IN TIMES TO COME
A dam-Troy Castro leads off our April issue with “Hiding Place,” another of his unique novellas about investigator Andrea Cort. This time the problem concerns a crime, but before its legal status can be determined, she has to figure out exactly who is who—and when—in a time and place when identity...
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
Don Sakers
In my day job as a public librarian, I learned something interesting about science fiction and fantasy. A few years ago, I had a great idea for a display of fiction books: collaborations. So I raced around the fiction shelves in search of books with two or more authors listed on the covers. To my...
Brass Tacks
Dear Analog, The Alternate View column in the 2010 September issue showed an alternate history in which “Climategate” apparently found some issue with the scientific evidence for climate change, instead of inspiring multiple reviews that found no problem with the science or the data. Bluff called...
UPCOMING EVENTS
Anthony Lewis
16–20 March 2011 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (academic conference: The Fantastic Ridiculous) at Airport Marriott Hotel, Orlando, FL. Guests of Honor: Connie Willis, Terry Bisson, Andrea Hairston. Registration and tickets: see website for details. Info: http://www.iafa.org/...
INFORMATION
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXI, No. 3, March 2011. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the...
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POETRY
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
EDITORIAL
Stanley Schmidt
ADJECTIVES THAT AREN’T
A long-time favorite topic for heated discussion among linguists and anthropologists is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says, in essence, that language shapes culture. Or, to put it another way, how people think about the world depends on the linguistic tools—words, grammatical structures, etc.—that they have available to use for their thinking.
Recognizable versions of the idea go back at least as far as the eighteenth century, but the formulation most familiar now grew out of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s field work, influenced by Edward Sapir at Yale University in the mid-twentieth century, on concepts of time in Amerindian languages and cultures. Whorf noticed that his subjects’ ideas of time and punctuality were very different from those of Anglo-Americans, and the verb tense structures of their languages differed from that of English in ways that might explain the cultural differences. Perhaps, he suggested, Amerindians found it difficult to understand Anglo notions of time because their own languages did not lend themselves to verbalizing those notions. Another example is that Arctic cultures tend to have multiple words for “snow”—not synonyms, but words for different kinds of snow that might look like synonyms to people from lower latitudes simply because it has never occurred to them to that there are different kinds of snow.
The idea has been controversial from the start because it can be hard to prove that there is a correlation, and if so, which way it goes. Does language shape culture and ways of thinking, or do culture and ways of thinking shape language? My personal suspicion is that the question is too simplistic: probably there are cases in which both kinds of shaping occur, to varying extents. It might be better to say that language and culture coevolve, changes in either leading to changes in the other. And then there are cases in which there doesn’t seem to be much correlation at all, like a small region in northern California where several Amerindian tribes have very similar cultures and very dissimilar languages.
The controversies will no doubt endure, but in the meantime I know of at least one area from my own experience in which most people, in every culture I know anything about, routinely fall into inaccurate, misleading, and counterproductive habits of thought and speech because the linguistic tools they’ve inherited make it hard to do otherwise. I do it myself, even though I’m aware of the problem, because the only tool available in any language I know for easily expressing a particular kind of idea is inherently misleading. It’s possible to express the idea more accurately, but doing so requires cumbersome circumlocutions or offense against cultural convention. The trouble is that people too often fail to realize that what they’re saying is really a quick shortcut for something more complicated, and behave as if what they say (or hear) really means what it appears to mean.
The tool I’m referring to is the adjective.
The Encarta World English Dictionary built into the word processor I’m using defines “adjective” as “a word that qualifies or describes a noun or pronoun.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged) goes into more detail: “A word . . . typically used as a modifier of a noun to denote a quality of the thing named . . . , to indicate its quantity or extent . . . , or to specify or designate a thing as distinct from something else...” (My ellipses replace usage examples and qualifications to extend the definition beyond English.)
On the face of it, that seems straightforward enough, but many of the adjectives in commonest use don’t really do any of those things. Instead they do something else that the dictio nary doesn’t mention. A good example of an adjective functioning in the first way described by that longer definition—denoting “a quality of the thing named”—is “round,” in the sentence, “The sphere is round.” Anything deserving the name sphere is round, regardless of what anybody says about it. It’s an intrinsic characteristic of the object.
A good example of an adjective that appears to function that way, but doesn’t, is “delicious,” in, “Well-prepared liver is delicious.” From everything we’ve been taught about what adjectives do, it seems to be describing an intrinsic property of well-prepared liver. Many people would agree that the description is accurate—and many others would vehemently deny that any liver is delicious.
Which group is right?
Answer: both—and neither. Or, more precisely, each is “right,” but only for its own members. Saying that liver is delicious or yucky does not describe an inherent characteristic of liver, but only its relationship to the person doing the describing. Choosing your food to suit somebody else’s taste is illogical nonsense.
