Asimov's SF, December 2009 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, December 2009

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2009 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 Duncan Long

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: ALL AROUND THE TOWN by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: BUILDING WORLDS: PART III by Robert Silverberg

  Short Story: A LOVELY LITTLE CHRISTMAS FIRE by Jeff Carlson

  Poetry: THE ANTI-WORLD by Andrew Gudgel

  Short Story: AS WOMEN FIGHT by Sara Genge

  Short Story: ANIMUS RIGHTS by John Shirley

  Short Story: ANGIE'S ERRAND by Nick Wolven

  Poetry: THE WORLD'S ENDING AGAIN IN 2012 by Darrell Schweitzer

  Short Story: LEAVING THE STATION by Jim Aikin

  Novelette: A LARGE BUCKET, AND ACCIDENTAL GODLIKE MASTERY OF SPACETIME by Benjamin Crowell

  Poetry: SHINER by G.O.Clark

  Short Story: THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN by Mike Resnick

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Novelette: SOME LIKE IT HOT by Brian Stableford

  Department: ON BOOKS by Peter Heck

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 33, No.12. Whole No. 407, December 2009. 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. © 2009 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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  Stories from Asimov's have won 44 Hugos and 25 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

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  Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our manuscript guidelines. To obtain this, send us a self-addressed, stamped business-size envelope (what stationery stores call a number 10 envelope), and a note requesting this information. Please write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. The address for this and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

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  Department: EDITORIAL: ALL AROUND THE TOWN

  by Sheila Williams

  A tour that maps the movement of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine's New York offices is a journey through Manhattan's historic business districts. The excursion ranges from the East side to the West side. It gets into the fifties and ends up at our newest digs near the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The only office I never set foot in was the first one. Near 18th Street, 267 Park Avenue South was the headquarters for Davis Publications. The offices were just up the street from Union Square and not far from New York's famous Flatiron Building. When he founded Asimov's, Joel Davis was already the publisher of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Apparently the built-in bookshelves in the office were all specially constructed for it and other periodicals. The wooden shelves were painted white, and made to house digest-sized magazines. One case was even designed specifically to hold unsolicited manuscripts. Although no one from those old offices remains with the magazines, those bookshelves have accompanied us to all our subsequent locations.

  In 1978, Davis Publications moved into the Chanin Building at 380 Lexington Avenue. This elegant art-deco edifice was the tallest building in New York City when it was erected in 1929. Too soon, the building's height was eclipsed by its more famous cousin—the Chrysler Building—which happens to stand kitty-corner to it. When I went to work for Davis Publications in December 1981, the lobby was looking a little tarnished. Indeed, all of New York seemed to have an air of faded gentility. The windows in Grand Central Terminal across the street had been painted black during the Second World War to protect the station and the city from bombing raids. They stayed that way until 1988. Restoration began on both structures late in that decade. Once the true grandeur of the pre-war train station and the sumptuousness of the Chanin Building's lobby were revealed, I often wondered what I'd done to deserve such beauty in my life.

  During the ten years that I worked for Joel Davis (and the one extra year that we stayed in the building after the fiction digests were sold to Bertelsmann Media and merged with Dell Magazines), I inhabited seven different rooms on two separate floors. Various office mates included the editorial assistants of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, Sylvia Porter's Personal Finance Magazine, and Analog, as well as Shawna McCarthy and Gardner Dozois, two former editors of Asimov's. Neither the editors nor I had offices to ourselves until we were sold to Bertelsmann. With all those moves we learned to travel light, but we still managed to amass a huge number of files and back issues of the magazines.

  Our new owners brought us a new publisher, an Austrian named Chris Haas-Heye. As he readied us for the o
ncoming move, he constantly urged us to “divest, divest, divest” of all unnecessary papers, files, and magazines. Historians may weep, but we were several tons lighter when we took up residence as the very first tenants in the brand new Bertelsmann Building located at 1540 Broadway.

