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  CONTENTS

  Editorial: The 2005 Dell Magazines Award

  Reflections: The Greatness of Cornelius Drible

  Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck by Neal Asher

  Point of Origin by Catherine Wells

  The Summer of the Seven by Paul Melko

  Kath and Quicksilver by Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper

  He Woke in Darkness by Harry Turtledove

  A Shadow Over the Land by Liz Williams

  Bottom Feeding by Tim Pratt

  A Birth by Carrie Richerson

  Verse

  On Books: Peter Heck

  The SF Conventional Calendar

  Letters

  In Our Next Issue

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  Asimov's Science Fiction

  August 2005

  Vol. 29 No. 8

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  Editorial: The 2005 Dell Magazines Award

  The Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing is co-sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and Dell Magazines. As the publisher of two of the science fiction field's leading magazines, Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell takes the magazines’ responsibility for discovering and nurturing new talent seriously. In addition to providing the Dell Magazines Award's five hundred dollar first prize and prizes for the runners-up, Dell sponsors the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author that is bestowed during the annual Hugo-award ceremony. The Dell Magazines Award is also supported by the School of Mass Comunications, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. The judges for the award are Rick Wilber, who oversees the administration of the award, and who reads every single submission, and me.

  This spring, I flew to Florida to meet a charming crew of finalists for the awards at the annual Conference on the Fantastic that is held in Ft. Lauderdale. One of the winners, Madeline B. Sheldon-Dante of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could not be on hand to collect her honorable mention award for “Astep.” Fortunately, though, the rest of the finalists were able to attend the conference. As always, I had chosen my favorite stories from a blind read of the contestants. Still, there were a number of familiar faces among the winners. One of these was Amelia Beamer, a recent graduate of Michigan State University. Amelia (last year's second runner-up) received an honorable mention for “The First Stone.” She is now working full time as an editorial assistant for Locus—SF's leading trade magazine. Another honorable-mention finalist, Catherine Krahe, received a citation for her captivating fantasy, “Undine.” Cassie is a biology student at Illinois Wesleyan, who intends to pursue a Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics.

  One of last year's honorable mentions, Michail Velichansky, an English major at the University of Maryland—College Park, was this year's third runner-up for his horror story, “Evelyn.” I was happy to discover that Michail had recently sold this year's tale to Fantastical Visions Vol. 4.

  Our second runner-up, Alice Kim, is studying science and technology in society at Stanford University. Alice received her award for her chilling short story, “Are You Getting All of This?” In addition to her award certificate, both she and Michail will receive one-year subscriptions to Asimov's.

  Eliza Blair, our first runner-up, is a physics major at Swarthmore college. She received her award for the delightfully inventive tale about “Friends in Need.” Eliza was pleased to learn that she would also be getting a two-year subscription to Asimov's.

  This year's winner, Anthony Ha, is an undergraduate in urban studies at Stanford University. He is the first repeat winner of our award. Last year, Anthony won first prize for “Orbiting,” which is now up at our website. This year, he received the award for his wonderfully claustrophobic tale of a journey “Around the World.” Anthony has one more year of school to go, so I may just see him in Florida next year!

  In addition to attending panels and listening to academic papers and readings, the students were lucky enough to spend some time sitting around the pool with fellow authors like Brian W. Aldiss, Judith Berman, Suzy McKee Charnas, John Clute, John Crowley, Andy Duncan, Stephen Donaldson, Kathleen Goonan, Eileen Gunn, Joe Haldeman, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, John Kessel, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, David Lunde, Rudy Rucker, and Peter Straub.

  Dell Magazines is proud to support these academic awards with IAFA. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is a worldwide network of scholars, educators, writers, artists, filmmakers, critics, editors, publishers, and performers who share an interest in studying and celebrating the fantastic in all art forms, disciplines, and media. I'm pleased that this year's winners were a gifted group of people with much to add to the fantastic in the arts.

  We are actively looking for next year's winner. The deadline for submissions is Monday, January 2, 2006. All full-time undergraduate students at any accredited university or college are eligible. Stories must be in English, and should run from 1,000 to 10,000 words. No submission can be returned, and all stories must be previously unpublished and unsold. There is a $10 entry fee, with up to three stories accepted for each fee paid. A special flat fee of $25 is available for an entire classroom of writers. Instructors should send all the submissions in one or more clearly labeled envelopes with a check or money order. Checks should be made out to the Dell Magazines Award. There is no limit to the number of submissions from each writer. Each submission must include the writer's name, address, phone number, and college or university on the cover sheet, but please do not put your name on the actual story.

