Chelle, a military woman, is sent to distant stars to fight nefarious aliens. Skip stays home, becomes a lawyer, and builds a tremendously successful practice. Decades pass, yet Skip waits faithfully for Chelle’s return. Finally, the day arrives.
Of course, relativity has worked its magic; decades to Skip have been months to Chelle. Her military service, and the injuries that sent her home, have changed her—much as Skip’s years have changed him. Yet the two (somewhat to their mutual surprise) are still in love.
They set off on a Caribbean cruise, and that’s when the trouble starts. Their ship is hijacked, and suddenly they are up to their necks in pirates, alien spies, and a war that has come to the home front.
Home Fires is an adventure story, a love story, and the flip side of the standard “going to the stars to fight aliens” story. The book is fast-paced and quite accessible, and shows that Gene Wolfe is as much at home writing adventure as he is writing epics.
Empress of Eternity L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
Tor, 336 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
Kindle: $12.99
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2664-5
Genre: Far Future/Clarke’s Law
But suppose you’re in the mood for a grand, far-future epic? Then you’ll definitely want to take a look at L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Empress of Eternity. Modesitt takes a break from his long-running Recluce Saga to present not one but three far-future societies, in three widely-separated eras across geological eras. All three exist on Earth; an Earth whose main continent is split down the middle by an eternal, imperishable canal. The canal is a complete mystery; no one knows who built it (if indeed it was built), why it exists, or how it remains undamaged across millions of years. Where the canal meets the sea, an indestructible building stands, empty and enigmatic.
In parallel stories, scientists from each of the three eras seek to uncover the secrets of the canal. Similar patterns repeat, and we come to understand that the three societies are somehow linked. Still the canal remains unknown, unexplained, unresponsive... until one of the societies, the Vaniran Hegemony, breaks apart in religious war. One faction produces a fearsome weapon that can seemingly destroy anything, even to the point of shattering the structure of the universe. Through the same forces that have entangled the three eras, this ultimate weapon now threatens all three eras with destruction.
Now the forces responsible for the canal react, and the three scientific teams find themselves working together to save their civilizations and the rest of life.
Modesitt is an old hand at making big, epic stories accessible through sympathetic and believable characters. He’s a superb storyteller, and here he’s produced a standalone novel that is more than a little reminiscent of the best time-spanning tales of Arthur C. Clarke. If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading his work, you could hardly find a better introduction. And if you’re a long-time Modesitt fan, you definitely won’t want to miss this book.
Little Brother’s World
T. Jackson King
Fantastic Books, 214 pages, $13.99 (trade paperback)
Kindle: $12.99
ISBN: 978-1-60459-940-4
Genre: Other Worlds
Life on the colony planet Mother’s World is safe, secure, and regimented by the Church of Flesh. Society is structured around citizens’ genetic inheritance: good genes are rewarded, bad genes discouraged. All citizens have their gene codes tattooed on their arms, so that everyone knows their place and things runs smoothly... for most, anyway.
But this is science fiction, and we know that all the interesting stuff is happening at the margins of the society. In particular, there’s the Alor City Dump, where outcast scavengers make a living off the garbage of the more fortunate.
Little Brother, an orphan, has grown up in the Dump and knows no other life. Little Brother is different—he has no gene code. One day, while scavenging, he finds a girl named Sally hiding in the garbage. Sally is a Breed, with one of the most valuable genetic legacies on the planet.
Little Brother rescues Sally, and there his problems start. Before he can sell Sally back to her family, her parents are murdered. Sally’s family, it seems, has attracted the attention of the Church of Flesh.
So now Little Brother and Sally go on the run, through the underbelly of Mother’s World. In the course of their flight, Little Brother finds out why he is the only person without a gene code... and also learns that he, unexpectedly, holds within his hands the power to topple the caste system and bring change to Mother’s World.
If you’re sensing a whiff of André Norton or Robert A. Heinlein, you’re not mistaken—those are the first two names in T. Jackson King’s list of acknowledgments. The influence is certainly there, but Little Brother’s World is no mere imitation of Star Man’s Son or Citizen of the Galaxy. Rather, it takes the sensibility of those sorts of books and makes of it something fresh and new. T. Jackson King is doing his part to further the great conversation of science fiction; it’ll be interesting to see where he goes next.
