Asimov's SF, October-November 2006 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Asimov's Science Fiction

  October-November 2006

  Vol. 30, Nos. 10 & 11. (Whole Numbers 369 & 370)

  Cover Art by George Gross

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  NOVELLAS

  A BILLION EVES by Robert Reed

  DOWN TO THE EARTH BELOW by William Barton

  NOVELETTES

  DAWN, AND SUNSET, AND THE COLOURS OF THE EARTH by Michael F. Flynn

  1 IS TRUE by Ron Collins

  SHORT STORIES

  BIODAD by Kit Reed

  AFTER I STOPPED SCREAMING by Pamela Sargent

  THE SMALL ASTRAL OBJECT GENIUS by James Van Pelt

  THE SEDUCER by Carol Emshwiller

  SAVING FOR A SUNNY DAY, OR, THE BENEFITS OF REINCARNATION by Ian Watson

  FOSTER MELISSA by Lee Shaw

  POETRY

  PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL by Rebecca Marjesdatter

  HELL ON WHEELS by Sandra J. Lindow

  I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF by Greg Beatty

  FRANKENSTEIN VS. THE FLYING SQUIRRELS by David Livingstone Clink

  GREY NOVEMBER by Holly Phillips

  FORWARD AND BACKWARD BELIEF by Vincent Miske

  REMEMBERING THE FUTURE by Darrell Schweitzer

  DEPARTMENTS

  EDITORIAL: THE PULP-ART TIME MACHINE by Sheila Williams

  REFLECTIONS: MAKING BACKUPS by Robert Silverberg

  ON THE NET: SECRETS OF THE WEBMASTERS (PART ONE) by James Patrick Kelly

  LETTERS

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU by Rebecca Mayr

  ON BOOKS: THE BIG KAHUNA by Norman Spinrad

  THE SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 30, Nos. 10 & 11. Whole Nos. 369 & 370, October/November 2006. 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. © 2006 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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  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL: THE PULP-ART TIME MACHINE by Sheila Williams

  REFLECTIONS: MAKING BACKUPS by Robert Silverberg

  ON THE NET: SECRETS OF THE WEBMASTERS (PART ONE) by James Patrick Kelly

  LETTERS

  A BILLION EVES Robert Reed

  BIODAD by Kit Reed

  PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL by Rebecca Marjesdatter

  DAWN, AND SUNSET, AND THE COLOURS OF THE EARTH by Michael F. Flynn

  AFTER I STOPPED SCREAMING by Pamela Sargent

  Hell On Wheels by Sandra J. Lindo

  THE SMALL ASTRAL OBJECT GENIUS James Van Pelt

  I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF by Greg Beatty

  1 IS TRUE by Ron Collins

  FRANKENSTEIN VS. THE FLYING SQUIRRELS by David Livingstone Clink

  THE SEDUCER by Carol Emshwiller

  GREY NOVEMBER by Holly Phillips

  SAVING FOR A SUNNY DAY, OR, THE BENEFITS OF REINCARNATION by Ian Watson

  FORWARD AND BACKWARD BELIEF by Vincent Miskell

  FOSTER by Melissa Lee Shaw

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU

  DOWN EARTH BELOW by William Barton

  REMEMBERING THE FUTURE by Darrell Schweitzer

  ON BOOKS: THE BIG KAHUNA by Norman Spinrad

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

  SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU SOLUTION

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  Asimov's Science Fiction

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  EDITORIAL: THE PULP-ART TIME MACHINE

  by Sheila Williams

  Not long ago my associate editor, the unflappable Brian Bieniowski, and I had the opportunity to take a step back in time. Another cool customer, Analog's associate editor. Trevor Quachri, accompanied us on this journey to the early decades of the twentieth century. Transportation was provided by the astounding private pulp-art collection of Robert Lesser. We had been in search of an appropri
ate image for this month's cover when Mr. Lesser invited us to a private viewing of his collection.

  Before we heard from Mr. Lesser, our first foray to the past had been an expedition to the mid-sixties. We were looking for a piece of cover art that would suitably illustrate William Barton's evocative “Down to the Earth Below"—a novella that is both a coming-of-age story and a remarkable celebration of the pulp reprint paperbacks that dominated that decade. Alas, a few days spent traipsing the Internet soon made it clear that most of those illustrations were not available for our purposes. Of course, those paperbacks celebrated an earlier era of fiction, so we turned the wheels of our time machine back a little further, heading in the direction of the original sources.

