Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 Read online

  Vince has been my agent for film rights for a decade or more, as smart and aggressive as you would want your agent to be, but never before has he had so many different Silverberg projects going. If even half of them materialize as movies or TV shows, I'll be all over the place a few years from now. But I know better than to put much faith in the likelihood that Hollywood stuff will actually happen. Most projects disappear somewhere along the way—even Dune came and went half a dozen times before finally being filmed.

  Also some documents from Vince pertaining to the proposed filming of my 1968 story “Passengers.” It was bought for filming a dozen years ago, but the movie was never produced, and somehow Vince has regained the rights and sold them all over again. Nice. I wonder if they'll manage to make it this time around.

  Feb 3. And now my New York agent, Chris Lotts, closes a deal with Tor Books for a reissue of my 1971 novel, Downward to the Earth. I wrote that one after coming back from a trip to Africa, so it's not surprising that one of its main themes is post-colonial life, and that it features a race of intelligent elephant-like beings. It includes a significant bit of homage to Joseph Conrad, a writer who has had great influence on me—the first of many Conrad homages of mine. (In this one I tip my hat to Heart of Darkness.) I'm glad to see the book returning to print. Chris tells me that another, much bigger reissue deal is in the works, but nothing is definite yet. My fingers are crossed for this one.

  These past few weeks have been very busy, all sorts of deals happening and even more pending. I'm not unhappy about that, of course, but so much action is starting to tire me—dozens of e-mails buzzing back and forth between various publishers and me, discussions with my agents Chris and Vince, terms to haggle over, contracts to sign! Poor me! I guess there are worse problems for a writer to have. My teenage self, who so desperately wanted to get a story published anywhere he could, would surely find all this self-pity very amusing. But I haven't been a teenager for close to sixty years and fatigue is an issue for me, even when caused by torrents of good news. That ambitious kid of 1952 would never understand.

  Feb 6. A glorious California weekend, record-breaking warm temperatures. On Saturday we saw the new London production of King Lear with Derek Jacobi, one of those worldwide theater telecasts. I spent much of sunny Sunday reading a biography of Georges Simenon. The juxtaposition of Lear and Simenon had me considering the concept of retirement, theirs and mine (because I am semi-retired as a writer and constantly thinking about deleting the “semi").

  Lear bungled his retirement, angrily and foolishly alienating his one ally as he gave up his kingship, and undergoing terrible suffering as a result. His rough and ultimately self-destructive treatment of Cordelia made me wonder whether he was already beginning to lose his mind when he abdicated, rather than (as I had long thought) going mad under the pressure of the events that followed. As for Simenon, he and I had very similar writing careers, the one difference being that he became vastly more famous and wealthy than I did. But we both began writing professionally in our late teens, enormously prolific writers quickly turning out reams of copy for pulp markets, then began to produce more ambitious material in our thirties, and, in our late sixties, gave up writing novels altogether. (Simenon, in fact, stopped writing fiction entirely, though he spent his last years writing a series of memoirs. I've done no novels in the past decade, but I've continued to write short stories and the occasional novella.) Do even the most prolific writers eventually reach a point where they'd just like to kick back and let the new generation take over? Simenon did in 1972. I've been feeling that way since about 2002. At least he made a better job of his retirement than Lear did. I hope I do.

  Anyway, it's been a busy few weeks—unusually busy. I hope these notes don't give the impression that every day of the year brings me some new contract to sign, as it has seemed since mid-January. Believe me: there are lulls, plenty of them. But this has certainly been an active time, and it's time to take things a little easier. So off we go on a little holiday, now—a few days down in San Diego, enjoying that city's lovely weather and prowling its marvelous zoo in search of wombats and koalas. And then I'll see what March holds for me.

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert Silverberg

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  * * *

  Department: ON THE NET: STEAMED

  by James Patrick Kelly

  ours and theirs

  Haven't we seen this once before? Back in the early eighties, a group of young and ambitious writers leapt out of the back seat of science fiction and gave the genre's steering wheel a hard jerk to one side, sending us careening into cyberspace. For a time cyberpunk was our secret, although given the caterwauling it evoked in genre from its partisans and critics, it wasn't much of one. But by the end of the decade, cyberpunk was no longer a literary movement but also a lifestyle, a fashion statement, and something of a fad. It spawned movies and TV shows and comics and video games and jewelry; for some mirrorshades and leather were the uniform of the day. It was no longer ours, it was theirs, too. Anyone could take whatever they wanted from it.

  At roughly the same time, steampunk was stirring. Just as cyberpunk had a core group of writers which included such central figures as Bruce Sterling [wired.com/beyondthebeyond] and William Gibson [williamgibsonbooks.com], among steampunk's founders were Tim Powers [www.theworksoftim powers.com] and James Blaylock [sybertooth.com/blaylock] and K. W. Jeter [kwjeter.com]. Of course, steampunk had a much slower takeoff. Jeter is generally credited with coining the name in a letter to the editor published in Locus [locusmag.com] that concerned itself with what to call the nascent subgenre:

  Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock, and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like “steampunk,” perhaps . . .