  The Bertelsmann Building is in the heart of Times Square. Although it was an exciting place to work, it wasn't the shiny Times Square that we know today. While I could approach the building from several directions, there was only one circuitous route that didn't take me past a sex shop. This was in contrast to the desolate theater a couple of blocks away that was home only to a gentleman with a megaphone who relentlessly informed us that we were all headed for eternal damnation. While those shops are long gone and the theater now houses The Lion King, we too moved on around 1997, several months after Dell Magazines was sold to Penny Publications.

  Our travels took us to Rockefeller Center and the same building that houses Radio City Music Hall. A lovely perk was the annual summer notification of eligibility for discounted tickets to the Christmas Spectacular. Due to complicated reasons and good fortune, I found I had an enormous corner office to myself. (Gardner Dozois always wanted to know where I planned to put the swimming pool.)

  Alas, such luxuries were relatively short lived. In 1999, we were packed off to Park Avenue South, not far from the Empire State Building. Although ten blocks south, it felt a bit like a return to our old Chanin neighborhood. Restaurants, which are a bit overpriced in tourist areas like Times Square and Rockefeller Center, were more economical and diverse. My daily walk across town from Penn Station took me through Little Korea, and we were only a few blocks north of an area that is densely packed with Indian restaurants and grocery stores.

  Now we are moving once again—this time to a beautiful location in an older part of the city. Once again, we've been divesting ourselves of files and magazines. Masses of issues and anthologies have been shipped off to Walter Reed Hospital, the USO, schools, and science fiction conventions. We'll arrive at 267 Broadway a leaner and meaner machine. The frenzied cleaning has already unearthed my college correspondence with Rod Serling that had been missing for years and letters from Arthur Clarke I didn't know I'd lost. The new office overlooks the park around City Hall. For the first time, I'll be in a workplace where the streets are named instead of numbered. Since the island of Manhattan narrows there, and the office is close to many subways, I don't expect to get too lost. It's not far from Wall Street and the South Street Sea Port and it's only half a mile from my hairdresser's salon in Chinatown. As I approach the latest stop on the Asimov's tour, I can't wait to begin exploring some more sidewalks of New York.

  Copyright © 2009 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: BUILDING WORLDS: PART III

  by Robert Silverberg

  My last two columns have been devoted to a basic aspect of writing science fiction: the designing of planets. In the first column I talked about ways to achieve scientific plausibility; in the second, I described how I had conceived and developed the specs for my own best-known world, the Majipoor of Lord Valentine's Castle. I want to go on now to discuss how I invented my characters and the social matrix in which their lives would be lived.

  I told last time of how Majipoor was ruled by a dual monarchy: a senior king, the Pontifex, and his junior companion, the Coronal. Upon the death of a Pontifex his Coronal succeeds to that title and chooses a new Coronal of his own. Thus the monarchy is an adoptive one, rather like what evolved in Rome in the time of the Emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius.

  The protagonist of the book I was constructing would be the Coronal Lord Valentine, cast from his throne by a usurper, robbed of his memory, and set loose to wander. A useful archetype: I find in my files a note that reads, “Valentine as Grail Knight—Perfect Fool—born ignorant and learns gradually.” And again: “A hero suffers, comes to power as the regenerator of the world.” And my own final comment: “Valentine is an amiable & sunny man, though no simpleton, and people are naturally drawn to him.”

  Suddenly I had a name for my planet: Majipoor, “maji” providing a subliminal hint of the romantic word “magic” and the Hindi-sounding suffix “-poor” to remind me that my geographic model was the subcontinent of India blown up to superplanetary size.

  Next in the gradually cohering plot came this: “Since Valentine is adopted, who is his true mother? Is she capable of detecting the impostor? (Or identifying the concealed ruler?)—She is a priestess on an island in a remote sea.” And I put a large island between the two main continents and made it a ritual center where the Great Mother rules.

  But there was still no hint of the conflict that every novel needs, other than the as yet unexplained usurpation that had sent Valentine into exile. Some sort of sinister player was needed. I jotted down this: “The King of Dreams is the dark adversary of the Emperor.” A second telepathic force, this one far more stern and ominous than the benevolent Lady of the Isle: a sender of bad dreams, a planetary superego ferociously chastising those who get out of line, but also—so I realized—capable of getting out of line himself. The King of Dreams would turn out, in fact, to be connected in some way with the mysterious usurpation that thrusts Valentine from his throne. I put his headquarters on an inhospitable desert continent and made him an equal partner in the government with the Pontifex, the Coronal, and the Lady.

