Analog SFF, November 2009 Read online

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  Cover art by Vincent Di Fate

  Cover design by Victoria Green

  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: AIMING HIGH—OR LOW? by Stanley Schmidt

  Serial: TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUNTAIN, PART I OF II by G. David Nordley

  Science Fact: ROCK! BYE-BYE, BABY by Edward M. Lerner

  Novelette: AMABIT SAPIENS by Craig DeLancey

  Short Story: FOREIGN EXCHANGE by Jerry Oltion

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: LESSONS FROM THE LAB by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  Short Story: THANKSGIVING DAY by Jay Werkheiser

  Novelette: JOAN by John G. Hemry

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXIX No. 11, November 2009

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  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: AIMING HIGH—OR LOW? by Stanley Schmidt

  It has long been common in some circles of science fiction fans to refer to people who don't share their taste in literature, or their visions of the future, as “mundanes.” So it's perhaps a bit ironic that in the last very few years a movement has arisen within science fiction calling itself “mundane science fiction."

  The idea, in short, is that many of the common themes and trappings of science fiction have little basis in established science and so don't really belong in the field. To paraphrase a few of its core tenets, as I understand them: There is no evidence that time travel, alternate universes (and travel between them), or faster-than-light travel is possible. Even slower-than-light interstellar travel or communication is so overwhelmingly difficult that it is unlikely to be achieved by us or anybody else—even if there is anybody else, and there's no real evidence for that, either. And even if there were, aliens would likely be so fundamentally different that no real communication would be possible between them and us.

  Therefore, the mundane-SF advocates tell us, it is overwhelmingly likely that the future of humanity will be one of humanity alone on Earth or in its relatively immediate vicinity. Therefore and furthermore, that's where science fiction should concentrate its efforts: on imagining what our future is really likely to be, right here on the world of our birth, with nothing to rely on but the resources it provides and no one to rely on but ourselves. And since we're trying to be as realistic as possible, we should do our imagining strictly within the framework of the science we actually know—which implies both capabilities and very strict limits.

  No wonder they call it “mundane."

  Actually, I have a certain amount of common ground with the mundane-SF people. I have long held that one of the important things for science fiction to do is pretty much what they describe: imagining carefully and in considerable detail what can be done, both good and bad, by application of the scientific principles that we already know. We certainly need writers doing that.

  Where we part company is that I maintain that that's only one of the things we need writers doing, while they explicitly discourage doing anything else. Writing about futures in which habitable worlds are plentiful and humans travel among them and interact with their nonhuman but intelligent inhabitants, they tell us, encourages false hopes and a wasteful attitude toward our limited resources.

  But they overlook a number of important facts and distinctions. Writers about interstellar travel, first contact, or interstellar federations are not, in my experience, saying that this is the way the future is going to be—but those who advocate limiting ourselves to Science As We Know It are saying that this is, at least within broad limits, the way it's going to be.

  The assumption that we—or they—know what the most probable future is seems to me arrogant in the first degree. It assumes there will be no more major surprises in the future, and I'd love to know how they can know that. There have been several huge ones in the last century or so—relativity, quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, and the wild and wonderful world of DNA, to name just a few. The idea that we're finished and there will be no more seems to me far-fetched in the extreme.

  Let's see ... what would a conscientious mundane-SF writer in 1900 have considered fair game for his speculations? Urban pollution caused by too many horses in the streets? Maybe even automobiles replacing some of those horses? Radiotelegraphs? Possibly airplanes would have been accepted by some, but not all.

  But such a writer would certainly have considered it unacceptably far-fetched to mention the tiny, powerful computer on which I'm writing this, or the internet on which readers will argue about it, or the communications satellites that enable people to chat with families on the other side of the world. The list could go on for quite a while, but the principle is simple and essential: Our most probable future is one that we can't predict, because it will include not only obviously logical outgrowths of what we already know, but lots of disruptive surprises. Relatively little ones, resulting from unexpected convergences of seemingly unrelated sciences and technologies (as the CT scan resulted from the fusion of x-ray imaging, medicine, and high-speed computing); and huge ones, resulting from fundamental shifts in our understanding of the world, like relativity, quantum mechanics, and DNA-based genetics.