  Before entering the contest, please contact Rick Wilber for more information, rules, and manuscript guidelines. Rick can be reached care of:

&nbs
p; Dell Magazines Award

  School of Mass Communications

  University of South Florida

  Tampa, Florida 33620

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  Next year's winner will be announced at the 2006 Conference on the Fantastic, in the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and on our website.

  —Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Reflections: The Greatness of Cornelius Drible

  I've spent the last couple of years nibbling away at a vast and remarkable book, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy—its sixth edition, the one of 1651, the last that its eccentric author revised and corrected himself. (My own copy, which I've owned for many years, is a reprint of a 1927 edition with modern spelling and typography.)

  One does not sit down and read Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy straight through, end to end, any more than one would sit down and eat five pounds of foie gras or a bucketful of beluga caviar. It is too rich, too extreme, for that sort of gluttony. I worked at it at a pace of four or five pages a day, sometimes not even that much; and since my copy runs to 984 pages, you can see how it came to pass that a project that I commenced in the autumn of 2002 was not completed until late in 2004. An extraordinary journey it was, too, and I propose to share some of its gleanings with you here.

  Burton was a British scholar, born during the reign of Elizabeth the First, who spent most of his life as a cloistered and celibate bookworm at Christ Church College, Oxford. During those years he seems to have done nothing but study, with special emphasis on mathematics, religion, astrology, magic, medicine, religion, and classical literature. His sole creative endeavor was a play in Latin, Philosophaster, which had one performance at Oxford in 1617 and went unpublished until 1862. But for many years he assembled significant quotations from his vast reading, which seems to have taken in everything that had ever been written—Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Montaigne, Rabelais, Chaucer, Erasmus, and on and on through the ages, down to his contemporaries Shakespeare and Marlowe. And out of this immense collection of material he began to shape, eventually, the book that has kept his name alive through the centuries.

  Ostensibly The Anatomy of Mel-ancholy is precisely what its name implies: an exhaustive study of the psychological ailment of depression. Evidently Burton suffered from it all his life. It was known to the ancients, he tells us, quoting the Roman physician Galen, who spoke of melancholy as “a malady that injures the mind, associated with profound depression and aversion from the things one loves best.” But his enormous book is much more than a study of the causes and cures of the blues. He includes under “melancholy” virtually every sort of human passion, not just “heaviness and vexation of spirit,” but also such phenomena as love, religious feeling, obsessive behavior of all kinds, the lust for power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, until his book becomes a huge encyclopedia of esoteric information of all sorts, digressing in all directions to embrace medicine as it was known in his day, alchemy, witchcraft, geographical exploration, and just about everything else. All of this he expounds by means of quoting from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the authoritative writers of the ages, weaving it together by means of the sort of opulent, splendiferously resounding prose that was the grand specialty of Elizabethan writers—as, for example, this:

  Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stupend, vast, infinite Ocean of incredible madness and folly: a Sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, Euripuses, and contrary tides, full of calms, Halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies and Tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits, that I know not whether they are more to be pitied or derided, or may be believed, but that we daily see the same still practiced in our days, fresh examples, new news, fresh objects of misery and madness in this kind, that are still represented unto us, abroad, at home, in the midst of us, in our bosoms.

  The first edition of this great and very odd conglomeration of a book appeared in 1621, a small thick quarto. Burton went on revising and enlarging his text, periodically releasing a new edition, until his death in 1640; the edition I read, the sixth, was based on notes and corrections that had been found among his papers. It has been reprinted constantly ever since, and is much beloved and admired to this day by those who have discovered its peculiar charm.

  And why mention it in a science fiction magazine?

  Let me begin answering that question, which will probably take two columns, by sharing with you one of Burton's innumerable little offhand references, offered without footnote or explanation, to something strange and phenomenal: in discussing the wonders of science (in which he includes alchemy) he tells us, on page 462, of the great achievements of a certain Cornelius Drible, which included “a perpetual motion, inextinguible [sic] lights, incombustible cloth, with many such feats."

  Cornelius Drible! Perpetual motion! Incombustible cloth! I had to know more. But Burton gives us not another syllable, so far as I am able to detect, about the astounding achievements of this great but obscure man of science.

  I turned, of course, to Google. (Googling for Drible! There's a statement that would have made no sense at all just a few years ago.) Google, alas, failed me here. It did lead me to a 1621 play by Ben Jonson, News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, nearly as obscure as Drible himself, in which it is announced that exciting news has lately come from the Moon, “but not,” the playwright says, “by way of Cornelius Agrippa [a 16th-century German alchemist, much quoted by Burton] or Cornelius Drible.” A dead end, this, though plainly Drible was enough of a household name in Ben Jonson's time to merit such a casual mention on stage.

