Asimov's SF, July 2010 Read online

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  Cover art by Tomislav Tikulin

  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: OUT OF THIS WORLD by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE SEARCH FOR OTHER EARTHS by Robert Silverberg

  Short Story: THE OTHER GRACES by Alice Sola Kim

  Poetry: THE GEARS OF NEW AUGUST by Bruce Boston & Todd Hanks

  Novelette: HAGGLE CHIPS by Tom Purdom

  Novelette: THE JAGUAR HOUSE, IN SHADOW by Aliette de Bodard

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Short Story: EDDIE'S ANTS by D.T. Mitenko

  Poetry: NEOSAUR by Robert Borski

  Short Story: AMELIA PILLAR'S ETIQUETTE FOR THE SPACE TRAVELER by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Novella: A HISTORY OF TERRAFORMING by Robert Reed

  Department: ON BOOKS: THIRD WORLD WORLDS by Paul Di Filippo

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 34 No. 7. Whole No. 413, July 2010. 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) 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. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. 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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  Stories from Asimov's have won 50 Hugos and 27 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 34, No. 7. Whole Nos. 413, July 2010. 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, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2010 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 Worldcolor St. Jean, 800 Blvd. Industrial, St. Jean, Quebec J3B 8G4.

  Department: EDITORIAL: OUT OF THIS WORLD by Sheila Williams

  A few years ago, I was delighted to discover that in the tight quarters of the International Space Station, the small library of books, movies, TV shows, and music intended for “recreational/off duty consumption” includes a dozen back issues of Asimov's and Analog. The selections in the library seem to prove that astronauts really do read science fiction. Of the eighty-nine books listed, forty-five appear to be science fiction (another seven are fantasy). Lois McMaster Bujold and David Weber are heavy favorites, but works by Kim Stanley Robinson, Walter Jon Williams, Mary Turzillo, Harry Turtledove, Greg Bear, and other SF authors also command the station's precious shelf space. Astronauts who want to take a break from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, Charles Darwin's Origins of Species, or The Federalist Papers can also peruse timeless SF novels by Isaac Asimov or Jules Verne.

  It's heady to think of an astronaut whiling away some downtime immersed in an issue of Asimov's. I can just imagine someone turning the pages of the magazine as they float in zero g. It's an image that I'm sure our founder, Isaac Asimov, would enjoy.

  I have no idea how the library was compiled, but it's easy to presume that the books came aboard the space station a few at a time in the astronauts’ personal belongings. Since the issues of Asimov's and Analog both date from a six-month period in 2004, it may even be that one of the astronauts was a subscriber who left his or her copies behind to entertain subsequent visitors to the station.

  I'm always impressed by how many famous scientists attribute their early inspirations and enthusia
sm for their fields to the works of classic science fiction writers. When I think of Asimov's orbiting the Earth, I am gratified that modern SF authors seem to be accomplishing the same thing. It's also gratifying to think that the people who are living the adventure that once upon a time existed only as tall tales spun by SF authors continue to appreciate those tales.

  Of course, once I had the library's list of reading material on hand, it was impossible not to peak at it to see what other books are read by astronauts on space stations. I wasn't surprised to learn that in between reading Asimov's and novels by Dan Simmons and Catherine Asaro, astronauts returning from an EVA or who are finishing up a day spent grappling with fifty-five foot robotic arms amuse themselves with books by David Sedaris and P.G. Wodehouse. Novels of suspense by John le Carre, James Patterson, and Dan Brown were to be expected and Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz seemed a reasonable choice. I wondered, though, was the person who brought The Ten-Day MBA aboard thinking about getting into asteroid mining or looking for a career change?

  This collection of physical editions of books and magazines made its way onto the space station before electronic readers were as ubiquitous as they are now. Perhaps the library has since been expanded to include thousands of e-books. I don't know if Asimov's is spinning around the Earth on a Nook, but I do know that electronic versions of some Asimov's stories now have an extraterrestrial home. As Allen M. Steele pointed out in his bio note for “The Emperor of Mars” in last month's issue, some of our tales were included on a mini-DVD called Visions of Mars that arrived safely on the red planet in 2008.

