Asimov's SF, September 2009 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, September 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 for “Away From Here” by John Picacio

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: THE 2009 DELL MAGAZINES AWARD by Sheila Williams

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

  Short Stories: AWAY FROM HERE by Lisa Goldstein

  Department: Asimov's Science Fiction Salutes the Winners of the 2009 Nebula Awards

  Poetry: SPECULATIVE TAI CHI by Kendall Evans

  Short Stories: CAMERA OBSCURED by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Novelette: SOULMATES by Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn

  Short Stories: IN THEIR GARDEN by Brenda Cooper

  Short Stories: THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Poetry: NEARLY READY FOR OCCUPATION by Danny Adams

  Short Stories: TEAR-DOWN by Benjamin Crowell

  Short Stories: HER HEART'S DESIRE by Jerry Oltion

  Poetry: THE LAST ALCHEMIST by Bruce Boston

  Novella: BROKEN WINDCHIMES by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Department: ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 33, No. 9. Whole No. 404, September 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

  Sheila Williams: Editor

  Brian Bieniowski: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

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  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

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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: THE 2009 DELL MAGAZINES AWARD

  by Sheila Williams

  Once again, I left the wintry north on a Thursday in mid-March for sunny Orlando, Florida, to bestow the Dell Magazine Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing on a lucky winner. The award is co-sponsored by Dell Magazines and the International Association for the Fantastic and is supported by the School of Mass Communications, University of South Florida. The Dell Magazines Award is conferred, along with certificates to the runners up and honorable mentions, at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the conference and I was amazed to discover that I had been giving out the award for more than half of them.

  Although my co-judge, Rick Wilber, and choose the stories from a blind read, we were delighted to learn that this year's winner, Josh Eure, is a creative writing student of the (soon-to-be) two-time Nebula Award-winning author, John Kessel, at North Carolina State University. Josh, who already holds a traditional author's resume that includes stints as a rock-wall belayer and a hammock weaver, as well as jobs in fast food, on a seed farm, and fueling aircraft, will be continuing on in the university's graduate writing program this fall. On Saturday evening, I presented him with the award and a check for five hundred dollars for his story “We Were Real.” This compelling tale of the not-too-distant future introduces us to a powerful and distinctive new voice. Josh's story will appear online next year. In the meantime, please check out asimovs.com for last year's hilarious award-winning story “Blank, White, and Blue,” by Stephen Leech.

  This year's first runner-up and the author of “The Best and Bitt'rest Kiss,” Sarah Miller, is a senior at Bard College at Simon Rock. Sarah majored in psychology and linguistics, and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the Alpha SF, Fantasy and Horror Workshop for Young Writers—a workshop for teenagers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Last year, Sarah received an honorable mention in the contest, and she was accompanied to Florida this year by her friend, and another of last year's honorable mentions, Emily Tersoff.

  Maggie Morgan, our second runner-up with her story, “Suspended,” is another of John Kessel's students at NCSU. Unfortunately, Maggie, along with three of our honorable mentions, could not be in attendance at the conference. One of the missing was Rahul Kanakia of Stanford University. Rahul, a 2007 finalist as well, was recognized this year for his story “Between Dusk and Twilight.” A fellow Stanford student, Jennette Westwood, received a certificate for “
Locked and Keyed,” while Elena Gleason of Knox College and an Alpha graduate was awarded an honorable mention for “Aeroplasty.”

  Happily, though, Lara Donnelly, a freshman at Wright State University, was on hand to pick up her certificate for “The Case of the Unassuming Book and the Very Soiled Trousers.” Lara is also a graduate of the Alpha Workshop. I hope to learn something about the secret of Alpha's success when I attend it as a guest over the summer.

  In addition to spending time in individual writing conferences with each of our finalists, I had the chance to catch up with Terry Bisson, Marie Brennan, Suzy McKee Charnas, Ted Chiang, Stephen R. Donaldson, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Daryl Gregory, Joe Haldeman, Elizabeth Hand, Judith Moffett, Patrick O'Leary, Kit Reed, Peter Straub, and a number of other authors. I look forward to seeing many of them again next year.

