Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, October-November 2007

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

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  Cover art for Galaxy Blues, Part One by Ron Miller

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  CONTENTS

  Editorial: TRENDS by Sheila Williams

  Reflections: REREADING THEODORE STURGEON by Robert Silverberg

  LETTERS

  On the Net: PIXEL-STAINED TECHNOPEASANTS by James Patrick Kelly

  Novelette: DARK INTEGERS by Greg Egan

  Short Story: AT SIXES AND SEVENS by Carol Emshwiller

  Short Story: PAID IN FULL by Susan Forest

  Poetry: MODERN CONSTELLATIONS by Pat Tompkins

  Novelette: NIGHT CALLS by Robert Reed

  Poetry: STAR PEOPLE by Bruce Boston

  Novelette: NIGHTFALL by Isaac Asimov

  Short Story: LEONID SKIES by Carl Frederick

  Poetry: LITTLE RED ROBOT by G.O. Clark

  Short Story: DEBATABLE LANDS by Liz Williams

  Poetry: INTO THE DEEP by Michael Meyerhofer

  Short Story: SKULL VALLEY by Michael Cassutt

  Poetry: ENDANGERED by P M F Johnson

  Novelette: DARK ROOMS by Lisa Goldstein

  Poetry: THE ANGEL WHO WRITES by Ruth Berman

  Short Story: THE TURN by Chris Butler

  Poetry: STAYING THE COURSE by Mark Rich

  Serial: GALAXY BLUES: PART ONE OF FOUR: DOWN AND OUT ON COYOTE by Allen M. Steele

  On Books: BURIED TREASURES by Norman Spinrad

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  NEXT ISSUE

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 31, Nos. 10 & 11. Whole Nos. 381 & 382, October/November 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. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. 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

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  Editorial: TRENDS

  by Sheila Williams

  At the countless “advice to new writers” panels that I have participated in at science fiction conventions, someone in the audience will inevitably ask about new trends in SF—what sort of trends are we seeing, which trends would we like to see more of? The anxiety that prompts this question is understandable. The beginning writer does not want to appear out of step with the times. Yet, this is a line of inquiry I am often reluctant to respond to, not due to an inability to define the trends or due to any lack of them, but simply because I really don't want to see twenty stories with similar themes showing up in Monday morning's mail.

  Nonetheless, two types of trends do show up. One type is the narrow and short-lived trend. It can arise from the politics and social issues of the day or simply from a call for a pirate or zeppelin anthology. The other sort of trend is broader and longer term. It may start out as a new way to define science fiction and evolve into a subgenre. In the seventies, this trend might have been the New Wave, in the eighties, Cyberpunk and Humanist SF. The trend is often initially defined with a kind of backward notation. Proponents of the trend will look around for published stories that conform to their definition of the trend. As the trend grows in appeal, authors will deliberately attempt to write fiction that incorporates the tropes of the now established trend. Observers of today's SF have indentified a number of trends, but I will limit this editorial to two that seem to be in opposition to each other.

  One example of the subgenre as trend is the recently redefined “Space Opera.” As David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer point out in their marvelous anthology, The Space Opera Renaissance, this term was initially coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter....” The editors contend that the term was redefined in the eighties to mean “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action ... usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.” In their
anthology, the editors showcase historical examples from the early days of SF through the late nineties and early twenty-first century. An indication that there has been a resurgence in this subgenre is Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's original anthology, The New Space Opera. Stories by a number of Asimov's most popular authors appear in one or both of these books. In recent years, authors writing in this tradition would seem to include Tony Daniel, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Allen M. Steele, R. Garcia y Robertson, and Charles Stross.