Don Sakers is the author of The Leaves of October and A Voice in Every Wind. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
Copyright © 2010 Don Sakers
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
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 and folded. The author muses about what a world without AGW would look like. Apparently in that alternate history the MV Manhattan had no trouble trying to transit the McClure Parry NW Passage in 1969 September, or such transits were too common to mention. In our history Manhattan repeatedly got stuck in 20-meter pressure ridges. USACG Ice Breaker Staten Island was unable to free the Manhattan, leaving the job to the Canadian ice breaker sent along as an unwelcome escort. Eventually Manhattan gave up on the deep water international passage and took a more southerly route through risky, shallow, narrow, passages that are inside internationally recognized Canadian territorial waters. That is what a world before significant AGW looked like. Ships such as the Manhattan would have had no problem doing a Transit of the McClure Parry NW Passage in September of 2007, 2008, or 2009. What a change in four decades. The Bremen based Beluga Group sailed a convoy of heavy lift ships carrying electric generator components massing 100s of tonnes each from South Korea to the north coast of Siberia in 2009, carrying on to Home Port in Bremen for a complete transit of the Northern Passage. That is just one way a world with AGW differs from one without AGW.
Kelly Manning
Dear Dr. Schmidt,
On reading the article and the story about phantom sense in the November issue, I immediately thought of controlling prisoners and combat soldiers and even general populations using that technique. When shall we read a story about that? And why is the technique limited to insects? Imagine, if you will, controlling packs of wolves or the like in combat.
I’ll finish by telling you that I don’t believe I have missed an issue since 1939.
Yours truly,
William F. Steagall, Sr.
Analog,
I am a long-term subscriber, and usually don’t have much to say, but I would like to say this: stories like “Outbound” [November 2010] are the reason I read the magazine.
If you had more like that, I might take out two or three subscriptions!
James Morton
Don Sakers,
Your Reference Library in the November 2010 issue about Space Opera was right on. Some of that old stuff needs to be reprinted. A great but often overlooked story is the “Earth Dreams” trilogy by Janet Norris. Written in adult language (words longer than four letters) by someone who thoroughly enjoys using the English language.
Alan Townsend
Dr. Schmidt:
Try to imagine my complete, total, utter surprise when I finished your editorial “Euthanizing the Euphemism” [December 2010] and found myself in complete agreement with you. While we are putting the euphemisms out of our misery, let’s round up the whole clan including “legalese” and “statutory lan guage” and stuff them down the same hole. When I look at C-SPAN and hear the clerk of the House read the title of a bill that includes “... and other purposes” it’s all I can do to hold in the screams. When I hear some career politico say of an unpopular bill “we’re going to rebrand this” my head explodes.
The fact is we are losing our language. It is being dissolved in a soup of Orwellian doublespeak and deception masquerading as communication. I submit that this is more than merely unfortunate, it is dangerous.
John Jarrell
San Antonio, TX
Dear Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Tourtellotte:
I’m joining thousands of other Analog readers in pointing out that aluminum is an inexpensive, lightweight but formerly high-value metal for time travelers needing money in the past (“Budget Tips for Time Travelers,” Analog, December 2010). I recall an aphorism pre-dating the development of the electric aluminum extraction process, to the effect that gold tableware is suitable for entertaining the nobility, but to impress visiting monarchs you set out the aluminum utensils.
Richard M. Boothe
Seal Beach, CA
P.S. RE: “Primum Non Nocere,” by H. G. Stratmann (same issue). Until I read that the government classified the MNM’s Thanatos software Top Secret on page 98, I was wondering why the liability lawyers, the ACLU, and the Churches weren’t screaming bloody murder. Guess I ignored Stratmann’s foreshadowings.
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
In his essay “Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler,” Shane Tourtellotte missed one good possibility. A time-traveler could likely make a large amount of money in the past by taking only the parts of certain “high-tech” devices that cannot be made in that past world. His character Americus might have taken a box of glass lenses to Augustan Rome, then mounted them in wooden tubes and sold the resulting spyglasses. Or he might have taken a box of magnetized needles, then made and sold magnetic compasses (note that as late as the nineteenth century, European travelers carried compasses to help them find their way across the still unmarked landscape). Or consider, staying on the subject of needles, how much a Roman matron would pay for a stainless-steel sewing needle and how many of those come in a kilogram.
I must say that I felt sorry for Americus humping his supplies across the Italian landscape on his back. Modern explorers carry their supplies, when the terrain allows, on small, bicycle-wheeled rickshaws. Mr. Tourtellotte really should have equipped Americus with one of those before he sent the poor man boppin’ up the Via Flaminia. For the time-traveler who intends to return to the present, a rickshaw could easily carry the hundred or so kilograms of gold (at a little over $42,000 per kilogram by Tourtellotte’s figures) that he gains from his sales of cheapo, transparent plastic rain capes and divinely comfy rubber sandals. Yeah, the road to riches lies open before us: all we need is a working time machine.
Cordially,
Dennis Anthony
Dear Stan,
As a biologist, and also as a writer of SF, I’d like to weigh in with what is the usual cautionary note of placing too much emphasis on accuracy in SF stories. Some of the things we think we know are absolutely correct, some are only partly correct, and some are just plain wrong. Unfortunately, at a given moment, if you could collect up-and-down votes on all these things, you would never find a perfect consensus on what “fact” fits in which category—truth, half-truth, or cockamamie claptrap.