  My sheets of preliminary notes now fill up with all manner of archetypical references out of our own history, literature, and myth: “Falstaff ... the Malcontent figure ... Tiberius ... Caligula ... Aeneas and the descent into hell ... Merlin/Hermes ... Shapeshifters ... Jonah in the Whale ... Darth Vader ... Jason and the Fleece...” All of these, and many more, would find their way in transmuted form into the plot of Lord Valentine's Castle.

  After a few weeks I was ready to set down a formal sketch of the book. It began with a statement of the general background:

  This long picaresque adventure—the manuscript will probably run six hundred pages—takes place on the huge world of Majipoor, a planet enormously bigger than Earth, but lacking most of the heavier elements, so that the gravity is only about three-fourths that of Earth. All is airy and light on Majipoor: it is a cheerful and playful place in general, although highly urbanized, bearing a population of many billions. Food is abundant, the air is fresh, the streams and oceans are clean. Majipoor was settled by colonists from Earth some fourteen thousand years ago, but also is occupied peacefully by representatives of six or seven of the galaxy's other intelligent species, as well as the descendants of Majipoor's own native race, humanoid in form, capble of physical changes of shape. These last beings are regarded with some uneasiness by the others, and this uneasiness is reciprocated.

  Across the vastness of Majipoor's three colossal continents is spread an incredible diversity of cities, glittering and majestic, separated by parks, agricultural territories, forest preserves, wastelands kept deliberately barren as boundaries, and holy districts occupied by religious devotees. Such a gigantic cosmos of a planet can hardly be efficiently governed by one central authority, and yet a central authority does exist, to which all local governors do indeed pay lip-service and on occasion direct homage. This central authority is the Pontifex, an imperial figure, aloof and virtually unknowable....

  The outline goes on to sketch the plot—Valentine's amnesia, and his attempt to regain his throne—and announces that “the form of the novel is a gigantic odyssey, divided into five ‘books’ of thirty-five to forty thousand words each, during which the deposed Lord Valentine learns of his true identity, gradually and at first reluctantly resolves to regain his power, seeks successfully to obtain access to his original personality and memories, and crosses all of immense Majipoor, enlisting allies as he goes, engaging in strange and colorful adventures, finally to confront the usurper at the Castle.”

  Now the main structure was in place, and I knew from past experienc
e that I would be able to fill in necessary connective matter—minor characters, sub-plots, internal surprises—as I went along. What remained was to move Valentine across Majipoor from the west coast of the secondary continent to the heart of the primary one and up the slopes of thirty-mile-high Castle Mount, inventing the details of the terrain as I went. And it was those details that I hoped would set my novel apart from its predecessors in the genre.

  In designing Majipoor I wanted it to be as realistic, in its fantastic way, as I could make it. Here I drew on my strong suits: my knowledge of geography, archaeology, and natural history. Beginning with the city of Pidruid on the wilder continent's northwest coast and going eastward, I invented an appropriate climate, a cuisine, an assortment of native wildlife, and—a matter of particular interest and amusement for me—a botanical background. All of these were, of course, derived in one fashion or another from terrestrial models; I don't believe that we science fictionists can ever really invent anything from scratch, but only make modifications of existing prototypes. The more familiar you are with a broad array of prototypes, the richer the variations you can ring on them; but true invention, I think, is Nature's own prerogative, and variations on existing themes is the best we can manage.

  I managed pretty well, I feel. In my garden are many of the plants known as bromeliads, which usually have rosettes with a cup in the center to hold a reservoir of water. Insects and plant matter fall into the cup and decay to provide nutrients for the bromeliad. Fine: I brought Valentine into a grove of “mouthplants,” stemless plants much like my bromeliads, except that their leaves are nine feet long and the central cups have paired grinders equipped with blades. The mouthplants are, in fact, carnivorous, grabbing their prey with hidden tendrils and conveying it to the cups to be chewed. There are, praise be, no such lovelies on our own world; but it was easy enough for me to dream them up for Majipoor.