Asimov's SF June 2009 Read online

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  Asimov's SF, June 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 “The Spires of Denon” by Paul Youll

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: JAMES PATRICK KELLY by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS by Robert Silverberg

  Department: ON THE NET: MIND THE GAP by James Patrick Kelly

  Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: ON JAMES PATRICK KELLY by Divers Hands

  Novellete: GOING DEEP by James Patrick Kelly

  Poetry: AND DRUNK THE MILK OF PARADISE by Robert Frazier

  Novelette: CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT by Tom Purdom

  Short Story: BARE, FORKED ANIMAL by John Alfred Taylor

  Short Story: COLD TESTING by Eric Brown

  Poetry: WITHIN YOUR SHOES by Mark Rich

  Short Story: THE MONSTERS OF MORGAN ISLAND by Sandra McDonald

  Poetry: SPLIT DECISIONS by Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel

  Novelette: SAILS THE MORNE by Chris Willrich

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Department: ON BOOKS: WHAT KILLED TOM DISCH? by Peter Heck

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 33, No.6. Whole No. 401, June 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 $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) 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. 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

  Sheila Williams: Editor

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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 46 Hugos and 27 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: JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  by Sheila Williams

  Every November, three hundred million butterflies arrive in Central Mexico. Every March, cliff swallows flock to San Juan Capistrano. And every June a new story by James Patrick Kelly graces the pages of Asimov's. This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the story that initiated this uninterrupted string of tales.

  Jim's first June story, the searing tale of “Saint Theresa of the Aliens,” was published in 1984. It was also his first story to receive a Nebula nomination. The novelette is well worth checking out, but it was not his first story for Asimov's. That honor goes to “Still Time” (August 1983); a tale I encountered as a shy assistant editor. One of only a handful of stories I've ever come across that has to be read in a single sitting, it's a thrilling tale about a man who thinks he's prepared to survive a nuclear war. He has his supplies and he's built his bunker. Unfortunately, when the bombs come, they come with little warning. He's at home working on his shelter, but his daughter is in daycare and his wife is at her job miles from home.

  Not long after “Still Time” was published, I attended my first professional Worldcon, and I made up my mind that I had to meet the author of this compelling story. I approached the writer with trepidation and timidly blurted out how much I'd loved the tale. Then I shrank away, mortified by my forwardness. What I didn't know was that Jim was a pretty nervous young author himself. Years later, he told me he'd been floored by my comment because I was the first “New York City editor” to come up and compliment him on his work.

  Although I was responsible for many aspects of the production of the magazine, I did not really think of myself as an editor, then. I wasn't choosing the stories, and I was not yet editing any of them either. Jim's second June story, however, marked a major transition for me. The story came in during a crisis. We'd always kept a tight rein on our inventory, and while this was fiscally prudent, we found ourselves in a slightly precarious position when the editor had to take a sudden leave of absence to cope with a family emergency. Asimov's now had a thirty page hole in its upcoming issue and I had the exciting, if alarming, instructions to fill the hole with the very best material I could find. As I began to read Jim's hallucinogenic submission about a midsummer day at Stonehenge, I started to relax. The result was that “Solstice” (1985) became the very first story I ever purchased for the magazine. The following year's June story, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” was a loose sequel to “Solstice.” This novelette dis
tinguished itself by becoming the very first winner of our newly instituted Readers’ Award.

  It was after the publication of “Prisoner” that we realized we had a tradition going. The tradition was of course dependent on three very important factors. First, Jim had to submit a story to us; second, we had to have space for it in the June issue (and no pressing needs to use it in a different month); and third, and most important, we had to like and accept the story. No one really expected all three factors to happen every June (or rather December, which is when the issue is actually put together) or that it would be possible to keep the tradition going for very long. All we did know was that we'd been pretty happy with the stories we'd seen so far.

  More important, you seemed pretty happy with Jim's stories, too. In 1990, his story about a wild future in which your mom could be the Statue of Liberty, “Mr. Boy,” picked up its own Readers’ Award. (What's more, that year Jim shared a Reader's Award for a poem he co-wrote with Robert Frazier. The poem, however, appeared in our December issue.) Both “Mr. Boy” and our 1991 June tale, “Standing in Line with Mister Jimmy,” ended up as finalists for the Nebula Award as well.