  Writers who try to be conscientious and responsible by refusing to try to guess what those surprises might be can be assured of only one thing: that the future they try so hard to make realistic will be anything but—because it will not take into account the biggest changes that will shape it.

  Writers who do try to guess what some of the surprises might be can't expect to get very many of them right, either. But at least they will get the fact that there will be surprises, and they can attempt to explore how people might react to them and how their lives might change as a result. That's important, too. Since we can be pretty sure that future science and technology will take some unexpected turns, exploring how people might handle them can be at least as important as working out the details of de
velopments whose possibility is already obvious.

  And, just occasionally, one of those wilder imaginings may turn out to be closer to something we actually get than any of the more careful, conservative extrapolations.

  Extrapolation. That's the word I have long used to describe essentially what the mundane-SF folks consider their lofty aspiration: to imagine rigorously what developments might actually grow from already-known science. They consider it a prescription for What Science Fiction Should Be. I consider it a prescription for one of the two main kinds of science fiction.

  The other, which I consider no less important, I call “Innovation.” That refers to stories that depend not just on extrapolation from known science, but on imagining fundamentally new kinds of science that might conceivably be discovered in the future, and working out what might become possible as a result.

  Note carefully that this does not mean than “anything goes.” You can't just imagine whatever outlandish thing you like, call it “new science,” and label the story you build on it “science fiction.” In deciding whether an “innovation” story is legitimately science fiction, I use what I call the “negative impossibility” test. You don't have to be able to prove rigorously that your speculation is possible, as in the best of what mundane-SF advocates call mundane SF and I call pure-extrapolation SF. But you do need to imagine it in such a way that it is not provably impossible, or provably inconsistent with parts of established science that are well confirmed by experiment.

  There's a precedent for this in real science itself. Physicists sometimes speak of a “correspondence principle,” according to which the predictions of a theory created to explain a new region of experience must give the same results as the old theory in regions where the old theory matched experiment well. The classic example is mechanics. Sir Isaac Newton formulated laws to describe the motions of all the objects he'd seen, all of which moved much slower than light. Albert Einstein created a new set of equations because Newton's version weren't accurate for objects moving close to the speed of light. But, contrary to a popular misconception, this does not mean that Einstein “proved Newton wrong” or invalidated his equations. Rather, he created a model that worked through a wider range of experience—including the “Newtonian” world of slow-moving objects. The predictions of Einstein's equations are equivalent to those of Newton's at very low speeds, and diverge gradually as speeds increase. For slow objects, most of us still use Newtonian equations because they're easier to work with and the results are indistinguishable at those speeds.

  Similarly, any new model you invent for a science fiction story—say, to make FTL believable—will still have to include relativity as a special case, and give the same results in the region of experience for which we have experimental verification of relativity. Such a model might well require a radical restructuring of theoretical foundations, but that has happened more than once before and will quite likely happen again.

  Besides, one could easily get the impression from listening to the pontifications of some mundane-SF advocates that this whole business is deadly serious and somber: We should write only about the kind of future we're most likely to get because we must make sure everyone has the proper attitude toward learning to cope with it. Well, yeah, we need some of that—but let's not forget that science fiction is also about fun. Sometimes a story is worth telling not because it's terribly likely to come true, but just because some outrageous-but-not-provably-impossible idea would have such deliciously wild consequences if it did turn out to be true that the temptation to play with them is irresistible.

  And there's nothing wrong with that.

  In this type of discussion I'm often drawn back to something I once heard Poul Anderson say, when a bunch of us had gathered in Florida for the launch of Apollo 17. The perennial question of what distinguishes science fiction from fantasy came up, and Poul drawled, “You know, sometimes I think the most fantastic fantasy of all is what's usually thought of as the hardest hard science fiction. Because what could possibly be more fantastic than the idea that we already know all the basics?"

  Or, in today's context, maybe it isn't really fantastic. It's just mundane.

  Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt

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  Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 11, November 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]

  Serial: TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUNTAIN, PART I OF II by G. David Nordley

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  Chapter 1

  Somewhere Unexpected

  Jacques Song opened his eyes and saw a huge fish floating above the canopy of his cold sleep unit and staring at him. He shut them immediately; it must be a bad dream. People often had dreams as cold sleep evolved into normal sleep and wakefulness.