Fortunately we have writers, and more specifically, SF&F writers.
Fiction writers are by their very nature communicating mostly half-truths. Especially SF writers. The neat thing about half-truths is, occasionally, the half that some of us know is false inspires some of us to go check, and, sonuvagun, there might be something there! A submarine powered by an unknown and virtually inexhaustible source of power in the 1860s? Hmmm. Well, gimme ninety years, maybe we educated scientists can come up with something. A canon shooting human hitchhikers to the Moon? Whoa! I’ll go for half of that idea—reaching the Moon by an explosion of somewhat lengthened duration, and also give me about those same ninety years. (Who knows, if Verne hadn’t made those outrageous solutions seem like fact, the Nautilus [hey, where did we get that name?] and Apollo might never have happened.)
One of the complaints of publishers in Jules Verne’s day, for instance, concerning Around the World in Eighty Days in its original incarnation as a story about a balloon trip across Africa, was “it is too scientific.” In fact, I’ve heard a lot of modern young readers groan when they have had to read an unabridged English translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Most common word: “B-O-R-I-N-G.” Verne tried very hard to please the scientists of his day by ladling on a lot of then-known science. Which helped them digest, perhaps only partly, the “nonsense” (non-science) parts of his guessing and imagining.
He was, however, very lucky to get published at all. It took a publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, “with vision” (perhaps out-of-focus vision, to some tastes), to realize the genius of Verne’s writings, and to guide him and support him and publish him; to bring Verne and his ideas to our world of the future. A world that might have been very different without him.
Still, by all means check your facts with scientists and experts in whatever fields may be called for. You rope in more readers that way (e.g., see Verne). But don’t check your imaginings of how things might work, especially somewhere else. Earth is a tremendously rich book instructing us in the complexity of the universe, but it ain’t the only tome in the stacks. We just haven’t checked those others out of the library yet. And we likely won’t, unless writers can keep the rest of us enthused in tending to the task of reaching for the next book.
Jack Egan
Kent WA
Analog staff,
I have been reading Astounding/Analog since the 1950s. Finally, I want to give you some feedback. I want to offer my thanks to everyone connected with Analog for putting your time, energy, and soul into the magazine. In particular, the value of John Cramer’s articles alone are worth many times the cover price. I know that no one is getting rich from working on Analog. That makes your contributions that much more precious. Thank you!
Fred Stahl
Thanks very much for your kind words. Since most readers tend to write only when they have a complaint, a note like yours tends to make our day.
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
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/
25–27 March 2011
NOVA ALBION STEAMPUNK EXHIBITION (theme: Wild Wild EAST) at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA. Guests of Honor: Cherie Priest, Paul Guinan, Annina Bennet. Outdoor kinetics and steam enclosure, hands-on maker workshops, academic presentations, panel discussions, book signings, three vendor areas, a museum of curiosities, art gallery, game room, Miss Kalendar’s Salon, and the Asian Steampunk art of James Ng. Tickets: $40 (subject to increase). Info: http://steampunkexhibition.com/
9–11 April 2011
AD ASTRA 2011 (Toronto-area SF conference) at Toronto Don Valley Hotel and Suites, Toronto, ON. Guests of Honor: Cathy Palmer-Lister, Aaron Allston, Todd McCaffrey, Eric Flint, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Pincombe. Info: http://www.ad-astra.org/; [email protected]; PO Box 7276, Station A, Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X9, Canada
22–24 April 2011
MINICON
46 (Minnesota SF conference) at Bloominton Sheraton, Bloomington, MN. Author Guest of Honor: Charles Stross; Musician Guest of Honor: Chas Somdahl. Membership: $45 until 31 March 2011, $60 at the door; students (13-20): $30 until 31 March, $35 at the door; kids (6-12): $20. Info: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon46/; [email protected]; Minicon 46, PO Box 8297, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408
28 April–1 May 2011
WORLD HORROR CONVENTION at Doubletree Hotel Austin, Austin, TX. Guests of Honor: Sarah Langan, Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, Vincent Chong and Brian Keene. Membership: $125 until 1 March 2011, $150 at the door, supporting $60. Info: http://whc2011.org/; WHC 2011, PO Box 170045, Austin, TX 78717
17–21 August 2011
RENOVATION (69th World Science Fiction Convention) at Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, NV. Guests of Honor: Ellen Asher, Charles N. Brown, Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo. Membership from 1 October 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending-Adult: $180; Attending-17 to 21: $100; Attending-0 to 16: $75; Supporting: $50. (Ages as of 17 August 2011.) This is the SF universe’s annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: http://www.renovationsf.org/, [email protected], PO Box 13278, Portland, OR 97213-0278. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Renovation-The-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref=ts; LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/renovationsf/
Copyright © 2010 Anthony Lewis
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
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 United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. 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. (c) 2010 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.
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