Asimov's SF, February 2008 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, February 2008

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2008 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 by Bob Eggleton

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: MY ROWBOAT by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: TOILET NIRVANA by Robert Silverberg

  Short Story: FROM BABEL'S FALL'N GLORY WE FLED... by Michael Swanwick

  Poetry: WHERE's THE SEELIES SHOP by Greg Beatty

  Short Story: SEX AND VIOLENCE by Nancy Kress

  Novelette: THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY by James Alan Gardner

  Poetry: THE MIRROR SPEAKS by Jessy Randall

  Novelette: THE EGG MAN by Mary Rosenblum

  Short Story: INSIDE THE BOX by Edward M. Lerner

  Short Story: THE LAST AMERICAN by John Kessel

  Serial: GALAXY BLUES: CONCLUSION: THE GREAT BEYOND by Allen M. Steele

  Poetry: CHESS PEOPLE by Bruce Boston

  Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 32, No.2. Whole No. 385, February 2008. 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 $43.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $53.90 (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, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. (c) 2007 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

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

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  Department: EDITORIAL: MY ROWBOAT

  by Sheila Williams

  The roots of modern fiction, we are told, can be traced to the oral tales passed down by generations of storytellers of all levels of accomplishment. My own introduction to science fiction certainly came about in that way. As I mentioned in my January 2005 editorial, my first memory of SF is my father relating Edgar Rice Burroughs's APrincess of Mars. The book was probably out of print and unavailable from our tiny country library, so he recounted the tale as a goodnight story from his own memory. Of course, unlike the bards of old, he wasn't a trained storyteller, and I'm sure details were lost in the retelling. He had me mesmerized as he described John Carter's desperate race into a cave in an attempt to escape a band of Apaches. Like Burroughs, my father didn't describe what the pursuers saw when they suddenly gave up the chase, but my dad's depiction of their reaction easily convinced me that, if he hadn't escaped to Mars, something truly horrible lay in wait for the hero. Although John Carter revisits the cave at the end of the book, I don't think my father brought him back there in his tale. I'm pretty sure that he couldn't remember what was in the cave and so omitted it from his own version of Burroughs's story. When I finally read the novel, I was thrilled to discover that the mystery was solved but disappointed to find that the sight that met John Carter upon his return from Mars wasn't nearly as terrifying as the one in my imagination.

  I'm sure my father picked up his talent for storytelling from his parents, since both were avid practitioners of that tradition. My introduction to Damon Knight's eerie “To Serve Man,” Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man, and George Langelaan's “The Fly” was via stories told to me by my grandfather. Since years passed between my grandfather's rendition of that last tale and my own reading of it in an anthology, and since I've never seen either movie version, I know that my vivid image of the fly/man's pathetic cry for help in the story's famous last scene comes more from my grandfather than from the printed page.

  My grandfather was a firefighter who loved books, but I'm not sure how much time he had left over for reading fiction after he put in his eighty-seven hour workweek. It's likely that I was getting third-hand versions of each tale since the first story was made into a famous television episode of the Twilight Zone and others became well-known movies. While his stories imparted life-long memories, I'm sure the original stories became somewhat distorted. I know that his umbrage at the idea of a fireman burning books gave me a strange lasting impression of Fahrenheit 451.

  One story that was clearly transformed in its retelling was my grandmother's account of “The Lonely,” a Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling. I was about eight years old when she passed along this story and, to be fair, the numerous distortions came about from what I heard, not from what she
actually said. As I recall, our dialog ran something like this:

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  Grandma: “A prisoner is sent into exile alone on the Moon. The man who brings him supplies feels sorry for him, so on one run he drops off a rowboat to keep the prisoner company."

  Me: “A rowboat? Is there water on the Moon*?"

  Grandma: “Yes, well of course there's some. He wouldn't survive without it. The prisoner starts to think the rowboat can carry on a conversation and that it has feelings, but that's just his imagination. It's really very limited."**

  Me: “The rowboat talks to him?"

  Grandma (ignoring my latest interjection): “Eventually, the prisoner is pardoned and he can come back to Earth, but he won't leave the rowboat behind. His friend has to shoot the rowboat to prove to him that it doesn't have any real feelings."