  Well. Off I went to a more conventional source of information: Oxford University Press's five-volume History of Technology (1957), which told me nothing of Cornelius Drible but offered me, in Volume III, a couple of paragraphs on Cornelius Drebbel (1573-1633), a Dutchman living in London “whose inventions were extremely varied and attracted attention throughout Europe."

  This had to be Burton's man—a victim of loose-jointed Elizabethan spelling of the sort that produced the “inextinguible” of a few paragraphs back. (Shakespeare himself seems to have spelled his own name in many different ways.) The Oxford History does not mention perpetual motion, but does credit Drebbel with “weapons devised for the Royal Navy, such as the flaming petards used off La Rochelle in 1628, a more economical method for making spirit of sulphur, thermostatic controls for chemical furnaces and incubators, and new processes for dyeing."

  Hot on the trail of Mynheer Dreb-bel now, I turned next to my trusty Eleventh Edition Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), the truest compendium of all knowledge, which told me that Drebbel, in 1630, had accidentally discovered the secret of dyeing wool a brilliant scarlet by means of adding cochineal to a solution of nitric acid and tin, an interesting datum but, well, not greatly exciting. It was from a later edition of the Britannica, the Fourteenth (1968), that I harvested the fact that among my man Drebbel's other inventions was nothing less than the first submarine.

  He built it in 1620, a small craft consisting of a hull of greased leather over a wooden frame, and tested it in the Thames at depths of twelve to fifteen feet. Oars extending through tightly sealed flaps in its sides were the means of propulsion. Air tubes leading to the surface provided the passengers with oxygen. Over the next four years he built two somewhat larger models, and no less a personage than King James I is said to have gone for a brief ride in one.

  A man who could invent a submarine in the seventeenth century could surely have taken a crack at a perpetual-motion machine, too, and so, armed now with the correct spelling of his name, I returned to Google and quickly turned up all the Drebbel information I sought, by way of the Cornelius Drebbel web site that the University of Twente in the Netherlands maintains in his honor. A Dutchman, he was, yes, who in his youth was apprenticed to the famous engraver and alchemist Hendrick Goltzius. While with Goltzius he developed an interest in ch
emistry and mechanical devices, and in 1598, at the age of twenty-five, did indeed invent what might well be called a sort of perpetual-motion machine.

  It was, in fact, a clock, built around a sealed glass vial containing water. Changes in atmospheric pressure caused the liquid to expand and contract, powering an arrangement of gears that would constantly rewind the clock. Ingenious, all right, although not really a device from which energy could perpetually be extracted without new input, which is what a true perpetual-motion machine ought to do. Nor have I been able to find anything about his inextinguible lights or his incombustible cloth. Dribble's clock, though, was clever enough so that King James, upon learning of it, brought him to England in 1604, primarily to be a technician in charge of the royal fireworks displays. But he tinkered with all sorts of devices, most notably a temperature regulator for ovens and furnaces that worked on the same closed-system principle as the clock. This he later developed into an incubator for hatching duck and chicken eggs that made use of what we now know as negative feedback to operate what seems to be the earliest known thermostat: when the temperature within the incubator rose beyond the desired level, air expanded, causing a blob of mercury to close a damper. When the air cooled again, the damper opened to admit more heat.

  This versatile man moved along to the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in 1610 to take the post of chief alchemist, but the onset of the Thirty Years’ War sent him hastily back to London a few years later. There he devoted himself to projects for draining swamps, designed his submarines, and produced some improvements on the compound microscope, which had been invented thirty years before by a fellow Dutchman, Zacharias Janssen. Then there was Drebbel's magic lantern for projecting images, his machine for grinding lenses, his telescope, his process for producing sulphuric acid—

  And yet, for all this phenomenal display of technological genius, Cornelius Drebbel, who did not, alas, invent a perpetual-motion machine after all but who does deserve credit for the submarine and the thermostat, is today all but unknown outside his native land (though he does, at least, have a lunar crater named for him). But for that chance one-sentence reference in The Anatomy of Melancholy, his name would never have crossed my path. And, of course, this description of my quest for Burton's Cornelius Drible has distracted me from telling you more about Robert Burton and his marvelous book. But such a digression is in itself perfectly Burtonian. More about The Anatomy of Melancholy next time.