  * * * *

  (Science Fiction Citations [jesses word.com/sf/view/327], an otherwise wonderful resource for genre jargon, cites a later interview with Blaylock as the first usage. Perhaps a correction is in order?) Since Jeter's letter appeared in April 1987, his prediction was off by as much as a generation, although in 2011 it has come to pass with a vengeance. It's interesting that Jeter was also a cyberpunk of note, and there has ever been entanglement between the two great punk subgenres, starting with their names. Steampunk has a note of whimsy that was lost on the first cyberpunks, who were earnestly fomenting literary revolution. Yet in 1990, Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine helped popularize steampunk tropes. Since then all kinds of writers have freely and often gleefully crossed the boundaries between steampunk and cyberpunk.

  And while steampunk's cultural breakthrough took longer than cyberpunk's, its time is most certainly now.

  * * * *

  steam-powered links

  Ask AEther Emporium [ether emporium.pbworks.com/w/page/10454263/Wiki], the steampunk wiki, what steampunk is and you'll get eight different impassioned answers. Various writers suggest that it is a literary genre, an evolved fantasy, an aesthetic, a mythology, and a subculture. It is the “Personal Industrial Revolution,” “a reaction to the utter soullessness and disposability of modern tech” and “over-sized rivets,aero shaped fins and elaborate exposed plumbing fixtures all covered with that ‘comfortably worn’ patina.”

  Clearly, deciding what steampunk is all about is not going to be easy! Part of the problem is that as more and more people are drawn to this subculture, they bring their own interests to it. Some are keen to dress up in corsets and riding boots, waistcoats and goggles, or uniforms of the armed forces of the imagination. Others want to make beautiful and idiosyncratic objects. Indeed, the Maker Movement [makezine.com] has come into its own at just the right time to help transform steampunk fancies into quirky reality. There is also self-proclaimed steampunk music, but no real agreement on what it ought to sound like.

  But since we're readers here, let's concentrate on the literary branch.
Aether Emporium polled members of the blog Brass Goggles [brassgoggles.co.uk/blog] for suggestions to stock the essential steampunk library [etheremporium.pbworks.com/w/page/10454249/Steampunk-Essentials]. The bloggers mentioned revered ancestors like Jules Verne [on line-literature.com/verne ], H.G. Wells [online-literature.com/wellshg], Jack London [london.sonoma.edu], and Arthur Conan Doyle [online-literature.com/doyle], men who wrote during steampunk prime time. Then there are precursors, some of whose work points toward the current iteration: George MacDonald Fraser [wjduquette.com/authors/gmfraser.html], Harry Harrison [harryharrison.com], Michael Moorcock [multiverse.org], and Talbot Mundy [talbotmundy.com]. To their number, I might also add Keith Laumer [keithlaumer.com] for his Imperium series. I admit I was less impressed with their selections of contemporary steampunk. For that, let me commend a list compiled by the astute John Klima [libraryjournal.com/lj/reviewsgenrefiction/884588-280/steampunk20coretitles.html.csp] in Library Journal. In addition to Jeter, Blaylock, and Powers, Klima mentions Neal Barrett, Jr. [infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intnbjr.htm], Gail Carriger [gailcarriger.com], Cherie Priest [cheriepriest.com], Gordon Dahlquist [bookreporter.com/authors/au-dahlquist-gordon.asp], and Paul Di Filippo [pauldifilippo.com], among others. Among those others he mentions are Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, who gave us the quintessential The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [lxg.wikia.com/wiki/Leagueof ExtraordinaryGentlemenWiki].Okay, so it's not a novel. It's a comic graphic novel. You got a problem with that?

  Yet another writer Klima cites is China Miéville [chinamieville.net] for his novel Perdido Street Station. And here we begin to see a problem with steampunk's popularity. Don't get me wrong, Perdido Street Station is a wonderful book, but Miéville himself describes it as “basically a secondary world fantasy with Victorian era technology.” Victorian era technology, but no Victoria. Or England. Or, indeed, any of our history. If one includes this book and others like it, as many do, it seems to me that the boundaries of this subgenre get harder to map. I don't want to play genre cop and Miéville probably doesn't care if his book is steampunk or not.But the more kinds of writing—or activities—that get called steampunk, the less meaning the word has.

  Just saying.

  * * * *

  debate

  And the steampunk subculture recognizes this. Check out The Great Steampunk Debate [greatsteampunkdebate.com], which is the archive of an online “discussion on ideology, beliefs, politics, ethics, and how all of these things intersect with steampunk.” This exchange took place in May 2010. Among the subjects “debated” were the politics of steampunk, its relationship to the world of the nineteenth century that it mirrors, with emphasis on issues of gender, race, class, and industrialization, and the existence—or failure—of a center that could hold its various subgroups together. Lest this sound like some academic colloquium, recall that that this took place on the internets, where the niceties of civilized discourse are rarely observed. Despite the fact that the noise to signal ration was definitely skewed toward clamor, it's worth skimming over the rants to find the quiet voices of reason. What I was able to glean from the debate was that different populations were attracted to the idea of steampunk for different reasons. Some were readers, some were media fans. Some were Makers, some were goths on the rebound. Some wanted just want to have fun, some want to change the world.