  “Think Like a Dinosaur,” Jim's 1995 June story, was the blockbuster. The spine-tingling novella about what might really happen if we had transporter technology brought him an SF Chronicle Award, the Reader's Award, and his very first Hugo Award. It was a finalist for the Nebula too. His quieter 1997 story, “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” received the Locus Award and made it to the Hugo and Nebula ballots, as well. “Itsy Bitsy Spider” always brings me close to tears. If you want to reread it, you'll find it in our 30th Anniversary Anthology. Jim won another Hugo for his chilling 1999 novelette, “10 to 16 to 1,” and at least three of his subsequent June stories have also been finalists for the major awards.

  With the June 1998 issue, Jim's relationship with Asimov's grew to include the role of bi-monthly internet columnist. His amusing and informative essays have proven to be popular with you, too. Although these essays have only been with us for a third of the magazine's existence, it seems hard to remember a time when they weren't an essential part of our publication.

  Since our first meeting in 1983 my friendship with Jim has also taken on added dimensions. He's become one of my closest confidants, and is often a sounding board for my editorials, though not this one. We've gone boating on the Lamprey River in New Hampshire, and looking for alligators in the Everglades. I sometimes have to light a fire under him when he comes close to missing his “On the Net” deadlines, but it's worth it, since he inevitably turns in such delightful material. Jim and I attended each other's wedding, and my whole family made it to Boston for his fiftieth birthday. And each year, like those who await the swallows and the butterflies, I look forward to the beauty that will be found in the tale that becomes the James Patrick Kelly June story.

  Copyright © 2009 Sheila Wiliams

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS

  by Robert Silverberg

  There was a time, fifty-plus years ago, when fantasy fiction was the pathetic ragged stepsister of science fiction, a scrawny little genre, beloved only by a special few. Publishing fantasy was a sure way to lose money, and those magazines that specialized in it, notably John W. Campbell's Unknown Worlds, had tiny circulations and quickly became sought-after collector's items.

  All that changed once J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy became a campus craze in the 1960s. Tolkien paperbacks sold by the zillions, and in their wake came the vast hordes of Tolkien imitations, invariably trilogies (though often the first three in a set led to three sequels, and three more after that) that obediently followed the Tolkien formulas: the Disinherited Prince, the Jolly Sidekick, the Dark Lord, the Slithery Secondary Villain, the Virginal Guardian Angel, the not-so-Virginal Wizardess, the Quest for the Talisman of Power, the climactic struggle between Good and Evil, and all the rest. By now one could fill a whole library with the many fat volumes that endlessly rehearse the tropes of commercial fantasy, and still they come, pretty much the same stuff over and over, so far as I am able to tell, but obviously meeting the needs of an ever-enthusiastic audience.

  I would not wish to deprive anyone of any sort of reading pleasure. Reading is a private thing; tastes differ. Go thou, if so you wish, and read trilogy after trilogy, and may you have much joy of it. But I do have a book to recommend to those fantasy readers who might yearn for a less formulaic example of the genre: a novel by an African writer that dips deep into the infinite well of the unconscious and offers a remarkable exercise of the free play of imagination: an extraordinarily rich journey through a fantastic realm that owes nothing at all to the ritualized formulas of modern post-Tolkien trilogistic fiction.

  The book is My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola, first published in 1954, and still in print. Tutuola (1920-1977) was a Nigerian, the son of cocoa farmers who belonged to the Yoruba tribe but had converted to Christianity. After six years of education at a Salvation Army school, he became a blacksmith, then worked at an assortment of menial jobs, and suddenly, in 1946, despite the skimpiness of his education, produced a full-length novel, The Palm-Wine Drink-ard. It drew on the folk traditions of the Yoruba tribe for its material and was written in a simple, odd, somewhat naive but quite literate sort of English. Somehow it found its way into print in England in 1952 and it was widely praised by such people as Dylan Thomas, who called it “grisly and bewitching.” It was followed shortly by My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which also attracted much attention among sophisticated readers, and several other books. Tutuola, now one of Africa's most famous literary figures, ultimately became affiliated with a Nigerian university and then became an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

  Technically this astonishing writer has to be classed as a “primitive,” along with such other self-educated artists as Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau. But “primitive” in that context does not mean unskilled or inept. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a potent work of art and, I think, a truer venture into the fantastic than any ten-foot stack of formula trilogies.