  A counter trend to the New Space Opera has been called Mundane SF by Geoff Ryman. In an interview with Kit Reed, for InfinityPlus, Geoff defined his own mundane philosophy this way: “SF content is the future, but the function of most SF seems to be about avoiding the future. So much of the inherited tropes are actually highly unlikely. Take faster than light travel ... there is a ghost of a possibility there, but people have run away with it. This is because they like it. It seems to open up horizons of adventure. It also conveys the message, we can burn through this planet and escape to the stars. I don't think we can. I think we're stuck on Earth. I want to write stories that are stuck on earth and throw out the unlikely tropes.” Mundane SF is pretty much limited by science as we know it today. The guidelines for an upcoming special Mundane SF issue of Interzone Magazine define the trend by what it is not: “Faster than light travel, psi power, nanobot technology, extraterrestrial life, computer consciousness ... brain downloading, teleportation, and time travel.” A recent post on the mundane-sf.blogspot cited Jack Dann's “Café Culture,” Nancy Kress's “Safeguard,” and A.R. Morlan's “The Hikikomori's Cartoon Kimono” from the January 2007 issue of Asimov's as examples of this subgenre (and flat-out excludes Charles Stross's cover story—"Trunk and Disorderly"). Another example would surely be Paolo Bacigalupi's “Yellow Card Man” from our December 2006 issue.

  Do these two trends contradict one another? Well, I believe science fiction is large and should contain multitudes. I'm looking for a well-rounded diet of stories, and, mostly, I'm in favor of authors simply striking out in whatever direction suits the story they're working on. Sometimes, I'm not certain that all so-called trends initially exist, or if the desire to classify stories into categories is really just a symptom of pareidolia, our need to see patterns in everything. Still, identifying a trend can be useful when doing so sets the bar higher, making demands on the author. I like all kinds of science fiction, but I love stories with large-scale, dramatic adventure and stories based on thought-out and convincing scientific premises. I'd like to see more of both. Some authors will experiment with various trends—sometimes in the same piece of fiction—others may prefer to work within a more restricted framework. Regardless of the trend of the day, though, if I find a story effective, it will probably find a home in Asimov's.

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  NONTRENDS IN ASIMOV'S: If you've already perused our contents page, you may have noticed a couple of atypical items. The first of these is our novel serialization from Allen M. Steele. Every once in a blue moon, Asimov's has serialized books by writers like William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and Robert Silverberg. When I got a look at Allen's new Coyote novel, Galaxy Blues, I decided it was about time we did it again. This four-part serial will conclude in our February 2008 issue, several months before the novel hits your local bookstore. The other unusual event is the appearance of Isaac Asimov's “Nightfall,” one of science fiction's best-known classics. Readers have often told me how much they miss seeing Isaac's stories in the magazine. For reasons explained in more detail on page 88, I thought it would be fun to begin the wrap-up of our thirtieth anniversary year with this memorable story. While reprinting landmark tales probably won't become a trend in Asimov's, we do plan to continue with the “memorable story” trend for the magazine's lifetime.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Sheila Williams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Reflections: REREADING THEODORE STURGEON

  by Robert Silverberg

  A few months ago, I said that I'm planning to reread some of the science fiction novels that had most impressed me during my formative years in the field, back in the 1950s, by way of seeing how they stand up to my more critical eye half a century later. The first one I chose, Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, stood up to the scrutiny remarkably well. This time around I've picked Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, which has been regarded as a classic science fiction novel since its publication in 1953.

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  More Than Human isn't exactly a novel. It consists of three novellas, the middle one of which, “Baby Is Three,” appeared first in the October 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, the most important SF magazine of its day. I was a Columbia freshman in October 1952, staggering under the unanticipated reading load that an Ivy League college imposed on its students, but still trying to keep up with my science fiction reading, too. (Not just for fun, either. I was already hoping to write science fiction professionally, and reading an innovative magazine like Galaxy was a form of vocational training for me.) I still was living at home that year, with an hour-long subway ride each way to Columbia and back, and SF was my subway reading. So I first encountered “Baby Is Three” aboard the Seventh Avenue Express, and it had a stunning impact on me. It was a first-person story, narrated by a tough, angry teenager, in which the narrator reports on his sessions with a remarkably skillful psychotherapist who gets him to talk about his experiences living among an odd group of people with paranormal powers. The tone of the story was utterly unlike anything that any SF writers of the day, even Isaac Asimov, even Robert A. Heinlein, even Ray Bradbury, had attempted: street-talk, mostly, vivid, brisk, rough. (The therapy being practiced was L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics, the ancestor of Scientology, which Sturgeon had been dabbling with, though he didn't explicitly say so in the story.)

