Asimov's SF, December 2008 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, December 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 for “The Flowers of Nicosia” by J.K. Potter

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: NEW DIMENSIONS by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: A LOGIC NAMED WILL by Robert Silverberg

  Novelette: WAY DOWN EAST by Tim Sullivan

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Short Story: WELCOME TO VALHALLA by Kathryn Lance & Jack McDevitt

  Short Story: PERFECT EVERYTHING by Steven Utley

  Novelette: IN CONCERT by Melanie Tem & Steve Rasnic Tem

  Short Story: STILL ON THE ROAD by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Novella: THE FLOWERS OF NICOSIA by David Ira Cleary

  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. 32, No.12. Whole No. 395, December 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

  Sheila Williams: Editor

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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: NEW DIMENSIONS

  by Sheila Williams

  As a teenager, my imagination was never anything less than vivid. I daydreamed my way through more than one Spanish class imagining myself inhabiting the world of whichever science fiction book or story I was currently reading. My imagination really took flight when I discovered the existence of science fiction magazines through Isaac Asimov's various reminiscences about the field. It wasn't much of a leap from thinking about the wonders of FTL and ansibles and time travel and neutron stars to imagining that in the aeries of Manhattan the editors of those noble magazines inhabited lofty palatial offices that were furnished in leather upholstery and cherry wood bookcases. I don't know what I thought the magazines would look like, but I was sure they would be wondrous and magical. Of course, there were none to be found at the local drugstore in my suburban town. I had to search through the racks in a giant newsstand in metropolitan Springfield, Massachusetts, for my very first copies of Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  While I don't recall exactly what I was expecting to find, I can remember the tiny pang of disappointment that hit me when I realized the magazines were so ... little. It had never occurred to me that the vehicles that held the gigantic ideas and myriad unfathomable aliens that inspired my daydreams weren't much larger than the TV Guide my parents subscribed to. Still, it wasn't long before these digest-sized magazines had completely charmed me. After all, it wasn't the magazines’ prosaic physical dimensions that were important. It was the weird dimensions explored in the stories, the concepts and the characters that dwelt within the magazines that mattered to me.

  By the time I'd discovered Amazing and Fantastic and Galaxy and If, I had become so comfortable with these little magazines, that I'm sure one part of my mind believed the digest was the inevitable and most appropriate size for a science fiction or fantasy magazine. I didn't know these magazines had and continued to come in all different sizes. Analog, in its earliest incarnation as Astounding Stories, had begun life in the standard seven-by-ten inch pulp format. While most genre magazines were published in the pulp format for several decades, this wasn't true for all of them. According to Mike Ashley's history of early SF magazines, The Time Machine, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing started out as a bedsheet-size magazine (around nine-by-twelve inches) that was roughly the same size as the old Life magazine. Astounding experimented with a similar large format for about eighteen months in the early forties. A short time later, though, it converted to a smaller (five-and-three-eighths by seven-and-three-eights inch) format, making it the first digest-sized science fiction magazine. Under Condé Nast's ownership, Analog took a brief detour into the standard size of most of today's nonfiction magazines (eight and a half by eleven inches), but it had pretty much settled back into the digest format by the mid-sixties.

  When Asimov's was founded in 1976, the fiction digest size had been standardized at five-and-one-eighth by seven-and-five-eights. Asimov's size was reduced slightly in 1984 and again in 1989 to save on pro
duction costs. The second size adjustment meant that our publisher's four fiction digests were now exactly the same size as the TV Guide and could be produced at the same printer during TV Guide's down time. In June 1998, we moved to a new printer, and the magazines increased to a non-digest format called an “F-trim size.” Our production circumstances recently changed once again, which is why your new issue of Asimov's is what's known in the trade as an “L-trim size” magazine. We have fewer pages now, too, but, because the leaves are larger, we're only a handful of pages shorter than we were previously. I've taken some steps to ensure that the effect this change has on the amount of fiction we can cram into Asimov's will be minimal.

  There are a few things that I now know about science fiction magazines that I didn't know when I was a teenager. I know that a fiction magazine editor's office is more likely to contain metal bookcases and Formica desks than designer furniture and that editors don't usually inhabit palatial offices on the upper floors of midtown-Manhattan offices. I know that SF and fantasy magazines can be full-size periodicals like Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, or Weird Tales; digest magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; and in between like Asimov's and Analog. I know that in a dynamic world almost nothing stays exactly the same—even TV Guide is now a full-sized magazine. Of course, magazines don't even have to come in three dimensions anymore. They can exist in electronic form on the internet like Strange Horizons, Jim Baen's Universe, and Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. Even Asimov's can now be purchased in electronic formats from Fictionwise and for Amazon's Kindle. I also know that whatever the format, magazines are still an exciting home for fast-paced adventure stories and thoughtful and strange slice of life stories, and they continue to be the place where our imaginations can explore unusual alternate dimensions. I know that this issue of Asimov's is still the stuff of dreams and nightmares, only now instead of transporting me away from a high-school class, it launches the New York City subway to the stars.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: A LOGIC NAMED WILL

  by Robert Silverberg

  Last issue, I mentioned a prophetic story by the pseudonymous “Murray Leinster” that had forecast in solid technical detail, back in the antediluvian year of 1931, the use of orbital space satellites to beam electrical power down to Earth. A discussion of that essay I had with Barry Malzberg the day after I wrote it put me in mind of an immensely more startling Leinster story, dating from 1946: “A Logic Named Joe,” in which, roughly fifty years before the fact, we are given a clear prediction of personal computers, the Internet, Google, Craig's List, the loss of privacy in a cyberspace world, and even that bold speculative phenomenon that we call the Singularity. Science fiction is only occasionally a reliable vehicle for prophecy—nobody, for example, guessed that the age of manned exploration of space would begin and end in the same decade—but this is one of the prime examples of an absolute bull's-eye hit.

