Asimov's SF, March 2008 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, March 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 by Tomasz Maronski

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: PANNING FOR GOLD by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: SPACE JUNK FOR SALE by Robert Silverberg

  Poetry: SNOW ANGELS by Ruth Berman

  Department: ON THE NET: MUNDANE by James Patrick Kelly

  Novelette: FOLLOWING THE PHARMERS by Brian Stableford

  Poetry: THE CAPACITY OF COLD by Roger Dutcher

  Short Story: KALLAKAK'S COUSINS by Cat Rambo

  Short Story: THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD by Steven Utley

  Novelette: SHOGGOTHS IN BLOOM by Elizabeth Bear

  Short Story: THIS IS HOW IT FEELS by Ian Creasey

  Poetry: MUSHROOM AGRICULTURE by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

  Novelette: SEPOY FIDELITIES by Tom Purdom

  Poetry: CLASSICS OF SCIENCE FICTION: “THE COLD EQUATIONS” by Jack O'Brien

  Short Story: SPIDERS by Sue Burke

  Novelette: MASTER OF THE ROAD TO NOWHERE by Carol Emshwiller

  Department: ON BOOKS by Peter Heck

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 32, No.3. Whole No. 386, March 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

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

  Sheila Williams: Editor

  Brian Bieniowski: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Irene Lee: Production Artist

  Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager

  Evira Matos: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

  Bruce W. Sherbow: Vice President of Sales & Marketing

  Peter Kanter: Publisher

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  Phone: (212) 686-7188

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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: PANNING FOR GOLD

  by Sheila Williams

  One of the special rewards of my job has been a growing appreciation for the creative imagination of Asimov's readers. For me, the most obvious result of this energy is that you are responsible for a large percentage of manuscripts that make their way to our office. I think that at least 10 percent of Asimov's readers are currently trying their hands at writing. I suspect that over the years Asimov's editors have seen stories at one time or another from at least 20 to 30 percent of you—perhaps even more. I hope those of you who would rather spend more of your free time quilting, duck hunting, or reading short stories will bear with me as I use this editorial to talk about how important this output of unsolicited manuscripts is to the magazine. After all, when they become the content of Asimov's, some percentage of these stories will eventually be shared with all of you.

  New writers are the lifeblood of the magazine. Rarely does an issue go by that doesn't include at least one person's first sale to Asimov's. There are cases (such as Edward M. Lerner, a long-standing Analog author, whose first story for us appeared in our last issue), where I'm already familiar with the work of the author from his or her previous sales to other SF outlets. Others (such as Merrie Haskell and Nick Wolven, whose stories are appearing in our next issue) will be authors whose work is completely unknown to me. In each instance, though, these stories caught my attention and held it all the way through. They were tales that I enjoyed and believed you would find rewarding as well.

  It might seem as though it could be easy to become complacent about buying stories for Asimov's and rely solely on the work of the established professional. The work of authors like Robert Reed, Nancy Kress, Michael Swanwick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others seem to appear so regularly in our pages that readers and struggling new authors can be forgiven if they think of them as Asimov's reliable stable. I, on the other hand, could not be forgiven for entertaining those same thoughts. I know that long-standing authors depart unexpectedly to write novels. If the novel doesn't divert them, they may find their time consumed by child-rearing responsibilities and by the hours needed for career building in occupations unrelated to fiction writing. In addition, there is the hard truth that not every story written by the well-known author is going to appeal to me or be right for Asimov's.

  Despite my claims to open mindedness, however, I know that the attempt to break into the field or into a particular market is a frustrating one for most new writers. While I can only publish seventy to eighty tales a year, I receive thousands of submissions during the same time period. It's unlikely that
more than a quarter of the stories that I do publish will be from new authors. This past fall at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, I had a long talk with Leslie J. Howle, the director and co-administrator of Clarion West Writers Workshop. She mentioned that some Clarion graduates felt discouraged by the odds of a new writer selling a story to a professional market.

