Asimov's SF, February 2010 Read online

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  Cover art for “The Ice Line” by Paul Youll

  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: AFFECTING ETERNITY by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: REREADING CLARKE by Robert Silverberg

  Novelette: STONE WALL TRUTH by Caroline M. Yoachim

  Poetry: REINCARNATION by Peter Swanson

  Short Story: DEAD AIR by Damien Broderick

  Novelette: THE WOMAN WHO WAITED FOREVER by Bruce McAllister

  Short Story: THE BOLD EXPLORER IN THE PLACE BEYOND by David Erik Nelson

  Novelette: THE WIND-BLOWN MAN by Aliette de Bodard

  Poetry: SUBATOMIC REDEMPTION by Michael Meyerhofer

  Novella: THE ICE LINE by Stephen Baxter

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  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. 34, No.2. Whole No. 409, February 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. © 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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  Department: EDITORIAL: AFFECTING ETERNITY by Sheila Williams

  When I landed my job as editorial assistant as Asimov's, I felt a bit like a skydiver who had managed to set down on a precipice. Thankfully, more experienced hands reached out to steady me, so that the wind couldn't blow me off my perch. Over the course of my career I've amassed debts of gratitude to many people, but the two who grounded me most in those early days were Betsy Mitchell and Eleanor Sullivan.

  Both women were colleagues of mine at Davis Publications. Betsy's name may be familiar to very long-time readers of Asimov's and certainly will be to those who know the names of the editors behind the books at the big SF publishing houses. Betsy had already worked as a journalist and as a copywriter at Dell Books before she became an editorial assistant on both Analog and Asimov's in late 1980. By the time I joined the magazine, she was the managing editor of Analog and the associate editor of Asimov's. Betsy's job at Analog was demanding and time consuming. Her duties at Asimov's were primarily to train me. It was a joy to be taught by someone as even-tempered and as much fun as Betsy. Due to our workload, I often had to operate on my own, and it seemed as though I was destined to make every possible mistake at least once. I can still see her standing in my doorway cheerfully delivering horrifying news about the very first issue of Asimov's to carry my name. In proofing the magazine, I hadn't noticed that some of the galleys for a nonfiction column had been pasted up out of order. Betsy's patience and good humor helped me learn from these mistakes without being humiliated and ensured that they were never repeated. Her own name came off the masthead when mine went on, but her help and encouragement lasted for months afterward.

  I'd been flying solo for a while when Betsy announced that she was leaving the magazines to help Jim Baen start up his brand new publishing company, Baen Books. I was heartbroken to see her go, but my loss was science fiction's gain. Betsy eventually moved from Baen Books to Bantam Spectra where she was named associate publisher. At Spectra, she edited the Hugo Award-winner Hyperion by Dan Simmons and Virtual Light by William Gibson. Later, she founded the Aspect line at Warner Books. One of her goals at Aspect was to focus on the work of writers of color. Nalo Hopkinson, whose Brown Girl in the Ring won Aspect's initial first-novel contest, was one of her discoveries. Betsy was the publisher of the World Fantasy Award winning Dark Matter, the first-ever anthology of speculative fiction by black writers. She is now the Vice President/Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey Books where, in addition to editing such writers as Michael Chabon, Terry Brooks, and Naomi Novik, she publishes Del Rey Manga and graphic novels.

  While I was learning how to produce a magazine from Betsy, I was learning about the life of an editor from Eleanor Sullivan, the editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Eleanor was about twenty-five years older than I and was much more sophisticated. She was blonde and the first person I'd ever met who always wore black. Eleanor lived in a large duplex apartment on East 48th Street. She knew everyone. Her neighbor was Katherine Hepburn and her close friend
s included Judith Crist, Ruth Rendell, and Phyllis Diller. Eleanor invited me to her home and took me out to places like Applause, a restaurant where every so often the wait staff would leave off serving drinks and dinner to break into song and dance routines. Although she was a very private person, she told me wonderful stories about her life and about publishing. She had worked as an elementary school teacher for ten years before joining the staff of Ellery Queen in 1970, and she was the editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from 1975 until 1981. Eleanor worked closely with Fred Dannay, the editor and one half of the team of cousins that made up the Ellery Queen pseudonym. The editorship of his magazine was passed to Eleanor when he died.

