Asimov's SF, July 2008 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, July 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 Tor Lundvall

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: TWO ROBOTS AND AN ALIEN WALK INTO A BAR by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: REREADING STAPLEDON II by Robert Silverberg

  Department: IN MEMORIAM: JANET KAGAN: 1946-2008

  Department: LETTERS

  Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD LOOKED UP by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Novelette: LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER'S MOONS’ BLUES by Gord Sellar

  Short Story: THE WOMAN UNDER THE WORLD by Steven Utley

  Short Story: CASCADING VIOLET HAIR by R. Neube

  Novelette: VINEGAR PEACE, OR, THE WRONG-WAY USED-ADULT ORPHANAGE by Michael Bishop

  Short Story: 26 MONKEYS, ALSO THE ABYSS by Kij Johnson

  Novella: THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE by Brian Stableford

  Poetry: LIGHT ACROSS AN IMPOSSIBLE LAKE by Mark Rich

  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.7. Whole No. 390, July 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 $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (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) 2008 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

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  Department: EDITORIAL: TWO ROBOTS AND AN ALIEN WALK INTO A BAR

  by Sheila Williams

  Coming upon a genuinely funny tale is both a happy and, alas, far too rare occasion. Writers seem considerably more drawn to the dark side of fiction than they are to the light-hearted. I am sometimes criticized for running issues too dominated by serious and weighty stories. I'm always on the lookout for humor, though, and buy as much of it as I can. I enjoy funny stories and I usually find that readers respond quite positively to them as well.

  There are many explanations for why the amount of humorous fiction available doesn't meet the demand for it. It could be that I'm seeing a lot more funny stories than I realize but I just don't get the joke. I certainly see stories that people tell me are funny, but which don't work for me. Funny stories can be very hard to do well. In addition to everything else that a regular story needs—strong characterization, fresh ideas, and skillful plotting, a funny tale has to include a sense of timing, possibly a sense of the ridiculous, and certainly insight into what makes people laugh.

  “A Portrait of the Artist” (February 2007), Charles Midwinter's tale of an artist and some sentient squirrels, is one very successful example of this sort of story. Not one detail is wasted in this little gem. It's a story that I'd love to see staged as a play. It was also a first sale and it led me to the surprising insight that I seem to encounter more amusing stories from writers who are new or relatively new to me than from the writers I am most familiar with. Other recent examples of newer writers penning funny tales for us include Felicity Shoulders and Tim McDaniel.

  Of course, humor is not completely dominated by new writers. Neal Barrett, Jr., author of the amazing “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (February 1988) and more recently, “Slidin'” (April/May 2008), and “Radio Station St. Jack” (which will be appearing in our August issue), is a true poet of the absurd who can make us laugh until we cry about the apocalypse and its aftermath. I have great admiration for authors such as Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross who can make wisecracks and fashion outrageous scenes while explaining the finer points of the singularity or higher mathematics.

  The aforementioned stories represent some of the many kinds of humorous tales. There are the stories that are funny all the way through, stories that are sublimely ridiculous, tales that may be deadly serious except for moments of hilarity, and stories that are inside jokes. Michael Swanwick is the master of the inside joke. His “Letters to the Editor” (October/November 2001) and “Congratulations from the Future” (July 2007) could only have appeared in Asimov's. Stories like those run the risk of being dismissed by the untutored reader. Fortunately for us, at least 95 percent of you were in on th
e jokes, and the other 5 percent came up to speed pretty quickly.

  Naturally, of course, humor stories run multiple risks. There is the concern that the reader won't get the joke. There's also the possibility that the reader will get the joke, but won't consider it funny. Often, it's the humorous stories that come under the most sustained attacks from critics.

  Critics of short, funny stories often seem to be arguing with a straw-man version of the story. They will go after a serious point that they believe the author made or failed to make. Much of the time, these criticisms would be legitimate if the tale had been a serious one, but in the case of the funny story, the serious point may have nothing to do with what the story is really about. It's tempting, but unfair, to dismiss the critic as lacking a sense of humor. More likely, the writer has failed to get the joke across to widest possible audience or else the critic's sense of what is funny is just narrower than it might otherwise be. What makes my job easier, though, is that it's usually those same stories that reap praise from the rest of you.

  One other disadvantage for the authors of funny fiction is that their skillful work may fail to get serious attention. Yes, there are exceptions, like Connie Willis and Howard Waldrop, who are capable of getting their amusing work onto the final ballots for Hugo and Nebula awards. Still, most award finalists seem to have a lot more in common with Connie's heart breaking “The Last of the Winnebagos” (July 1988) than they do with her comic “Even the Queen” (April 1992). Esther M. Friesner, who has delighted us with numerous witty stories, won both her Nebula awards with dark and disturbing pieces.

  One type of story I'd like to see a lot more of is the kind that can mix the transformative and the earth shattering with the droll and the hilarious. Like a good Irish wake, the end of the world can be easier to take when served with a dollop of humor. I'm not the only one who likes these tales. Stories that can leaven highly stressful situations with some humor are very popular and often receive critical attention as well. This sort of fiction has a very good shot at bringing home the gold. So authors, please keep this advice in mind the next time you set that doomsday device on a course heading for planet Earth.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: REREADING STAPLEDON II

  by Robert Silverberg

  A couple of months ago I chose Odd John, Olaf Stapledon's tale of a superhuman genius, for the fourth in this series of rereadings of classic science fiction novels. Taking a new look at Odd John got me interested in investigating Last and First Men, the British philosopher's most famous book, which such people as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem regard as the greatest of all visions of the far future. More than fifty years had gone by since my last reading of it. I had found it overwhelming then. Would it have the same power for me now?