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  Left to right: Rick Wilber, Sarah Miller, Josh Eure, Lara Donnelly, and Sheila Williams.

  Photo credit: Beth Gwinn

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  Asimov's is proud to support these academic awards with IAFA. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is a worldwide network of scholars, educators, critics, editors, publishers, and performers who share an interest in studying and celebrating the fantastic in all art forms, disciplines, and media.

  We are actively looking for next year's winner. The deadline for submissions is Monday, January 2, 2010. All full-time undergraduate students at any accredited university or college are eligible. Stories must be in English, and should run from 1,000 to 10,000 words. No submission can be returned, and all stories must be previously unpublished and unsold. There is a $10 entry fee, with up to three stories accepted for each fee paid. A special flat fee of $25 is available for an entire classroom of writers. Instructors should send all the submissions in one or more clearly labeled envelopes with a check or money order. Checks should be made out to the Dell Magazines Award. There is no limit to the number of submissions from each writer. Each submission must include the writer's name, address, phone number, and college or university on the cover sheet, but please do not put your name on the actual story.

  Before entering the contest, contact Rick Wilber for more information, rules, and manuscript guidelines. He can be reached care of:

  Dell Magazines Award

  School of Mass Communications

  University of South Florida

  Tampa, Florida 33620

  [email protected]

  Next year's winner will be announced at the 2010 Conference on the Fantastic, in the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and on our website.

  Copyright © 2009 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: BUILDING WORLDS: PART I

  by Robert Silverberg

  The job of the science fiction writer, like that of writers of any other sort of fiction, is telling stories, that is, inventing characters and placing them in dramatic opposition to one another. The special task of the SF writer, though, is to supply not only the drama but also the stage: to build the entire set upon which one's characters act out their conflicting purposes. And so we must create not merely characters and plots but entire worlds.

  That sounds like a god-sized assignment, and in a sense it is. Of course, our worlds are merely things set down on paper, and that spares us the considerable trouble of producing actual mountains and seas, skies and deserts, and all the other tangibilities, down to microbes and algae, that real gods must traffic in. We deal in the illusion of creating worlds, not in the worlds themselves. Even so, the job has to be done right or the illusion won't hold.

  I can name any number of examples of the job done right: Hal Clement's Mesk-lin, Frank Herbert's Arrakis, Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia, James Blish's Lithia, Ursula K. Le Guin's Gethen, Anne McCaffrey's Pern, Harry Harrison's Pyrrus, Larry Niven's Ringworld, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, and on and on, an infinity of fictional worlds having little in common except plausibility and unforgettability. But how is it done? What factors must you consider, what knowledge must you have?

  The place to start, I think, must be the physical characteristics of the world to be created: its size and mass, the nature of its sun and the imaginary world's distance from it, its gravitational pull, its period of revolution and axial rotation, its orbital tilt, the makeup of its atmosphere, its biochemistry, and so forth. From these things all else inevitably follows.

  Two of our greatest practitioners of this area of the art of creating imaginary worlds were Poul Anderson and Hal Clement. These two grand masters had the playfully speculative cast of mind that any science fiction writer must have, but also the benefit of scientific educations that were both deep and broad, particularly in the areas of physics and chemistry, and their work demonstrated a degree of accomplishment in those aspects of world-building that most of us can only hope to approach. Both are now gone from us, but it's our great fortune that each of them left valuable essays on their working methods: Anderson in “The Creation of Imaginary Worlds” and Clement in “The Creation of Imaginary Beings,” both published in Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow (1974), edited by Reginald Bretnor. I urge anyone interested in knowing how worlds are built to seek out these magisterial texts. The Bretnor book is long out of print but readily available via second-hand channels. Most of its fifteen chapters are still relevant to modern SF writers, but two, the Anderson and the Clement, remain essential reading today.