  The disk, which was assembled by The Planetary Society, contains eighty stories and articles, as well as artwork and radio shows. The material on it was first scheduled for a 1996 voyage to Mars aboard a Russian spacecraft. Alas, that ancient CD-ROM now lies on one of Earth's seafloors since neither the disk nor its ride made it out of orbit. Fortunately, this treasure trove of information was reproduced and launched for the fourth planet aboard the Phoenix on August 4, 2007.

  Poring over the index of stories brings to life my earliest encounters with this most evocative of our planetary neighbors. I can imagine Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars sharing space with the inhabitants of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. I'm sure Roger Zelazny's “Rose for Ecclesiastes” is still breaking hearts. I'm glad Tom Dish's Brave Little Toaster has finally really gone to Mars and relieved that Theodore Sturgeon's tragic “Man Who Lost the Sea” made it there too.Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, John Varley's Martian Kings, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver may now turn to H. Beam Piper's “Omnilingual” before they embark on Stanley G. Weinbaum's “Martian Odyssey.” Phil Dick can remember this for us wholesale and in the meantime, I'm sure Isaac Asimov's Max will always try to see what he can get away with while in Marsport without Hilda.

  Six of the stories on the disk were first published in Asimov's in the eighties and reprinted in Isaac Asimov's Mars in 1991. These tales are “The Dificulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica” by Brian W. Aldiss, Gregory Benford's “All the Beer on Mars,” Ian McDonald's “The Catharine Wheel,” Kim Stanley Robinson's “Green Mars,” Allen Steele's “Live from the Mars Hotel,” and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Windwagon Smith and the Martian.” Another Asimov's regular from that time, Lewis Shiner, is represented on the disk by his translation of Japanese author Aramaki Yoshio's “Soft Clocks."

  It's awesome to think that when astronauts board the space station or when settlers finally make it to Mars, they'll see first hand what the readers of this magazine already know—that the fiction in Asimov's is out of this world.

  Copyright © 2010 Sheila Williams

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: REFLECTIONS: THE SEARCH FOR OTHER EARTHS by Robert Silverberg

  "To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space,” the Greek philosopher Metrodoros the Epicurean wrote about 300 bc, “is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow."

  I believe that too, although the only evidence I have for its truth is the same as Metrodoros': simple common sense. He knew of five planets aside from our own—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter —and perhaps he thought they were inhabited, but also he could see that the sky was full of stars. He didn't have any telescopes to show him the existence of worlds of other stars, and neither do I. But the universe is infinitely large, as Metrodoros understood two and a half millennia ago, and that which is infinite contains an infinite amount of everything. It is a place in which not merely uncountable numbers of suns exist, but uncountable numbers of galaxies. To me it seems unlikely, to say the least, that in all that literally unthinkable multitude of galaxies there is only one planet, one little dinky world, on which living beings can be found.

  For many centuries the concept of a multiplicity of worlds was dangerous heresy in Christian Europe. A literal interpretation of the Bible had produced the belief that God had created the world—flat, floating on water—in six days, and had placed the sun in the sky to provide light, and in that same week had created man and woman and various subordinate creatures to populate it. Earth was unique and at the center of the universe. There was nothing in Scripture about other worlds or other forms of life; therefore, such things did not exist.

  The work of the sixteenth-century Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus began the process of undermining the concept of a geocentric cosmos. Copernicus showed that the Earth and its sister planets must move in orbit around the sun, rather than the sun going around us, as it appeared to do; but he mistakenly thought the orbits were circular, and it remained for the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, building on the work of a Dane, Tycho Brahe, to show that the planetary orbits were in fact elliptical. With the mathematical foundations now in place, the modern view of the universe began quickly to emerge. I suppose there are still some believers in the pre-Copernican theory of the universe, but very few, I suspect, are readers of this magazine; the rest of us have no difficulty with the notion that Earth travels around the sun and is just a speck in a vast universe full of stars and—very likely—a host of other planets more or less like our own.