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  What is immediately apparent is that Stapledon (who lived from 1886 to 1950) may have been a great visionary, but he wasn't much of a prophet. Writing in 1930, he completely failed to foresee the rise of Adolf Hitler just three years later, and spoke of the Germany of his day as “the most pacific [of nations], a stronghold of enlightenment.” Instead he singled out Mussolini, who was already in power, as the strongest figure in Europe ("a man whose genius in action combined with his rhetoric and crudity of thought to make him a very successful dictator"). Most—not all—of Stapledon's portrait of the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is equally wrongheaded—"awkward and naive,” as Gregory Benford said in his introduction to a 1988 edition of the book, and even “ludicrous,” as Brian Aldiss once observed. Stapledon's account of the near future was so far off the mark that in a 1953 American edition of Last and First Men the publisher simply deleted most of the first three chapters of the sixteen-chapter book.

  But Stapledon himself knew he was no prophet. In the preface to the first British edition in 1930, he said that he did not intend “actually to prophesy what will as a matter of fact occur; for in our present state such prophecy is certainly futile, save in the simplest matters. We are not to set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.”

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  So Last and First Men, by its author's own admission, is art—fiction—and not an attempt to predict the future. But it is fiction of a very strange kind, because it is almost totally lacking in such standard fictional appurtenances as character, dialog, and plot. In form it is a work of history, of sorts, a sober and solemn account of the passing eons to come, written in much the same tone as might be used for a chronicle of human life in the Pleistocene or of the development of constitutional theory in Great Britain. It's a sign of Stapledon's great artistry that he manages to make his history of the future such compelling reading.

  To quote him again: “Our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth.... This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.”

  Neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. Yes, indeed. And it is, I think, triumphantly successful at that.

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  The early chapters are hard going because of their manifest failures of prophecy. When we find him predicting an Anglo-French war around 1950 that ends with France ruling all of Europe and England virtually destroyed, we shake our heads. He misses the development of atomic energy, too, giving us only the invention of an explosive weapon so terrible that everyone agrees to destroy the formula for it, and does. But he does hit the target now and then. His analysis of the geopolitical importance of oil is especially shrewd: “The expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful [and] a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars.”

  And who can fail to feel a shock of recognition at his description of Americans: “Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man's existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labor. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph, and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought.” This a decade before World War II, when the United States still lived in isolation from the world, safe behind the barriers of the two great oceans that formed its boundaries!

  Even so, most of what Stapledon has to say about the near future is, as Aldiss said, “ludicrous.” A particularly egregious example is the episode three or four hundred years from now in which negotiators from China and the United States—the two great world powers of the era—meet to hash out a treaty. The American is dressed in a sort of Puritan costume ("a decent gray coat and breeches") and the Chinese delegate wears traditional Chinese garb, “a sky-blue silk pajama suit, embroidered with golden dragons.” It is all very silly, and it is hard for one not to wince.

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  Finally, in the fifth chapter, comes the total collapse of our civilization and a series of catastrophes, some manmade and some natural, that make most of our planet uninhabitable and come close to wiping out all of humanity, and Stapledon begins to hit his stride as a science fiction writer. The wonders begin: a mutation that creates the glorious Second Men, a species of big-brained geniuses who live for hundreds of years, then an invasion from Mars that owes a good deal to H.G. Wells and leaves the Earth devastated again, and then the emergence of another dominant kind of humanity, the Third Men, “slightly more than half the stature of their predecessors,” w
ith immense silken ears that are “expressive both of temperament and passing mood,” and “great lean hands, on which were six versatile fingers, six antennae of living steel.”

  At this point the book is just past the halfway mark, and he starts to hurry his tale along. When he tells us in Chapter Five that we will now skip over the next ten million years, because it was a time of barbarism and stasis, we understand that we are entering a visionary dream. (Ten million years: what an enormously long span! If we go back ten million years from our own day, nothing remotely like a human being has yet evolved.) In the remaining pages Stapledon unfurls one successor species after another—there will be eighteen types of human being in all, over a span of two billion years—and, by so doing, set a mark of inventiveness that the rest of us have been striving to match for nearly eighty years. As he piles one wonder atop another he swings the reader's mind as though in a centrifuge, and then sends it swirling agreeably off to undreamed-of distant places.

  But the book isn't just a zoo of fantastical entities. What is really unrolling before us is a pattern of cyclical history—evolutionary leaps, the development of stunningly enlightened civilizations, inevitable collapses into barbarism or even worse, and, eventually, some new resurgence. In the guise of fantasy he is actually creating an allegory of our own species’ uncertain climb from its early days of savagery to what we smugly think of as our grand modern era, and reminding us that human progress is an uncertain thing and that the direction of the march is not always upward.

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  There are problems of scale, as that ten-million-year leap indicates. Some events, like the political struggles of our own near future and the onset of the Martian invasion, are told in very fine detail. Others are grandly skipped over (the Tenth through Thirteenth Men get only a single page for all four species). Stapledon is aware of this, and explains it by saying that he's trying to make his book comprehensible to readers of our own day.