  Me: “He shoots the rowboat?!"

  At some point, perhaps later in the telling, I'm fairly certain my grandmother made it clear that she was talking about a robot, not a rowboat, but the image of that poor, wounded, and abandoned rowboat remains firmly fixed in my mind. ***

  Like my grandparents and my father, I've become an amateur story-teller. I dine out with my friends on such tales as my rowboat/robot confusion. These same friends are rather used to hearing my synopses of upcoming Asimov's stories (whether they want to or not). I don't get to see too many movies these days, so, unlike my grandfather, my goodnight stories for little ears tend to be the classic tales of written science fiction. My five-year-old may be a captive audience, but when I hit my stride, the stories seem to hold the same power over her that they held over me when I was young. While I'm sure that in my retelling I've done some damage, I hope I haven't wreaked too much havoc on the originals.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Sheila Williams

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  *The story actually takes place on Ceres-XIV. My subsequent viewing of the episode revealed that the planet had a breathable atmosphere, but the landscape looked as arid as the Moon.

  **I could understand limited. My grandparents had retired to a home on a lake in Western Massachusetts. My grandfather had built himself a boat-house in which he docked his rowboat and his motorboat, and while we went fishing in the rowboat, rides in the motorboat were much more exciting.

  ***I'm not the only one, of course, to notice a similarity between the words “rowboat” and “robot.” In 1998, The Onion ran a very funny spoof on Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics entitled “I, Rowboat” by TW-Vac9J5-1581 Rowboat. The article showed just how difficult it was for a small craft to follow the Second Law of Rowboatics wherein if a Rower gives a Rowboat an order that could “cause the Rower to suffer immersion—then a Rowboat must disobey its master in order to save him.” The three laws are also revisited in Cory Doctorow's 2007 Hugo-Award finalist “I, Row-Boat."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: TOILET NIRVANA

  by Robert Silverberg

  By the time you read this, the sixty-fifth World Science Fiction Convention will be history, and a truly historic convention it will have been: not only the annual Worldcon but also the forty-sixth Japan Science Fiction Convention. Science fiction has readers all over the world, but from its beginning in New York in 1939 the Worldcon has usually been an American event, though it did timidly venture as far from our homeland as Toronto in 1948, strayed all the way to England in 1957, 1965, 1979, and 1987, went to Heidelberg, Germany, in 1970, to Melbourne, Australia in 1975, 1985, and 1999, to the Netherlands in 1990, and has gone twice (1995, 2005) to Glasgow. (There have also been three more Canadian Worldcons, Toronto again in 1973 and 2003, and Winnipeg in 1994.) Fifteen non-USA Worldcons out of sixty-four isn't such a bad record of internationalism, really. But not until the sixty-fifth, nicknamed Nippon 2007/JASFIC, has there been a Worldcon in the fervently science-fictional country of Japan. (Or anywhere else in Asia, for that matter.)

  The exigencies of magazine deadlines being what they are, the Yokohama Worldcon called Nippon 2007 is in the past tense for readers of this issue of Asimov's, but it is still a few months in the future for me as I write this. I've traveled widely through the world over the past half century, having visited every continent on Earth except Antarctica, the icy shores of which hold little attraction for this tender resident of California, and I've attended fourteen of those fifteen international Worldcons. (I was too young for the 1948 Toronto event) But I've never been to Japan, and, seasoned traveler though I am, I confess I feel an unusual degree of uneasiness about the journey that awaits me this summer. I know how to use chopsticks, yes. I'm familiar with sushi and sashimi and sukiyaki. I know how many syllables a haiku has to have. As someone who grew up in New York City, I shouldn't be overly frightened of urban congestion. But will I be able to find my way around, or even order a meal, in a country where I'm unable to read a single letter of the native script? How will I cope with the tremendously crowded streets and the furious pace of Japanese cities, said to be far beyond what New York offers?

  And—perhaps the most important thing of all—am I going to be successful at dealing with the kind of toilets that twenty-first-century Japan favors?