  Well, the odds can be very discouraging, but writing a story and sending it in to a science fiction magazine is not the same thing as buying a lottery ticket. In the latter instance there is a certain probability that you will win the jackpot. Depending on how many people enter a lottery, these odds may range from tiny to miniscule, but statistically, the odds will be the same for every ticket purchased. This is clearly not the case for the writer. Some authors may sell to me on their first attempts. At the other extreme, I met an author at World Fantasy who had been submitting stories to Asimov's for about twenty-five years before finally selling one to us a couple of years ago. For myriad reasons, some authors will never tell a story that appeals to me, while others will do so over and over again.

  Still, as I said earlier, I don't rely on my familiarity with an author when I make choices for the magazine. I take the search for new stories very seriously, and I look over every submission that comes into the office. Whether you've had any sort of professional experience or not, I enjoy reading your cover letters. I like learning about who you are, the research you've put into the story, or your connection to the magazine. Some of my colleagues advise against listing semi-professional sales, but I am not adverse to reading about your hard-earned writing credits. There are many discerning professional and semi-professional editors working in science fiction and its related fields. Three sales to Bloody Fang Magazine may not tell me that you know how to write an SF story, but it often does indicate that you know how to construct a tale. Ultimately, though, the cover letter isn't essential because the story will have to sell itself. Just last week, I purchased a story sans cover letter from an author I'd never heard of.

  It may sound like a cliché, but it's still true that every professional author had to start somewhere. Not long ago, Jack Skillingstead was completely unknown to our readers. I had never heard of either Ian Creasey or Ted Kosmatka when I purchased their first stories for Asimov's. Since then, I've bought enough material for each of them to qualify for a SFWA membership on the strength of their Asimov's sales alone.

  I'm delighted and heartened that we consistently find promising new writers, but I have no intention of taking that good luck for granted. I'll continue to enjoy getting to know you and appreciating the time and effort that you put into each story at the same time as I look hungrily over your tales for the next exciting Asimov's debut.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Sheila Wiliams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: SPACE JUNK FOR SALE

  by Robert Silverberg

  It was going to be a grand and glorious adventure, remember? The dawning of a new Elizabethan Age of exploration: first the Moon, then Mars, then perhaps the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually the colonization of the stars. The late twentieth century and afterward would be the Age of Space. We all wrote stories about it, imagining what it was going to be like—Heinlein, Asimov, Williamson, Bester, Sturgeon, all the great writers of science fiction's golden age, and on and on through my own generation of writers to the winners of last year's Hugo and Nebula awards.

  As we all know, most of yesterday's science fiction is still science fiction today. The Age of Space—by which we meant the era of manned space flight to far horizons—got as far as the Moon, back there in 1969, and after a handful of manned landings there we turned our backs on the whole enterprise and called it quits. Of course, things aren't going to stay that way. What we're going through right now is a sort of quiet interlude in that grand and glorious adventure, an odd little phase of inactivity, and sooner or later spacefarers from Earth will be heading outward again, bound for the sort of exploits I used to read about in Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories when I was a kid. The promise of the first moon landings is eventually going to be fulfilled, I have no doubt. But for the time being, not much is going on for us along the frontiers of space.

  Meanwhile we have www.collectspace.com and www.hobbyspace.com and www.thespacestore.com and www.lovaura.com as the bleak, ironic residue of the first phase of our grand and glorious Age of Space.

  Www.collectspace.com and hobby space.com and the rest of them are web sites, just a few among many, that deal in space memorabilia, by which I don't mean merely back issues of Astounding Science Fiction and postage stamps depicting space satellites, but actual artifacts that have been to space. More than half a century ago, Robert A. Heinlein wrote a stirring novella called “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” about a wily entrepreneur who sells man-kind on the idea of voyages to the Moon—not so much for the romantic grandeur and gloriosity of it all as for his own personal profit. Heinlein himself, very much a romantic but also a free-market capitalist if there ever was one, and an energetic propagandist for space exploration, would be angered to learn that here in the twenty-first century, two decades after his death, we still haven't taken the first step beyond those early Moon landings. But I'm sure he'd find wry pleasure in the knowledge that somebody is cashing in on space exploration, if only by selling the detritus that our space flights so far have generated.