  A look at some of the chapter headings quickly provides the flavor of the work:

  My Life in the 7th Town of Ghosts

  At a Ghost Mother's Birthday Function

  The Short Ghosts and their Flash-eyed Mother

  In the Nameless-town

  Lost or Gain Valley

  Invisible Magnetic Missive sent to Me from Home

  Television-Handed Ghostess

  The Future-Sign Tree

  The story is the first-person narrative of a seven-year-old boy who, fleeing slave traders that burst into his village, manages to slip into a nearby supernatural realm known as the Bush of Ghosts, which is forbidden to mortal beings, but which he enters because he is too young to know better. (Some definitions: “bush,” in the African sense, is a zone of impenetrable jungle. A “ghost,” in the Tutuolan sense, is not the spirit of some departed mortal, but simply one of the supernatural beings that inhabit this strange other realm.)

  The narrator's sojourn in the Bush of Ghosts lasts twenty-four years, during which time he marries twice, is transformed on occasions into a horse, a cow, and some things much more bizarre, briefly becomes a god, studies how to be dead, and has many other curious adventures, all described in straightforward though idiosyncratic prose derived from the spoken idiom of West Africa. In style it is like nothing ever written by anyone else, and yet it is always intelligible and compelling.

  Tutuola's tale is a very peculiar odyssey indeed. When at the outset the narrator blunders into an underground house with a golden portico, he immediately becomes the subject of a quarrel between three ghosts, each of which wants him as a servant. The fuss becomes so intense, we are told, that “all the ghosts and ghostesses of that area” go to the house to settle the dispute. “It was at this time I noticed carefully ... that many of them had no
hands and some had no fingers, some had no feet and arms but jumped instead of walking. Some had heads without eyes and ears, but I was very surprised to see them walking about day and night without missing their way....”

  In the end he is carried off by the “smelling-ghost,” a loathsome creature who wears live scorpions on the rings on his fingers, venomous snakes wrapped around his head, and a boa constrictor as a trouser belt. He pops the boy in a bag, intending to take him to the 7th Town of Ghosts, where he lives. An attempt to escape by climbing a “gravity tree” comes to nothing, and in the smelling-ghost's town the boy is changed into a monkey, a lion, a horse, a camel, a cow, and then a horse again. While briefly back in human form he seizes the juju—the magical talisman—that his master has used to effect these transformations, and bolts off into the forest. “But as any ghost could run faster than any earthly person, so that I became tired before him, and when he was about to catch me or when his hand was touching my head slightly to catch it, then I used the juju which I took from the hidden place that he kept it in before we left the house. And at the same moment that I used it, it changed me to a cow with horns on its head instead of a horse, but I forgot before I used it that I would not be able to change back to the earthly person again....” So it is as a cow that he makes his escape, only to fall into the hands of a tribe of cow-herding ghosts who beat him cruelly in order to induce him to graze on grass, “as I was unable to explain to these cow-men that I am not really a cow.”

  Another escape follows. He regains his own form and hides in a dead log that is already inhabited by a snake; the two of them frighten each other. Another capture, another escape, and he comes to the town of the burglar-ghosts, who exchange themselves with human children to gain access to houses and rob them, and makes a friend who takes him to another town where he sees “a very beautiful young ghostess” and arranges to be married to her. (Time is passing; he is growing up.) His marriage first involves him in a baptism in hot water and fire; then, at his new in-laws’ house, comes a frenzied party “where everybody was served with a variety of food and all kinds of ghost-drinks.... Also all the terrible-creatures sent their representatives as ‘Skulls,’ ‘Long-white creature,’ ‘Invincible and Invisible Pawn’ or ‘Give and Take'...”