  At first, we did not make it all the way back to the heyday of golden-eyed heroes and ape men, because we found our cover when we disembarked in 1949. George Gross's art for “Huntress of Hell-Pack” appeared on the quarterly Jungle Stories magazine in 1949. Although this magazine did not survive the great die-off of the pulps (it folded in 1954), it did outlast Doc Savage Magazine, which ran from 1933 until 1949, and this issue postdates the Tarzan novels that were published during Edgar Rice Burroughs's lifetime.

  Our art director, Vicki Green, had come upon the Gross cover in the pages of Robert Lesser's coffee-table book Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines. This beautiful book includes examples of covers from all the pulp magazine genres: Westerns, science fiction, detectives, mysteries, horror, war, aviation, and other adventure magazines. It is just a sampling, though, of the works in Mr. Lesser's collection, and, while the book does bring that period to life, it cannot convey the thrill I felt as I stepped into a room filled with the actual paintings.

  Witnessing those paintings nearly brought me to a sensory overload. I felt as though I had dived into a refreshing pool of water. As I splashed around in delight, I came face-to-face with George Rozen's portrayals of The Shadow and Frank R. Paul's Quartz and Golden Cities. I backed up into J. Allen St. John's painting of Tarzan and the Leopard Men (the art that graced the cover of the edition my father picked up at Johnson's Second-Hand Bookstore years before I was born), and nearly stumbled over the works of Hannes Bok. I was menaced by the paintings of Rafael de Soto and Norman Saunders, but Doc Savage, gloriously depicted by Walter Baumhofer, was there to rescue us. Mr. Lesser uses every inch available for his private display. Like the Sistine Chapel, even the ceiling is covered with art. Instead of Michelangelo, though, it was the work of Virgil Finlay that met my raised eyes.

  Robert Lesser and other collectors have only been able to save a fraction of the art created for the pulp era. It is a gross understatement to say that the works were not appreciated in their own time. The collector believes this is because it was considered “offensive art.” In addition to representing what was (and is often still though of as) “worthless pulp fiction,” those paintings of bug-eyed monsters and rum-running gangsters were about “the threat of sexual violation and death in motion.” The general public wouldn't hang the paintings in their homes and the intelligentsia didn't want to see them in museums and galleries. Even the artists were frequently ashamed of their own work. In conversation and in his book, Mr. Lesser relates the tragic loss of many of these paintings:

  When the Popular Publications warehouse in the Bronx burned to the ground, hundreds of pulp paintings were destroyed. In 1961, when Condé Nast bought Street & Smith and moved to high-rent uptown and were cramped for space, they called the artists: ‘Do you want your artwork returned?’ The answer: ‘No!’ Street & Smith had saved their art and it was a large collection of the very best. A small auction was held, but there were no bids, no bidders. Then the paintings were offered free to their employees; even at that price there were no takers. A tragedy in American art: the largest collection ever saved was put on the street for ... a New York City garbage truck.

  Mr. Lesser's recitation of these events sent a chill to our hearts. My normally phlegmatic co-workers and I returned to our office giddy with delight at having viewed these extraordinary paintings, but saddened by our history lesson. Brian insisted that if he'd been alive in the fifties or the sixties, he would have had the sensibility needed to save the lost artwork. Trevor and I, using a variant of Fermi's paradox, argued that since they weren't saved by anyone, he wouldn't have had the foresight to do so either. Still, I'd like to think that if I'd had the opportunity, I would have thrown myself in front of that truck. It's too bad we don't have a real time machine, but thankfully, we do have people like Robert Lesser.

  In the early seventies, Mr. Lesser and others began to rescue some of these paintings from oblivion. Nowadays, this art sells to wealthy collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. Robert Lesser does not intend to get rich from his collection, though. He hopes to turn it over to an institution that will make the art available to all of us. When that happens, we'll let you know, since everyone should have the chance to visit the pulp-art time machine. Copyright © 2006 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  REFLECTIONS: MAKING BACKUPS

  by Robert Silverberg

  I was the youngest boy in my elementary school class, and when I became a professional science fiction writer in 1955 I was for a long time the youngest writer in the business. I am still the youngest writer ever to win a Hugo, for Most Promising New Writer in 1956. All that precocity has left its imprint on me. I continue to tend to think of myself as younger than I am, even though that Hugo, you will note, came to me exactly fifty years ago, and a glance in the mirror is enough to remind me that I am no longer in the first flush of youth. I am, in fact, a man of grandfatherly years, and as a writer I'm a kind of survivor from the Pleistocene, old enough to have been a contributor to the last few shaggy-edged pulp magazines.