  These fears may all turn out to be the merest foolishness. Everyone I know who has been to Japan assures me that the train system operates in English as well as Japanese, that most big-city restaurants are foreigner-friendly, that the cities are not nearly as chaotic as I imagine them to be, and that plenty of help is available to the visitor trying to get around in them. As for the toilets, well, I'm told that some of them are quite advanced in design, yes, but anyone whose profession has required him to spend as much time in the future as I have should, I hope, have no difficulties with them. Still, that part remains to be seen.

  You see, the progress report that the convention committee sent out a few months ago includes all sorts of little tips for visitors to Japan, and among them is this note about Japanese toilets:

  “Some facilities have a high-tech toilet, or more precisely, a basic Western-style toilet with a high-tech seat. The functions on the control panel of the seat usually include bidet functions, a dryer, controls for heating the seat, often a timer for setting when the seat will begin to heat (so it can be warm in the morning or when you get home from work), and sometimes even more functions. Some even have a remote control, a somewhat mysterious feature."

  A remote control on a toilet seat? And what is this other ominous warning, sometimes even more functions. How many functions can a toilet seat have? Of what sort? I began to do a little research into Japanese toilets.

  And learned that Japan is toilet nirvana, where bodily functions are carried out in state-of-the-art surroundings. Japan's formidable engineers have been engaged for the past eight or ten years in a struggle to devise the most ingenious high-tech excretory devices possible, and the results have been quite extraordinary.

  There's the talking toilet, for instance, which has been under development by Toto, Japan's dominant toilet manufacturer. Its cunning microchips are capable of greeting its owner with a personal message, a jolly “Good morning, madame,” perhaps, or a cheerful “Did you sleep well, sir?” Similarly, it can respond to spoken commands: “Open, please.” “Flush, please.” I've seen American newspaper accounts of these products. But I don't know whether they've been placed on the market yet, or how widespread they are if they have. Will I be having little chats with the john in my Worldcon hotel room? Stay tuned.

  Then there's the toilet manufactured by a company called Inax that glows in the dark and automatically lifts its lid as its infrared sensor detects the approach of a human being. (I suppose it's not yet ready to identify the sex of the approaching user and make the appropriate decision about whether to lift the seat also. But it shouldn't be hard to build scanners into the device that can send word down into the microchips that Sir or Madam is arriving.) The Inax—don't confuse it with that big-screen movie mode—comes equipped with six nifty soundtrack
s, too, among them your choice of tinkling wind-chimes, rushing water, birds a-chirping, and the plangent twang of a Japanese harp.

  Consider also the Matsushita model that has a pair of air nozzles to provide climate control in the bathroom: heating in the winter, air conditioning in the summer. Matsushita claims it can lower the room's temperature by ten degrees in thirty seconds. It also can be programmed to pre-heat or pre-cool a bathroom, so that its climate is just right when you get up in the morning. And you can also program the temperature of the bidet-style cleansing spray from below that is already standard in more than half of Japan's bathrooms, a feature that I am told has taken many an unwary foreign visitor by surprise.

  Most futuristic of all are the toilets that double as medical units. Matsushita has one furnished with electrodes that zap the user's rump with a mild electrical charge that yields a digital readout of one's body-fat ratio. Rival company Toto has released a model that measures the sugar level in the user's urine. Still in the developmental stage, I hear, are units that will take measurements of one's weight, blood pressure, heartbeat, and five or six other things, all of which can be relayed straight to one's doctor by a built-in Internet-capable cell phone, so that he has a day-by-day record of his patients’ physical condition.

  This, of course, has aroused the usual twenty-first-century privacy paranoias among many Japanese. If your toilet can e-mail your blood-pressure numbers to your doctor, what about sending your blood-alcohol levels to the highway patrol, or figures on the cannabis content of your urine to your employer? And Japanese civil libertarians are already speculating about the possibility that a health-minded government could collect data on such things as constipation and use the Internet-equipped toilets to send nice little messages back about getting more roughage into one's diet. The Japanese Civil Liberties Union, I am assured, is already alert to these privacy risks. Other guard-ians of Japanese culture are troubled about the excessive coddling that these high-tech loos can afford. They see them as conducive to a softening of the national backbone, metaphorically if not literally.