and appropriate action. They had little sympathy for characters who spent pages and pages bemoaning the terrible world they lived in when they could, and should, have been trying to do something about it. And while they valued most highly stories that were rich in both style and substance, if they had to choose, they prized substance more than style. And in style, they strongly favored clarity over literarily pretentious ornateness and obscurity.

  That's a pretty good, if oversimplified, summary of the values I, too, have tried to maintain in Analog. This is not to say that I try to do things exactly as Ben would have, or that Ben tried to do exactly as John would have. We've all had our own distinctive leanings and quirks, and those have determined the overall shape of the magazine during our respective tenures. That's true of any magazine of this general sort; the magazine's character is very much a reflection of the editor's ideas, attitudes, tastes, and values.

  So I take responsibility, whether you regard that as credit or blame, for the kind of magazine this now is. It's not to everyone's tastes, of course; the field of science fiction has now broadened to the point where it accommodates a very wide range of readers’ likes and dislikes. That's why we have multiple magazines and book publishers. There are readers who have no interest in whether there's science deeply embedded in their stories, or whether what science there is is even remotely plausible. There are readers who are far more interested in style than substance, and readers who sneer at the idea that the universe is a rational place that humans can cope with on rational terms.

  But there are still plenty of readers who do share the kinds of values that John and Ben and I have tried to make the foundation of Analog—enough of them to keep this the best-selling English-language science fiction magazine for several decades. I often get letters or e-mails from them telling me that this is the only place they can still reliably find the kinds of science fiction they prefer. If you're one of them (and if you're reading this, there's a pretty good chance that you are), I appreciate your appreciation. I can only say that I've tried, and will continue to try, to keep those values alive here.

  But I cannot claim to have originated them, and I did not first learn them directly from John or Ben. There is somebody else more responsible than you realize—and maybe more than even he realizes—for the fact that Analog still exists and is the kind of magazine that it is. You've seldom, if ever, seen his name in print, though you have seen him mentioned indirectly in my editorials. He's the one who introduced me to this field by handing me some old issues of Astounding that his uncle had bound and kept, and practically insisting that I read the stories at three bookmarks he'd inserted. He's the one who told me—and showed me—that while all kinds of fantastic imaginings can be great fun, there was something extra special about the kind of science fiction found in Astounding (and later Analog). The fantastic happenings there were ones that could conceivably actually happen—a concept that made a huge impression on me at an early age and has occupied a prominent place in my thinking ever since.

  So if you value the kind of science fiction that Analog tries to publish, and for which it has become a sort of standard bearer—some say its “last bastion"—you owe its continued existence and vigor in considerable measure to my father, Otto Schmidt. Because, for better or worse, today's Analog largely reflects my science-fictional values, and he played a large part in shaping those values. On September 28, he'll be 90 years old—which brings us back to why I'm writing this now.

  This one's for you, Dad. Happy birthday, and thanks.

  Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 9, September 2009. 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]

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Our October issue starts with a bang, with a Bob Eggleton cover for Michael F. Flynn's novella, “Where the Winds Are All Asleep,” a unique and literally deep adventure story. You may think our world has been thoroughly explored, and indeed our knowledge of it has been growing by leaps and bounds. Can it still hold surprises? The answer may be right under your feet, and far bigger (and scarier) than you'd guess.

  The rest of our diverse grab bag of fiction comes from both old favorites (like Jerry Oltion and Carl Frederick) and some very promising newcomers. And it includes not only an unusually successful alien-viewpoint story, but at least a couple of nods to different aspects of the season (it being, at least nominally, October).

  Finally, our fact article, by psychiatrist Nick Kanas, goes beyond the usual technical problems of exploring the universe to another set that may be even thornier: the psychology of space travel.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: EVERGREEN by Shane Tourtellotte

  Superhumans can come in many shapes and sizes, and for many reasons—which can cause unprecedented problems.

  Andrew Crawford could tell an adult in a child's body when he saw one.

  He passed by this playground most days walking to work. Four kids were using it on this cool June morning, but only one caught his eye. He might have seen her before, but today she had given herself away.

  She looked about eigh
t, wearing a blue jumper, white tights, and high-top sneakers. She was swinging and tumbling around on monkey bars, her long brown hair sometimes falling over her face. She jumped down and ran over to a climbing wall, and there it became obvious.

  Children always had a jerkiness in their movements, from never fully adjusting to their growing bodies. She, though, ran with a fluidity of motion that real kids never had, that came from living in a body that hadn't grown for ten or twenty years. Closer to twenty, Andrew judged.

  She had been “frozen,” her genes manipulated in the womb to halt her physical maturation partway to adulthood. Parents had been doing this, in varying numbers, for three decades now, for a variety of reasons that all cut no ice with Andrew. The worst of it was, she was probably a contemporary of Andrew's, but was still behaving, playing, like the child that she wasn't.

  Revulsion uncoiled in the pit of his stomach. “Act your age,” he hissed. She was much too far away to hear.

  Andrew quickened his pace past the playground, his little legs not carrying him fast enough to suit him. He did not look back. A few pedestrians gave him curious looks, but he was used to that, and paid no attention.

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  Andrew had a busy morning, retooling a customer survey page on his company's website. He had just drained his second mug of coffee when he spotted Jason McCarthy chatting up one of the women across the office. “Jason, can I see you?” he called, ruing for about the thousandth time not having a projecting, commanding, adult voice.

  Jason sauntered over, already looking insufferable. He made an exaggerated lean over Andrew's scaled-down desk. “Morning, Andy. What's up?"

  It's Andrew, asshole, Andrew thought, but that running fight would have to wait. “I need that terms-of-use file for the new linked-appliance line."

  "Yeah, it's coming along. I'll have it done for you by the end of the day."