  “Murray Leinster's” real name was Will F. Jenkins (1896-1975)—the pseudonym, which he made no attempt to conceal, derives from his family's ancestral county in Ireland. He was a prolific pulp writer from his teenage days on, turning out westerns, mysteries, weird tales, and much else. Under his own name he wrote for slick magazines like Collier's, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post, while as Murray Leinster he was a major figure in science fiction for almost fifty years, going back to a lively story called “The Runaway Skyscraper” that was published in Argosy in 1919, seven years before such things as science fiction magazines existed. He followed it with a rich, moody Leinster tale of the far future, “The Mad Planet,” in 1920, which, with several sequels, he expanded into a book decades later. When the first SF magazines were founded Murray Leinster was right there, with a story in the very first issue (January 1930) of the garish pulp Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which is still with us today as Analog Science Fiction. He would remain a steady contributor to Astounding and then Analog for the next thirty-six years, and among his dozens of contributions are some of the imperishable classics of our field—"Sidewise in Time” (1934), the first parallel-world story; “Proxima Centauri” (1935), the first generation-starship story; and, notably, 1945's “First Contact,” one of the most successful tales of human/alien encounter in space ever written. And then there's “A Logic Named Joe.”

  Leinster/Jenkins was a serious gadgeteer—he invented and patented a system for rear-screen projection that was in use in movies and television for many years—and even the pulpiest of his stories has a solid technological underpinning that gives it special conviction. But “A Logic Named Joe” stands out among his work for the eerie accuracy of the technological extrapolations that allowed him to visualize the world of the Internet so far in advance.

  It appeared in the March 1946 issue of Astounding, a short and presumably minor story placed near the back of the book. It didn't even bear the familiar “Leinster” byline, because there was a Leinster story elsewhere in the issue, so editor Campbell stuck Will F. Jenkins’ real name, much less well known to SF readers, on it. But readers noticed right away that there was something special about the story, and in the popularity poll that Campbell regularly conducted they voted it #1 for that issue, ahead of some much longer stories by some very celebrated writers. During the years that followed it was reprinted in a good many anthologies. But it is for readers of the Internet age that the story is a real eye-opener.

  There's nothing noteworthy about its style. Will Jenkins never went in for literary flourishes, preferring to tell his stories in a simple, sometimes almost folksy, manner. And it is not until the second page that we learn that what he calls a “logic” is actually a sort of business machine with a keyboard and a television screen attached. You know what that is. But in 1946 no one did. Computers had already begun to figure in a few SF stories, but they were usually referred to as “thinking machines,” and they were always visualized as immense objects filling laboratories the size of warehouses. The desk-model personal computer that every child knows how to use was too fantastic a concept even for science fiction then—until “A Logic Named Joe.”

  And what a useful computer the “logic” was! Everybody had one. “You know the logic setup,” Jenkins's narrator tells us. “You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch ‘Station SNAFU’ on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch ‘Sally Hancock's phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you're hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if someone answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—no, it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an’ anything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Also it does math for you, and keeps books, an’ acts as consultin’ chemist, physician, astronomer, and tealeaf reader, with a ‘Advice to Lovelorn’ thrown in.”

  Substitute “servers” for “tanks” and you have a pretty good description of the structure of the Internet. The “Carson Circuit” is the 1946 version of the magical algorithm by which Google provides the path to just about any information you might want in a fraction of a second. Where the particular logic that gets nicknamed “Joe” differs from other logics, though, and from the computers we all own today, is that it is miswired in some strange way that gives it the ability to assemble existing data into startling new combinations o
n its own initiative—plus a complete lack of inhibitions in making the new information available to its users.

  So Joe's screen suddenly declares, “Announcing new and improved service! Your logic is now equipped to give you not only consultive but directive service. If you want to do something and don't know how to do it—ask your logic!”

  Want to murder your wife and get away with it, for example? Joe will provide details of a way to mix green shoe polish and frozen pea soup to commit the perfect crime. Want to drink all you'd like and sober up five minutes later? Take a teaspoon of this detergent. Make foolproof counterfeit money? Like this, Joe says. Rob a bank? Turn base metal into gold? Build a perpetual-motion machine? Shift money from somebody else's bank account to your own? Here's the trick. All the information is in the tanks, somewhere. Joe will find it and connect it for you and serve it up without a second thought, or even a first one. And Joe is connected to all the logics in the world, so everybody can ask for anything in the privacy of his own home.

  But it's the end of privacy, of course. You give your logic your name and it will tell you your address, age, sex, your charge-account balance, your wife or husband's name, your income, your traffic-ticket record, and all manner of other bits of personal data. You give the logic someone else's name and it'll provide the same information about that person, too. It's every privacy advocate's worst nightmare: nobody has any secrets. You don't even need to do any hacking. Just turn on your logic and ask.

  The logic technician who discovers Joe's special capabilities tells his supervisor that the whole logic tank must be shut down at once before society collapses under Joe's cheerful onslaught. But how? “Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin’ all the computin’ for every business office for years?” the supervisor asks. “It's been handlin’ the distribution of 94 percent of all the telecast programs, has given out all the information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement—Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization! Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!”