  There are, of course, still plenty of SF writers around who were already famous when I was just a kid, and who now, in their eighties, are still turning out books and stories. Just last year I was on a panel with three of them—Frederik Pohl, Phil Klass (William Tenn), and Harry Harrison—at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, and for that one shining hour, sitting among those sprightly codgers, I felt like a boy again.

  But I'm not a boy. I've had one of the longest careers around, and I'm old enough to remember typewriters, and carbon paper, and manila envelopes, three of the primitive implements that were essential tools of the trade for writers when I was starting out. When, at a more recent SF convention, I found myself explaining to someone what typewriters actually were like, I got a vivid jolting sense of how much the technology of professional writing has been transformed since my earliest days in the business.

  The typewriter, for instance: I still keep mine sitting on a side desk in my office as a sort of museum piece. I bought it in 1968, because I needed a new one to replace the one I lost in a fire that wrecked my home that year, but it's essentially identical to the one I was using when I won that first Hugo in 1956. It's a German-made item, an Olympia: a big sturdy box-shaped object with a keyboard that looks something like a computer keyboard, a roller-plus-knobs thingy that allows you to insert a sheet of paper, and a chrome-plated lever on one side that you pull to advance the paper when you've reached the end of the line. A little bell goes “ping” to tell you that it's lever-pulling time. Since each line you typed contained about ten words, and we were usually paid by the word then, each “ping” announced that the writer would earn a dime at the bottom rate of a cent a word, twenty cents if his story was going to a two-cent-a-word market, thirty cents if it sold to Astounding or Galaxy, the two top-paying magazines.

  Some writers of the Fifties used electric typewriters, but mine was the manual kind. The electrics, though they required less muscle-power, made an annoying hum, two or three times as loud as the hum that computers make today, and I found that too distracting. I also was in the habit of resting my fingers on the keys while thinking, and some electrics had such jackrabbit
calibration that it was all too easy to type a whole string of unwanted letters during a pause of that sort. Which was a problem, because you didn't just back up your cursor and get rid of such unwanted letters then: they were permanently there, marring the paper you were typing on.

  Of course, it was hard work banging away on a manual typewriter, and my refusal to switch to an electric seemed a little quaint to some of my colleagues. But, what the hell, I was young then and had plenty of energy, and in a perverse way I enjoyed the physical demands of pounding on the keyboard. (The only writer I know who still uses a manual typewriter is Harlan Ellison. He isn't exactly young any more either, but he's mighty stubborn.)

  One big problem we had, back then, was the riskiness of depending on typed copy. Today's computer-using writers can back up each day's work on diskettes, or ZIP drives, or any one of a number of other sophisticated data-storage devices, or they can simply e-mail it to a web site that will store it for them. The closest we could come to making backups back then was to use carbon paper, a messy substance that you slipped between two sheets of conventional typing paper: as you hit the typewriter keys, the impact on the carbon-paper sheet in the middle of the sandwich created a more or less legible duplicate of what you were typing on the sheet below. This gave you an identical copy that you could store in some place other than where you were keeping your primary copy.

  That system didn't work so well if you were the sort of writer who typed out a first draft, revised it by hand, and then retyped the whole shebang (or had it retyped professionally) for submission to a publisher. First-draft writing involves a lot of second thoughts as you work; you rephrase stuff, crossing out earlier rejected versions, and sometimes striking out whole paragraphs or even pages. I often wound up with only four or five lines of useful copy on a page. Doing that when you were using two sheets of paper at a time was wasteful and expensive, something to consider in the days when a five-thousand-word story might bring a writer fifty dollars, before taxes. It was also a nuisance when you were zooming along through a first draft in the white heat of creation to pause at the end of every page and assemble a new paper-plus-carbon-paper sandwich. And when you worked over your typed first draft by hand, the changes you made didn't automatically turn up on the carbon copy—you had to inscribe them there too, separately, if you wanted to keep an accurate backup version of your current draft. If you didn't, you risked the loss of all your revisions if something happened to your one and only copy of the manuscript, and I heard plenty of horror stories from my colleagues of just such losses.