So is saying (as one reader did) that a story is “unreadable crap” when tens or hundreds of thousands of readers have read it and enjoyed it. But it sounds so much more impressive, and feels so much more satisfying, than its more accurate counterpart: “I couldn’t read it and didn’t like it”!
It’s likewise illogical to assert that a particular (and popular) poem is “universally recognized as a bad poem.” If it were, nobody would buy it or read it, and it wouldn’t still be instantly recognizable from its title decades after it was written. A more accurate version of this allegation would be that the poem in question is universally recognized as “bad” among a particular group of individuals who have agreed to recognize each other as “experts” (and agree with the person making the statement). The trouble is that they then fall into the all too common trap of mistaking their shared opinion for an objective description of an intrinsic characteristic of the poem—an error facilitated by our language’s quirk of considering “bad” an adjective: a describer of a noun.
The person making this statement, as it happens, was a regular Analog correspondent whose letters we always look forward to, not only because he often approves of what we do, but because he often provides insightful and entertaining comments along the way. But he, too, can slip, and occasionally when something (maybe even quite a small something) bothers him about a piece we’ve published, he falls headlong into the “adjectives that aren’t” trap and informs us in no uncertain terms that the story was terrible and should never have been published.
In this particular case he was reacting to comments I’d made
on a (different) poem that he didn’t like and which I refused to acknowledge was terrible. He insisted that it was, further jumped to the conclusion that I was woefully ignorant of poetry, and proceeded to lecture me condescendingly and at length on basics, none of them new to me.
I might have to agree with his characterization of the poem if I accepted his premise that a piece of literature can be judged “good” or “bad” by measuring how well it follows widely accepted rules and precepts for deciding when the rules can or should be violated. But, as I’ve made clear on numerous occasions (most recently in the editorial “Rules and Reasons,” November 2010), I don’t—and can’t afford to. To an editor or writer, unless he or she aims primarily to please critics, what matters is not how well a story or poem follows somebody’s set of rules (even “second-order” rules), but how well it works for readers. “Works” means it has the intended effect on the reader; rules are attempts to formulate methods that will enhance a writer’s chance of producing that effect. But any of us who’ve been doing this very long have inescapably learned that the correlation between rules and results is only approximate. Following them meticulously does not guarantee success, and violating them purposefully sometimes produces extraordinary success.
A successful editor or writer has to develop an intuition for what is likely to work with a significant number of readers, with conformity to rules at most a secondary consideration. We also have to learn that nothing works for everybody, and nobody likes everything. So while I’m sorry that this reader was disappointed with this poem, I’m no less disappointed that he doesn’t realize that his insistence that it’s “bad” really just means he didn’t like it.
I confess that we on this side of the desk sometimes describe a story or article as “good” or “bad,” partly because the language makes it so difficult to be more accurate, and partly because we have to think not only about what works for us as individuals, but about what is most likely to work for most of our readers. A “good” story is one that we think likely to work for a lot of them; a “bad” story is one that we think won’t.
But “good” is still, even at that level, a description of a relationship, not an innate quality. It is not, in the sense that we are too easily led to think of it, an adjective. Nor are any of a large number of variants on “good” and “bad.”
Yet people will continue to have heated arguments over whether works of art, even more than foods, are good or bad, as if it were actually a meaningful question that has a True Objective Answer, if only everyone can be made to see it.
These arguments can be unpleasant and destructive even at the level of artistic taste, but they’re even worse (again, the language provides me no really satisfactory alternative) in questions of morality and ethics. Churches have undergone schisms and nations have fought wars over fine points of whether some practice is “good” or “evil,” with any attempt to point out that it may be a simple matter of preference drowned out in the emotional noise.
At this point I have to explicitly point out, before somebody pounces on my alleged moral depravity (some will anyway), that I am not saying that anything goes, everything is purely a matter of taste, or whatever anybody thinks feels good is fine. I think it’s pretty clear that in matters of interpersonal behavior, some things really are bad in a sufficiently objective sense—indiscriminate premeditated murder comes to mind—that the vast majority of us can agree that they need to be treated as such, and the rest can reasonably be required to act as if they did.
But I also think that the number of such “objectively bad” actions is far smaller than the number of actions treated as such by almost any existing moral or legal code. And our language—any language I know, in fact—provides no built-in mechanism for distinguishing such cases, in which words like “bad” really are adjectives, from the far more numerous ones in which they aren’t.