  So what's wrong with that?

  Nothing, of course. But to return to literary concerns, traditional SF writers have expressed misgivings about a subgenre that resolutely turns its back on our sometimes bewildering future to fixate on a period of history, which, while simpler, was filled with horrors that we are lucky to have escaped. Charles Stross made this case on his blog[antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/the-hard-edge-of-empire.html]:

  If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat.

  At the end of his essay he asks, “what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?”

  Scott Westerfeld gave a testy reply [scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2010/11/genre-cooties] in which he details a number of thoughtful essays by steampunk aficionados dealing with the very issues Stross raises. And as for the novel that takes an unflinching look at the Dickensian side of steampunk, he suggests Cherie Priest's popular Boneshaker [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boneshaker(novel)].After pointing out that science fiction—specifically space opera—is not without the sin of under-examined assumptions, he strikes what might be considered a low blow at critics like Stross: “And yes, this is about YOU being OLD, steampunk-haters. (In spirit, not in years.)” Ouch!

  Speaking of Cherie Priest, if you are looking for a passionate, intelligent, and knowledgeable explanation of what steampunk is all about, click over to her essay Steampunk: What it is, why I came to like it, and why I think it'll stick around [theclockworkcentury. com/?p=165]. She elaborates on two persuasive reasons: “(1). Steampunk comes from a philosophy of salvage and customization, and (2). Steampunk's inherent nature is participatory and inclusive, yet subversive.”

  * * * *

  exit

  If you are expecting some grand pronouncement on these matters, stop reading here. Like my friend and editor Sheila Williams [asimovs.com/201104-05/editorial.shtml], I am of two minds on this subject. I definitely get uncomfortable when critics of steampunk go after it for being escapist—a calumny that has been used to marginalize SF since Gernsback's days. Clearly, in the hands of writers like Priest and Powers, steampunk deserves to be taken seriously. And even those aspects of steampunk that are more playful than thoughtful challenge consensus reality in ways that are good for us all. But not all steampunk worlds—or those of science fiction, for that matter—are as morally grounded as those of Powers and Priest. Critics have every right to insist that attention be paid when steampunk's delight in shiny surfaces glosses over human suffering.

  Meanwhile, I still have an unanswered question. Mirrorshades and goggles—what's up with all the eyewear?

  Copyright © 2011 by James Patrick Kelly

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novella: STEALTH

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Recently, Kristine Kathryn Rusch accomplished the remarkable feat of winning both the twenty-fifth annual Asimov's Readers’ Award for best novella and Analog's AnLab award for best short story. She returns to our pages with another thrilling novella about the dangerous and destructive technology that was first encountered in “Diving Into the Wreck” (Asimov's, December 2005). The author's Diving series is having quite a year. Pyr published City of Ruins in May, and will publish the next book, Boneyards, in January. In other news, her next Retrieval Artist novel, now retitled Anniversary Day, will appear exclusively on Audible.com during the fall, and then be released in book format by WMG Publishing in December.

  Now

  Go, go, go, go!” Squishy waved her arms, shouting as she did.

  She stood in the mouth of the corridor and watched as scientist after scientist fled the research station, running directly toward the ships.

  The corridors were narrow, the lights on bright, the environmental system on full. It would have been cold in the corridors if it wasn't for the panicked bodies hurrying past her. The sharp tang of fear rose off them, and she heard more than one person grunt.

  “Go, go, go!” She continued shouting and waving her arms, but she had to struggle to be heard over the emergency sirens.

  An automated voice, androgynous and much too calm, repeated the same instructions every thirty seconds: Emergency evacuation underway. Proc
eed to your designated evac area. If that evac area is sealed off, proceed to your secondary evac area. Do not finish your work. Do not bring your work. Once life tags move out of an area, that area will seal off. If sealed inside, no one will rescue you. Do not double back. Go directly to your designated evac area. The station will shut down entirely in . . . fifteen . . . minutes.

  Only the remaining time changed. Squishy's heart was pounding. Her palms were damp, and she kept running her fingers over them.

  “Hurry!” she said, pushing one of the scientists forward, almost causing him to trip. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Another ran by her, clutching a jar. She stopped him, took the jar, and set it down.

  He reached for it. “My life's work—”

  “Had better be backed up off site,” she said, even though she knew it wasn't. The off-site backups were the first thing destroyed, nearly three hours before. “Get out of here. Now!"

  He gave the jar one last look, then scurried away. She glanced at the jar too, saw it pulsating, hating it, and wanting to kick it over. But she didn't.

  She stood against the wall, moving the teams forward, getting them out. No one was going to die this day.

  A woman clutched at her. “My family—”

  “Will find you. They've been notified of the evac,” Squishy said, even though she had no idea if that was true.

  “Are they far enough away?” the woman asked, clutching at Squishy.

  What made these people so damn clingy? She didn't remember scientists being clingy before.