Asimov's SF, July 2007 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, July 2007

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

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  Copyright ©2007 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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  Asimov's Science Fiction

  July 2007

  Vol. 31, No.7. Whole No. 378

  Cover Art by Donato Giancola

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  NOVELLA

  Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress

  NOVELETTES

  The Trial by Brian Stableford

  The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small by Chris Roberson

  SHORT STORIES

  Bullet Dance by John Schoffstall

  Roxie by Robert Reed

  Congratulations from the Future! by Michael Swanwick

  POETRY

  Baseline by Greg Beatty

  As Much As Most by W. Gregory Stewart

  My Window on the Worlds by G.O. Clark

  DEPARTMENTS

  Editorial: First Impressions by Sheila Williams

  Reflections: Limbo on the Moon by Robert Silverberg

  On Books by Paul Di Filippo

  The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss

  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, No.7. Whole No. 378, July 2007. 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. (c) 2007 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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  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS by Sheila Williams

  REFLECTIONS: LIMBO ON THE MOON by Robert Silverberg

  BASELINE by Greg Beatty

  THE TRIAL by Brian Stableford

  BULLET DANCE BY John Schoffstall

  THE SKY IS LARGE AND THE EARTH IS SMALL by Chris Roberson

  ROXIE by Robert Reed

  CONGRATULATIONSFROM THE FUTURE! by Michael Swanwick

  FOUNTAIN OF AGE by Nancy Kress

  ...AS MUCH AS MOST by W. Gregory Stewart

  ON BOOKS by Paul Di Filippo

  MY WINDOW ON THE WORLDS by G.O. Clark

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR BY Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

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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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  EDITORIAL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  by Sheila Williams

  Your first impression of Asimov's is usually the cover. Although this image often represents an individual story, it must also convey a sense of the entire reading experience that lies ahead. At the newsstand, the cover art must attract the attention of a new buyer, maintain the interest of a familiar reader, and help convince both to take the magazine home. Lying in a stack of mail at home, this same cover vies for attention with the time you might carve out to play World of Warcraft or to watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives. We place our trust in an illustrator's talent when we assign a story to him or pick up one of her pieces for reprint. Luckily, the vivid images that science fiction and fantasy engender attract a great many gifted artists to our field. As part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration, I'd like to mention some of the artists who've been a part of our magazine. We've worked with many gifted artists, but this column only gives me the space to mention a few of the illustrators you've recognized with your annual readers’ awards.

  The arrival of a new cover in the office creates a buzz. It is one of the last pieces to fall into place. As I write this editorial, I eagerly await July's cover proofs. I've seen Donato Giancola's striking painting, online, but it will be a few days more before I'll know how it looks with cover lines and the magazine's logo. I've always loved Donato's covers, and the public seems quite taken with his work, too. Donato won the Best Artist 2006 Hugo Award. The art for his September 2005 cover, which featured astronauts working in space, went on to win a major Spectrum Award and his gleaming robot on the August 2004 cover won that year's Readers’ Award. Donato was delighted to add your award to his collection. For his acceptance speech, he wrote, “This is one of my favorite paintings, as well. My thanks go out to all the people who have encouraged and supported my work over the years. It is recognition through awards like this that remind me, as I work in the studio, tha
t I am on the right path; others are looking over my shoulder, as eager as I am to see what springs forth from the drafting table. May I continue to delight and entertain you for many more issues to come.” Naturally, we hope he does, too.

  The highly regarded Michael Whelan is another artist we've had the honor of working with. Michael has won sixteen Hugo Awards. In 1990, our July issue, which featured his brooding megaliths on a beach, and the reprint of his intricate Snow Queen in December brought him his first Asimov's Readers’ Award. His January 2005 image of a woman standing on a precipice brought him another. In November 1992, he graced our special tribute cover with a dignified depiction of Isaac Asimov on a pedestal of books next to a robot holding an eternal flame.