  That extrasolar planets exist is no longer theoretical. Our telescopes aren't powerful enough to show them to us, but in one indirect way or another we have demonstrated the existence of some 330 such worlds. (For lovely and plausible paintings by Lynette Cook of what these already discovered extrasolar worlds might look like, check out extrasolar. spaceart.org/extrasol.hmtl. The ones located so far, though, have had to be big enough—Jupiter-sized, at least—so that their gravitational field perturbs the motions of the sun about which they move in a detectable way, and that means that they are too big to support the kind of life that thrives on Earth. That is not to say that no Earth-sized worlds exist out there, only that we are currently unable to detect their presence. But in an infinite cosmos there surely must be an infinite number of worlds, including some very much like Earth, and at this moment we have a space-going telescope up above us, searching for those other Earths.

  It's called, appropriately enough, Kepler. NASA launched it in March 2009, putting it into solar orbit at such an angle that Earth itself would not block its view of the galaxy. Because it is located in space, the images it collects are not subject to atmospheric blurring (the effect that makes the stars seem to twinkle, down here on Earth). A couple of months of tweaking were necessary before Kepler became fully functional, but it has been sending back data since July 3, 2009, and very likely some interesting revelations will have come forth by the time you are reading this piece, nine months or so after I've written it.

  Kepler is not the only space-based telescope capable of spotting extrasolar planets. The French Space Agency and various European partners launched one in December 2006 called, in a nice Gallic cultural touch, COROT—COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits. Within five mont
hs it had sent back data on its first discovery. But COROT is best suited for detecting planets greater in diameter than Earth. As for our Hubble telescope, it was designed for other uses than the quest for extrasolar planets, and does not remain focused on any one star group long enough to gather the kind of information needed.

  Kepler, though, has a fixed field of view that continuously observes more than 100,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus, Draco, and Lyra. These constellations were chosen because they lie outside the plane of the ecliptic and thus will not be hidden from Kepler's eye by sunlight. During its lifespan of some 3.5 years, Kepler will be looking for planetary transits, the passing of a planet in front of its star. Such a transit would cause a temporary reduction in the star's apparent brightness; the transit of an Earth-sized planet, for example, would briefly reduce the observed magnitude of its star by 0.01 percent. We can't detect such a minute fluctuation with Earth-based telescopes. But Kepler can, and because its gaze is constantly fixed on the same stars it not only can take note of the movements of such relatively small worlds but keep track of the interval between transits, from which the size of the planet's orbit can be calculated and even some conclusions thus drawn about its climate.

  Kepler will need to record at least three planetary transits to make certain that it is a planet that is causing the dimming, and not some random fluctuation of the star. Thus the first reports from Kepler probably will tell us about planets hundreds of times as big as ours, moving in orbits relatively close to their stars, since those are easiest to detect. Anything living on such a world would have to put up with immense gravitational forces and searing solar radiation, and, therefore, whatever kinds of life-forms such planets might have—animated balls of plasma, drifting networks of pure energy, whatever—will not be anything like those of Earth. For the time being, thinking about such beings must remain in the realm of pure speculative fantasy. Even when Kepler begins locating smaller worlds, the ones that have the sort of gravitational pull and geological structure that would make them habitable by Earth-type life, it will be necessary to consider that those that move in orbits extremely distant from their suns are likely to be chilly places, unsuitable also for Earth-type life, and those that are very close will be too hot. We know enough about our own solar system to understand that only one of its nine planets (or eight, if you are a Pluto-denier) can support our kind of life. But there's no doubt that the universe is full of planets, and that one chance out of nine, if it carries through everywhere, yields the realization that the cosmos is teeming with habitable worlds.