  At Davis, we could take calls after hours by intercepting the night bell. Once, I took a call from a woman with a familiar voice. It was the actress Loretta Swit and she wanted to give Eleanor two tickets to that evening's Broadway performance of Edwin Drood. I wasn't sure if my life would be worth less if I lost Eleanor a shot at the tickets or if I gave out her home number. As I dithered, Loretta sweetly asked me if it would help if she told Eleanor I'd been very difficult. With great relief, I said that would be lovely and passed along the information.

  Though a mystery editor might seem to have a tenuous connection to science fiction, it was another of Eleanor's friendships that brought about the existence of this very magazine. Since Fred Dannay worked mostly from his home, Eleanor had held down the fort at the New York office. Isaac Asimov loved visiting with her and as a result he submitted all his Black Widower and Union Club mystery stories in person. It was because of these visits that our publisher, Joel Davis, got to know Isaac and eventually asked him if he could attach the Good Doctor's name to a science fiction magazine.

  Eleanor died almost twenty years ago, but I think of her when I hang ornaments from her on my Christmas tree or when my kids complain that I wear too much black. While our busy lives don't allow us to see that much of each other, Betsy Mitchell has remained my friend for all these years. These two women who helped shape me also shaped our world. In an alternate universe that is without Betsy Mitchell, the SF field looks completely different from the one we know. And without an Eleanor Sullivan, there is no Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

  Copyright © 2010 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: REFLECTIONS: REREADING CLARKE by Robert Silverberg

  The merits of most of the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke have largely escaped me. There is no denying the overwhelming visionary fertility of his imagination—he exceeds all others in his ability to show us the wonders of the as yet uncharted realms of space and time—and some of his short stories are superb. But the big, bland novels that repeatedly put him on the best-seller lists—the Rendezvous with Rama books, Imperial Earth, 2001 and its various sequels, et cetera, have always struck me, despite their passages of great conceptual inventiveness, as dull, slow, and passionless. That they should have enjoyed such great commercial success and gobbled up so many Hugo and Nebula awards left me baffled.

  In my first few years as a science fiction reader, though, when everything was new and wondrous for me and I had not yet come to judge what I read with the eye of a fellow practitioner of the craft, Clarke's earliest published fiction had a powerful impact on me—such stories as “Loophole” and “Rescue Party,” and the short novel Against the Fall of Night, all of which I read when I was thirteen or fourteen. So I decided, for this series of essays on rereading my early SF favorites, to see what it was that I had found so marvelous in Clarke's first novel when I encountered it more than sixty years ago.

  As it happened, the edition of Against the Fall of Night that I took down from the shelf also contained a novella, “The Lion of Comarre,” that first appeared in the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in the summer of 1949, when I was barely into my teens. I remembered that one fondly, too; and so I began my Clarke research with it now.

  It turned out to have its moments, but I found it mainly to be simple, innocent stuff. Though I don't know when Clarke wrote it, I suspect that the first draft, at least, dates from the mid-1930s, when Clarke was barely out of his teens himself. The story opens with a page-long historical lecture of the sort favored by writers in Hugo Gernsback's pioneering SF magazines of that long-ago era:

  "Toward the close of the twenty-sixth century, the great tide of Science had at last begun to ebb. The long series of inventions that had shaped and molded the world for nearly a thousand years was coming to its end. Everything had been discovered. One by one, all the great dreams of the past had become reality.

  "Civilization was completely mechanized—yet machinery had almost vanished. Hidden in the walls of the cities or buried far underground, the perfect machines bore the burdens of the world...."