  In correspondence about his most recent Readers’ Award, Michael wrote, “Thanks for the email with the great news! It's particularly enjoyable for me to win for a painting I did for myself, based on a theme of my own. After illustrating books for over thirty years I have [since 1988, when the award winner was painted] been devoting more time to my gallery. Perhaps there will be other more recent pieces that might work as well.” Happily, two of those pieces have appeared on subsequent issues, and a painting Michael created for another venue graces our thirtieth anniversary anthology, as well.

  A perennially popular illustrator, six-time Readers’ Award winner, and multiple Hugo-Award recipient is Bob Eggleton. Bob's most recent Asimov's cover was April/May 2006's amusing and evocative portrayal of the ill-fated Gernsbach expedition. When I told him about this editorial, the artist responded “I think what's great about Asimov's is that it's widely read and goes to subscribers, which means that each and every month people see a piece of artwork on the cover that hopefully promises amazing adventures within. It's always nice to hear that readers chose some of my artwork to award ‘best cover art.’ It means that my work is meaningful to people and gives them enjoyment. That's really the mission of any artist. Even when it doesn't win an award, though, I hope readers enjoy my work along with the whole magazine. The field—the magazines—have changed and evolved so much over the years. It's fun to be part of that evolution."

  It's true that Asimov's covers have changed over the years. Although I vividly recall the soft blues and purples from the palette of our 1989 Readers’ Award winner Hisaki Yasuda, whose dolphins and whales seemed to leap right off the page, and the surreal floating images of Wojtek Siudmak (winner, 1997), we've long since lost touch with both artists. Gary Freeman, who tied with Bob Eggleton in 1992 for the Readers’ Award, is another artist I haven't heard from in years. I associate Gary's work with robots because so many of his covers accompanied Isaac Asimov's stories. The image of Keith Parkinson's (winner, 1990) dragons remains with me, but, sadly, the artist passed away in 2005.

  Fortunately, we remain in touch with many of our more recent award winners. Michael Carroll, who won the award in 2002, has been responsible for intriguing astronomicals, ancient dinosaurs, and fiction. His story, “The Terrible Lizards of Luna,” appeared in our June 2000 issue. Multiple Hugo-Award winner, Jim Burns, is also a two-time winner of our Readers’ Award (2000 and 2004). His wide-ranging talent brilliantly coveys both the deadly chill of frozen Mars in a Kim Stanley Robinson story and the vast reach of space in a Charles Stross tale. News has just reached us that Jim will illustrate our August cover story, “Horminga Canyon,” by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling. Our 2003 winner, Dominic Harman, is another versatile artist who seems equally at home with aliens, space stations, and planetary vistas.

  New artists come to our attention and we rediscover old favorites. Alas, there isn't room here to discuss all the creative people who worked on Asimov's covers before the award existed, or the lovely work by many artists who haven't managed to snatch the Readers’ Award. For the past thirty years, the look of Asimov's has been defined by these imaginative people. We can't wait to see what surprises will spring from their drafting boards in the years ahead.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  REFLECTIONS: LIMBO ON THE MOON

  by Robert Silverberg

  New popes bring new doctrines, and the canny theologian who is now Pope Benedict XVI has begun making his mark on the Roman Catholic Church by, among other things, speaking in favor of the idea that it is time to make an end to the churchly concept of “Limbo"—putting Limbo in limbo, so to speak. Ordinarily a change in Roman Catholic dogma would hold very little direct significance for most of the readers of a science fiction magazine, but in this case, as I'll demonstrate in a moment, there's a definite SF angle. The concept of Limbo got into Catholic terminology by way of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century theologian, whose primary metaphysical achievement was to reconcile the thinking of the pre-Christian philosophers Plato and Aristotle with the doctrines of the Roman church. (By way of full disclosure: I am not now and never have been any sort of Christian, Roman Catholic or otherwise, and though I've read widely in religious texts it has been purely in the spirit of anthropological research, not as a manifestation of belief.) Eight hundred years before the time of Aquinas, an earlier theologian, St. Augustine, had considered the problem of babies who die before they can be baptized. Baptism washes away original sin, the taint brought upon the human race by Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden apples in Eden. But what about babies who die unbaptized? Augustine concluded that they are, alas, excluded from Heaven and must suffer the torments of Hell along with all other unbaptized souls.