  Last night, 21 June 2345, he and the rest of the corps had listened to some inspirational nonsense from Earth Empress Marie, lifted a glass of rum spiked with cold sleep preparation drugs, and dutifully lain down on their hotel beds at Sheffield Station in Earth orbit.

  In deep sleep, they'd been transferred to Cold Sleep Units and loaded onto starships bound for 36 Ophiuchi. The process would be reversed twenty-three years later when the invasion force had established itself, hopefully undetected, at a base in the Kuiper belt around 36 Ophiuchi A and B. Their mission was to liberate a colony gone horrifically wrong.

  But that colony was not under a sea filled with staring fish.

  The colony leaders didn't believe in using robots—labor cleansed the soul. Slavery in all but name had evolved in a decade. Polygamy, child marriage, gladiatorial executions, and inherited subordinate status became the rule. They'd bungled relations with primitive aliens on another of 36 Ophiuchi A's planets, raising concerns about humanity's status in the galaxy.

  But those aliens did not, as he remembered, look like fish.

  Dissenters had fled to the hills and risked everything to call for help—which would take half a century at best to get there. Before 36 Ophiuchi, the consensus had been that the distance between stars made interstellar warfare impossible. The colony leaders had counted on it.

  But faced with a cry for help, Earth considered the impossible. There'd been a mammoth debate informed by massive simulations showing that, absent outside influence, the theocracy might persist indefinitely. The decision had been made, volunteers recruited, and robots instructed to prepare a fleet. Jacques, divorced and looking for distance, had signed up.

  Jacques opened his eyes again, and the fish was still there, all too real. Maybe two meters long, it boasted a huge parrotlike beak, but otherwise looked something like a shark. He was wide awake now. He was obviously not on the conveyor ship, Resolution, so something else had gone horrifically wrong.

  He tried to t
ouch the net, but the lack of response didn't surprise him. The CSU seemed inert, but he was breathing, so it must be functioning to some extent. The things were designed to keep you viable in a suspended state for a couple of centuries without external power—they warmed you up to a coma every few months for DNA repair.

  "CSU, what's your energy level?” he asked. As soon as he moved, the parrot-beaked shark tried to bite through the canopy, but didn't have much success against the flexidiamond.

  A heads-up display flashed in front of him, superposing itself over the curious—or hungry—fish. It showed he had about two hours left at present consumption levels, which were at emergency minimum. The display flashed off again. The CSU might as well have said, “I've done what I can. It's your problem now."

  Jacques raised himself on his elbows. The water—assuming it was water—around him was not all that clear and the light level must be very low. From what he could see, his CSU seemed to be resting on nearly level sand, with a few huge, dark, boulderlike objects here and there. The surface seemed far above him.

  He would probably have to try to reach it.

  But when? Conventional wisdom would have him wait as long as he could for rescue. The CSU, he realized, had maximized that time. Rescue wasn't coming.

  First things first. He needed to inventory his assets. He reached into a cubbyhole to his left for his personal effects; his wrist comp and a couple of backup data disks—what he'd left on his hotel night table for the Resolution's robots to take with him. The objects seemed very light—low gravity?

  The wrist comp was dead, powerless. He shivered. Just how long had it been? He suppressed the urge to ask immediately—if he were going to get out of this situation alive, he would need to use what was left of the CSU's power very efficiently.

  Another cubbyhole held an emergency kit in a sealable bag, which he emptied and inventoried. It struck him as an eclectic jumble of stuff someone assembled to fill a regulatory square, never expected to be used. There was another wrist comp, its memory filled, no doubt, with all sorts of survival information. It was powerless. There was a survival tent, nicely folded down to the size of an envelope. There were a few pieces of primitive, non-electronic gear including a dozen nutrition bars, a compass, a magnifying lens, needle and thread, a ten-centimeter-long multitool, a pair of fabric canteens, a photovoltaic power supply, binoculars, space blankets, etcetera. Finally, occupying most of the volume of the kit, there was a shipsuit.