  And so on for quite a while until we meet our protagonist, Richard Peyton III, a young man who remains little more than a name to us as we follow his adventures for the next fifteen or twenty thousand words. Restless in Earth's utopian tranquility, he goes off in quest of the legendary lost city of Comarre, locates it with the greatest of ease, and wanders around amongst the smoothly purring machines that are its only inhabitants until he succeeds in stumbling upon knowledge that he may be able to use in breaking the world out of its long cultural stagnation. The action, such as it is, moves by fits and starts, and is frequently interrupted by more dollops of history ("The First Electronic Age, Peyton knew, had begun in 1908, more than eleven centuries before, with De Forest's invention of the triode....") Though the young Clarke does foreshadow the concept we speak of today as the Singularity—artificial intelligence capable of outstripping our own—the level of inventiveness throughout is a low one: ad 2600 has “personal communicators” instead of telephones, windows have panes of “glassite” instead of glass, the World Council's chamber has a roof of “crystallite,” people use “writing machines” instead of typewriters or computers, and so on: all of these are just science fiction noises, rather than genuine efforts of the imagination.

  The story, then, seems primitive. How much more deftly Robert A. Heinlein, who in 1940 almost singlehandedly made the Gernsback school of storytelling obsolete, would have imparted all the information that Clarke is content simply to shovel at us! How much more cunningly Henry Kuttner, the cleverest storyteller of his generation, would have shaped the story: the opening hook leading to some paradoxical conflict, then the history lesson, then the dramatic tour of mysterious Comarre and the world-changing resolution of the main plot problem. I see what stirred me about “The Lion of Comarre” back in 1949, when my primary concern as an uncritical reader was to extract visions of the unknowable future from a story, rather than to be carried along by a swiftly unfolding plot. It was the sense of futureness it offered me then. But I doubt that readers of today would have much patience with the story.

  Against the Fall of Night, a far more interesting work, has some of the same drawbacks. But those are greatly outweighed by its virtues, which are the virtues of the clear-eyed innocence of its young author. What seemed primitive and clunky in “The Lion of Comarre” becomes oddly moving in the thematically related longer story.

  There's no question that this one was a child of the Gernsback era. Clarke himself has written that he began it about 1936, the last of the Gernsback years, and went on tinkering with it until 1940, by which time it had reached a length of fifteen thousand words. After the war he returned to it, finishing a novel-length draft by January 1946, and submitted it to John W. Campbell, who rejected it and then rejected a rewritten version six months later. (Campbell may have been annoyed by Clarke's notion of Earth conquered by superior alien forces, a concept that ran counter to Campbell's editorial prejudices.) At the time, there was only one other market for science fiction of that length, the pulp magazine Startling Stories, which ran a long novella in every issue. It appeared in the November 1948 Startling, and I read it there in a second-hand copy that I found about six months later.

/>   What captivated me then, and still does, was its setting in the extremely distant future—a billion and a half years hence, in this case. Ever since H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine took me to the end of the universe when I was ten years old I have had an insatiable love for the sub-genre of science fiction that deals with the far future: S. Fowler Wright's The World Below, Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, Brian Aldiss's The Long Afternoon of Earth, and many another. I have even offered my own contribution to the field in the novel Son of Man. None of these books pretends to offer an accurate description of the farthest reaches of time; nobody can write a really plausible story about so remote a period, or even about the world of just a couple of centuries ahead of ours. These stories are only visions, dreams, fantasies, poems.

  Probably the greatest of far-future fables is Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), which I discussed in these pages last year. Clarke, in a 1967 introduction to Against the Fall of Night, makes it clear that that book was the primary influence on his. He was thirteen when he read it, and, he says, “With its multimillion-year vistas, and the roll call of great but doomed civilizations, the book produced an overwhelming impact on me. I can still remember patiently copying Stapledon's ‘Time Scales'—up to the last one, where ‘Planets Formed’ and ‘End of Man’ lie only a fraction of an inch on either side of the moment marked ‘Today.’”

  Against the Fall of Night is the young Arthur Clarke's homage to Stapledon. It tells of a far-future Earth that long ago lost its interstellar empire to a race of invincible conquerors, and now is a desert planet, where the last humans, a passive, reclusive, culturally stagnant race of immortals, live out their days barricaded in the fortress city of Diaspar. No child had been born in Diaspar for seven thousand years until the coming of Clarke's protagonist, the boy Alvin, who has the hungry curiosity of youth. Alvin finds his way out of Diaspar and makes a series of discoveries that eventually, as we see in a frantic flurry of revelations in the last few pages of the book, utterly upset all of Diaspar's notions about the last billion or so years of Earth's history.