  I wasn't the only one who was stunned by “Baby Is Three.” Within the general SF community it was probably the second most widely discussed story of the year, after Philip José Farmer's “The Lovers.” For the thirty-four-year-old Sturgeon, who had established his reputation in the 1940s with such stories as “Microcosmic God” and “Killdozer,” and more recently had been startling us all with works like The Dreaming Jewels, “The Stars are the Styx,” and “Rule of Three,” it was an announcement that he was ready to take his place in the top rank of the field. (As he would show in 1953-55 with a swarm of a dozen or more awesome novelettes and novellas.)

  Major book publishers were just becoming interested in science fiction then. “Baby is Three” brought Sturgeon an offer from the new house of Ballantine Books, which had launched an ambitious SF program with such books as Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, to expand the story to book length by adding two more novellas to the existing one. He wrote them both in about three weeks and called the book More Than Human.

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  Though I hadn't read the book in more than fifty years, I remembered it fairly well, which will tell you something of the effect it had on me (and many others) in 1953. It belongs to the subgenre of superman stories, along with such works as Olaf Stapledon's Odd John and H.G. Wells’ Starbegotten—novels that depict the evolution of man-kind beyond the Homo sapiens level. The story deals with the forging of a group of freakish misfits of the peculiarly raffish kind that we came to know as Sturgeonesque people (an idiot, two speech-impaired black girls, a mongoloid baby, etc.) into a being of superior powers to which Sturgeon gives the linguistically infelicitous name of Homo Gestalt.

  When I began my rereading, I felt myself from the very first paragraph in the hands of a master. This is how it opens:

  “The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead."

  No one, not even the eloq
uent Ray Bradbury, had managed prose like that in the science fiction of that era. “The white lightning of hunger"—how extraordinary! “Ribs like the fingers of a fist"—who but Sturgeon could have written that, then? A generation later, William Gibson would begin his own classic novel Neuromancer with the startling line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” But Gibson had had the advantage of knowing Sturgeon's work of thirty years earlier. Sturgeon was on his own when he wrote More Than Human.

  And as I read on through Sturgeon's portrayal of the life of the retarded man who would be one of the components of his gestalt superbeing, I was struck again and again by the dazzling imagery. “The idiot's eyes whose irises seemed on the trembling point of spinning like wheels.” ... “It was air with a puzzle to it, for it was still and full of the colors of dreams, all motionless, yet it had a hurry to it.” ... “His mouth opened and a scratching sound emerged. He had never tried to speak before and could not now; the gesture was an end, not a means, like the starting of tears at a crescendo of music.” Some of Sturgeon's similes and metaphors go too far over the top, as when he compares the color of marmalade to stained glass. But even when he plunges off into wild verbal excess, the only crime he commits is the one of excessive ambition: even Sturgeon's reach sometimes goes beyond his grasp, but at least he is reaching, when that sort of thing was almost never attempted by science fiction writers and, usually, actively discouraged by SF editors. The prose here is remarkable stuff, of a level that Sturgeon himself rarely approached again, as his highly individual manner turned into formula and engulfed him in his own mannerisms. Here, though, everything works wonderfully well.

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  But I found little things going wrong with the book as I moved on through it, and I began to remember that its author was a young man with a family of small children, who had spent his entire career writing under great pressure for poorly paying pulp magazines. Troublesome signs of pulpy overexplicitness begin turning up. Right on the first page we are told that the idiot is a creature “lacking in empathy,” a textbooky sort of thing to say that could well have been left for us to conclude from the character's own actions. In the pages that follow we get similarly needless auctorial prods. They are relatively rare, amidst pages of remarkable nuance and grace; but that they are there at all is a sign that Sturgeon could not entirely edit away the vestiges of his pulp-magazine background.