  Consider: three or four years ago, a California auction firm called Aurora Auctions sold a brown M&M candy that had traveled beyond the Earth's atmosphere aboard the privately financed SpaceShipOne. It went for fifteen hundred dollars. “It was flown on the very first mission,” the head of the auction house said. “That's very important."

  More recently, Aurora auctioned off the documentation concerning a urine-measuring system that was keeping track of astronauts’ body functions on one of the Gemini missions of the 1960s. “Excellent condition,” the auction catalog declared. “Answers those delicate questions."

  The collector market for space junk is infinitely voracious. A toothbrush that Buzz Aldrin used during the Apollo 11 mission—that was the big one, the one that made the first landing—went for twenty-three thousand dollars. The same enthusiast—a retired New York lawyer—paid twenty-six thousand dollars for a flashlight and cord that went to the Moon with Apollo 15. Astronauts’ autographs, of course, are always in heavy demand, and so are peripheral items like NASA tote bags and DVD recordings of press conferences involving Lisa Nowak, the hapless astronaut who was arrested a few months ago on charges of attempted murder growing out of a love triangle she was involved in. But the big action is in the precious items that fall into the “flown” category—artifacts that have been to space and back, and particularly those that have been to the Moon.

  Most of this stuff gets into public hands because NASA doesn't consider it important enough to donate to the Smithsonian Institution's space museum. Everything aboard a space mission is carefully catalogued and the Smithsonian gets first pick. Whatever is deemed superfluous—those flashlights and toothbrushes, etc.—is donated by NASA to other museums, or sold at government auctions. NASA employees are forbidden to sell space artifacts themselves, although plenty of items do get smuggled out. (Heinlein, that old free-enterpriser, probably would approve.) It's permissible for astronauts to sell their signatures and other memorabilia once they retire, and a lot of them do. And so, even though not much is going on right now in the way of space exploration, the stock of space junk that today's space entrepreneurs are offering for sale is constantly growing. If you Google up “space memorabilia,” you'll find all sorts of sites peddling things like thermal tiles from the space shuttle, cell-phone holsters used by astronauts, parachute fragments from the Soviet Soyuz expeditions, and baseball caps that come with impressive-looking “flown in space” certificates of authenticity. (Certificates of authenticity are a major feature of this particular area of collecting.)

  So
me of the astronauts find this kind of mercantile activity distasteful, but most take a laissez-faire attitude. “It's business,” said Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut to set foot on the Moon. “Isn't that the American free-enterprise dream, to buy something low and sell high?” On the other hand, Neil Armstrong, the very first man on the moon, no longer will sign autographs because he thinks the prices they fetch are obscenely high. Jim Newman, though, who was aboard the 2002 space-shuttle mission that repaired the Hubble telescope, signs autographs all the time, deliberately creating a huge supply to keep prices low. “It's very important to acknowledge there are collectors of things in the world,” he said. “When there is no one left who collects things about space flight, that's because space flight is no longer important."

  Myself, I don't see much appeal in a spacegoing M&M or a used toothbrush, but they're about as good as one can hope to get right now if one collects that sort of thing. However, the most fertile territory for the dealers in space artifacts is still untapped, and we had better start tapping it soon. I'm talking about space itself, a well-stocked repository for highly marketable space debris of all sorts.

  There's so much of it out there now that it'll soon be a threat to further space exploration. NASA keeps a list of detectable space objects in our vicinity that are more than four inches wide: at the moment upward of three thousand spacecraft are in orbit around Earth, two thirds of them no longer active. There are seven thousand items of miscellaneous man-made debris of lesser size but large enough to be tracked, everything from spent rocket stages to stray hand tools and a camera. And in January 2007, China tested its new anti-satellite rocket by using it to blow up an old weather satellite up yonder, thus creating, in one fell swoop, close to a thousand new orbiting fragments 530 miles above us, which by now have spread out over a belt stretching from a hundred miles up to more than two thousand. Low-altitude debris drifts toward us and eventually burns up in the atmosphere. The loftier chunks don't. They'll remain in orbit for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years.