  Aquinas found this notion repugnant, as I suppose I would if I believed in Hell in the first place. His solution was Limbo: a place in the afterlife reserved for unbaptized babies—and also the Hebrew patriarchs, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, et al., who were unquestionably persons of virtue but who, because they had lived before the time of Jesus, had been deprived by that technicality of inclusion in the Christian Heaven. According to Aquinas it was unfair to condemn innocent babes to suffer in Hell merely because there had been no time to baptize them, and it was manifestly nonsensical to send the great Biblical patriarchs there. On the other hand, the church taught that baptism was necessary for admission to Heaven, and the babies and the patriarchs had not undergone that rite, so it was impossible to let them in. Limbo was a useful compromise—a place that was neither Heaven nor Hell. (The word “limbo” comes from the Latin limbus, meaning “hem” or “border.")

  The most famous literary reference to Limbo can be found in the fourth canto of Dante's Inferno, in which Dante, following Virgil, his guide, enters the First Circle of Hell and finds it to be a somewhat revised version of Aquinas’ Limbo. In Dante's version it seems like a pleasant enough place: there is a meadow, a stream, a seven-walled castle where its inhabitants dwell. The Biblical patriarchs aren't there, because Jesus had personally descended into Limbo to rescue the lot of them, from Adam and Noah on down, but Dante's Limbo does contain the souls of other men, women, and children who had lived lives free of sin but had not been able to receive the sacrament of baptism: what Dante calls the “virtuous pagans,” among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the astronomer Ptolemy, the mathematician Euclid, the poets Homer, Horace, and Ovid, the great doctors Hippocrates and Galen, and such well-known figures of the classical world as Cicero, Seneca, and Julius Caesar. A surprising inclusion is the Moslem hero Saladin, Sultan of Egypt in the time of the Crusades, who certainly could have been baptized if he had wanted to, which, of course, he did not. (The lordly Saladin sits in splendid isolation, though if he had cared to have the company of other members of his faith in Limbo he could have sought out the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Averroes, author of a famous commentary on Aristotle, or the third Muslim resident, the physician Avicenna.) Even more astonishingly, Dante also includes in his group of virtuous pagans a remarkable collection of mythical and fictional characters: Orpheus, Hector, Aeneas, and the Amazon queen Pen-thesilea, a character in the Iliad.

  Since Dante's day the church has found t
he idea of Limbo an embarrassment, not only because it exposed a troublesome conflict between the teachings of the two great masters, Augustine and Aquinas, but also because denying newborn children the blessings of Heaven on a technicality began to seem like a chilly dogma indeed. Eventually Augustine's position was disposed of by a ruling declaring it his own private opinion, not a binding church dogma. That still left Aquinas’ Limbo on the books; but, about 1985, Pope John Paul II appointed a commission of thirty theologians to come up with “a more coherent and illuminating” doctrine, and one member of that commission was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, who expressed his belief that “Limbo was never a defined truth of faith. Personally ... I would abandon it, since it was only a theological hypothesis.” Now that he is Pope, he has indicated his support for a 1994 church document that said of children who die without baptism that “the church can only entrust them to the mercy of God,” which would allow innocent but unbaptized babes to have the solace of Heaven, and dismisses Limbo as unnecessary. The current anti-Limbo movement has come under attack by conservative churchmen who think that abolishing it will weaken the significance of baptism, but it is likely soon to win formal ratfication.

  While the Catholic Church has wrestled with the Limbo idea for centuries (Protestants reject it as unsupported by Biblical authority), poets have felt free to use it in all sorts of interesting ways. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, in his spooky poem “Limbo,” written about 1817, depicted it as a realm on the borderline between reality and non-reality, a sort of hyperspace whose inhabitants dwell in a perpetual waking nightmare of utter stasis:

  “'Tis a strange place, this Limbo—not a Place,

  Yet name it so; where Time & weary Space