  Anderson focuses quickly on the importance of consistency of scientific logic: writers who arbitrarily cobble together worlds built out of incompatible factors risk forfeiting, at least to the scientifically informed reader, their plausibility in all other sectors of their stories, those involving such things as character, emotional texture, plot. Giving the example of a planet that circles a blue-white sun and has an atmosphere of hydrogen and fluorine, Anderson says, “This is simply a chemical impossibility. Those two substances, under the impetus of that radiation, would unite promptly and explosively.” Blue-white stars are too hot to be surrounded by inhabited planets of any sort: they burn so fiercely that they don't last long enough for planets to develop around them, let alone for life to evolve on those planets. He deals similarly with red giants, white dwarfs, variable stars, and other sorts of stellar bodies unsuitable for the creation of habitable worlds, pointing out the problems inherent in choosing such familiar stars as Sirius, Vega, Antares, or Mira as settings for stories. Those stars are familiar to us because they shine brightly in our own sky, but for half a dozen different reasons it is not the most luminous stars that will be found to have inhabited worlds. By running through the stations of the stellar temperature-luminosity chart, Anderson explains how to select (or invent) a star that would be likely to provide worlds useful to the storyteller. He does point out that any sufficiently ingenious writer can make use of any kind of star for story purposes: the thing to avoid is unknowingly to place your fictional world around a star that can't possibly have planets, or to postulate intelligent life on a world where no life of any sort could exist.

  With these limitations having been invoked, Poul goes on to remind us that a planet's distance from its sun affects its climate, that its mass and size and density determine its gravitational pull, that the presence or absence of moons will control its tides, that the degree of axial tilt will shape its seasonal variations. “By bringing in this detail and that, tightly linked,” Anderson says, “the writer makes his imaginary globe seem real. Furthermore, the details are interesting in their own right.... They may reveal something of the possibilities in these light-years that surround us, thereby awakening the much-desired sense of wonder.”

  He doesn't insist that the conception of a fictional world must be preceded by months of preliminary study, but only that a reasonable understanding of the laws of astrophysics will allow writers to convince their readers that they actually know what they're talking about, and will also help in the process of i
nventing the story itself: “Whatever value the writer chooses [for a planet's axial tilt], let him ponder how it will determine the course of the year, the size and character of climatic zones, the development of life and civilizations. If Earth did travel upright, thus having no seasons, we would probably never see migratory birds across the sky. One suspects there would be no clear cycle of the birth and death of vegetation either. Then what form would agriculture have taken? Society? Religion?” He illustrates the Andersonian planning methods with diagrams and mathematical calculation, but there's nothing there, intimidating though it may look at a quick glance, that a would-be science fiction writer with at least a high school degree can't follow. (And if you aren't willing to think through a little bit of high school astronomy, what are you doing setting up shop as a science fiction writer?)

  Though the Anderson essay is, in and of itself, a splendid little handbook for planetary creation, he recommends two classic reference books that remain invaluable to science fiction writers to this day: Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan and Habitable Planets for Man (1970) by Stephen H. Dole. I second the recommendations—those two have stood me in good stead for decades—and add to it Cycles of Fire (1987) by William K. Hartmann, Red Giants and White Dwarfs (1967) by Robert Jastrow, and The Planetary System (1988) by David Morrison and Tobias Owen, which, while dealing entirely with our own solar system, provides a wealth of fundamental information about why that solar system has the form it does, so that any writer can readily generalize new worlds from the data supplied.

  The Clement essay that follows Poul Anderson's in the Bretnor book likewise stresses the merit of using rigorous logic, or at least common sense, in populating one's invented worlds with living creatures. One should know something about how earthly creatures work, Clement says, before dreaming up extraterrestrial ones, since the basic biological rules of our planet very likely will hold true for any planet that is capable of bringing forth life. ("The trick of magnifying a normal creature to menacing size is all too common. The giant amoeba is a familiar example; monster insects, or whole populations of them, even more so. It might pay an author with this particular urge to ask himself why we don't actually have such creatures around. There is likely to be a good reason, and if he doesn't know it perhaps he should do some research.") He goes on to explain why Pegasus wouldn't be able to fly, why six-foot-long ants don't infest our gardens, and why birds don't travel at supersonic speeds; and, having done that, he then proceeds to demonstrate how, given a deep enough knowledge of planet-building, a writer can conjure up worlds and creatures capable of operating in contravention to all our own planet's rules. (The indispensable Shklovskii-Sagan volume, Intelligent Life in the Universe, has a particularly valuable chapter on the possibilities for life of a non-terrestrial sort in other solar systems.)