Even in English there are a relatively few cases in which the “relationship” nature of an adjective has to be explicitly acknowledged. We cannot normally say a person is “allergic” without immediately adding that they are allergic to some specific allergen. “Allergic” is used without “to” only when context has already established what allergy is being talked about. We even have ways of expressing the real nature of most value judgments, like “I don’t like X” rather than “X is horrible.” But the easy availability of words like “horrible,” which look like real adjectives but aren’t, makes it all too easy to use them as such and thus be drawn into hot but essentially meaningless disputes. The problem is exacerbated by widespread teaching that we should try to avoid saying “I” whenever possible.
It would be interesting to see how different human history might be if our languages made it easier to express real relationships and harder to make very personal, private judgments sound like Profound Universal Truths. That won’t happen anytime soon; it’s too hard to change language at such a fundamental level. But I can think of two things that can be done, even now, that might help a little:
1. Science fiction writers can do the Gedankenexperiment of exploring how a world with such a linguistic system might develop; and
2. Educators could try a lot harder and more explicitly to make students understand and internalize the kind of distinction I’m talking about: the distinction between adjectives that really are, and those that aren’t.
Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
BIOLOG
Richard A. Lovett
BRAD AIKEN
Brad Aiken came to Analog by way of sci-fi. Low-grade television sci-fi, to be specific. “Lost in Space was my first thing,” he says. “It was a terrible show, but at the time it was all there was.”
Thanks to a brother who was an avid science fiction reader, he was also exposed at a young age to Asimov and Heinlein, “but it was the visual media that got me. Then Star Trek came along and really got my interest going.”
At the same time, he was also interested in science. “I was into sports, but when I wasn’t playing sports I was in the basement with my chemistry set,” he says.
Writing science fiction wasn’t anything he’d ever thought about. Then, in college, majoring in chemistry, he took freshman English from a professor who required his students to write a short story. “Of course, I wrote a science fiction story,” he says. “My professor said, ‘You really should get this published,’ which shocked me.”
The story was never submitted because Aiken was wrestling with other career choices. Chemistry was his first love, “but I figured that careerwise I would either be fighting for grants my whole life or working in someone else’s lab,” he says. Instead he went to medical school. Today he’s been honored as one of the top rehabilitation specialists in South Florida (working primarily with stroke and traumatic-brain-injury patients). But science fiction always percolated beneath the surface. “I dream in science fiction sometimes,” he says.
In 2000 one of those dreams became a short novel, which he self-published. This was followed by two small-press novels, plus honorable mentions in a couple of short story contests. Then, breakthrough. His first professional sale, “Locked In,” appeared in the March 2010 Analog, followed quickly by “Questioning the Tree” (July/August 2010).
Aiken’s ideal story has a technological basis that’s “feasible enough it could actually happen” but is also something that could affect people’s lives in a significant manner. “That’s the underpinning that draws my interest,” he says. “What makes for good reading is to put it in the context of how it impacts the life of an individual.”
“In general,” he adds, “I try to find something that has a hopeful message, although thinking about the two I’ve published so far, that might be a little distant. But even in those, there’s something with a positive outlook. I love science fiction and fantasy, but I’m not much into horror stories or dark things. I like a ray o
f hope.”
As for selling to Analog? To begin with, he was drawn to the magazine because the stories are always based to some degree in believable science. But he also liked the fact articles. “That intrigued me.”
Overall, he says, “I feel incredibly lucky and honored to be included.”
Copyright © 2010 Richard A. Lovett
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
THE ALTERNATE VIEW
John G. Cramer
LEINSTER’S GOLDEN AGE “LOGIC”
The Golden Age of Science Fiction began roughly in July 1939, when an issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding featured the first published stories of A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov. It ended in about 1957, when a devious Wall Street speculator purchased a majority stock interest in the American News Company, the principal distributor of most of the pulp magazines—SF and otherwise—and proceeded to fire the employees, close down all magazine distribution operations, and sell off the vast American News real estate holdings in warehouses, distribution centers, newsstands, etc., for a huge profit. The market for magazine short stories shrank dramatically, and the focus of SF writing moved from short stories to novels. The Golden Age was then supplanted by the New Wave, centered around Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & SF magazines. I was four years old when the Golden Age started, and I was just graduating from college when it ended, so in my teenage years science fiction meant the Golden Age writers.
I was about 12 years old when I was “infected” with the SF bug by my good friend Gene Wolfe (yes, the Gene Wolfe), who was a few years older than I and lived on Vassar Street, half a block away from my family home at 1657 Banks Street in Houston. Several of us were at Gene’s house on a rainy afternoon, sitting on the floor of his bedroom playing a board game, when his mother came in and insisted that he do something about all the science fiction magazines that were cluttering up his room. He dutifully filled a brown grocery bag with 1940s issues of Astounding and presented the bag of magazines to me, with the advice, “Read these! They’re much better than comic books.” I followed his advice, and I soon became a regular reader of Astounding.
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