Analog SFF, July-August 2007
Page 42
With that all said, what is Unity all about? The fleet is at rest in a system where they can pluck from a living world gobs and gobs of algae goop for food and medicines. The Cylons attack and are fought off, leaving an escape pod behind. In the pod is Peter Attis, a pop music star who has been a captive of the Cylons since shortly before their initial attack on the Colonies. Despite suspicions, once he has been checked for any viruses or bacteria the Cylons may have loaded him with, he is accepted. Before long, he gives a concert to a massive audience, and shortly after that people start falling ill with something a bit like Mad Cow Disease. Victims start twitching, speak in tongues, lapse into coma, and finally die. The frantic search for a cure is complicated by religious nuts who decide Peter is the prophesied Unifier and the disease is a blessing. But of course the search is successful; we know that from the git-go since right at the beginning of the book it says the tale takes place between two episodes of the TV show.
There are all the usual soap-opera details, of course. Not one of them does a better job of convincing than using solder on strain-bearing wing cracks.
Bah.
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Carol Emshwiller has been earning praise for a long time, and at 85 she's not done. Her novel The Secret City is a charming take on the “aliens among us” trope that begins when a homeless man is arrested. His primary offense is snoring under a bush in an old lady's back yard; his secondary offense is rather bruisingly resisting arrest. He's a beefy fellow, you see, and it takes but a few pages for his interior monolog to reveal that he is an alien. His parents were tourists come to Earth to gawk at the pitiful natives. Their disguise was flowered shirts and shorts and cameras beyond which the natives just wouldn't look to notice the bulky bodies and brow ridges.
I suppose that could work, as long as the tourists weren't too different from us, and these weren't. In fact, they looked pretty human, or at least Neanderthal (those brow ridges, right?), so they could pass. But when they weren't retrieved according to plan, they had a problem. Mostly they kept on wandering the landscape dressed like tourists, though the flowered shirts got pretty tattered once they ran out of money. A few retreated into the mountains, where in an isolated valley they built a kinda-sorta reminder of home. They had to keep the profile low to escape notice from planes and satellites, but they could build an urbanish architecture that—they hoped—would keep the kids connected to home. And they clung to the hope that someone would show up to rescue them.
Our vagrant, Lorpas, escapes and, looking for his possessions, winds up befriending the old lady who ratted him out. Alas, when the rescuers arrive, they kill her. He runs, heading for the mountains, searching for the rumored Secret City. In due time, he finds it, as well as the last three of his kind, one of them a young woman, Allush, with whom he is quickly smitten, as is she. Alas, one of the others is a bloodthirsty nutcase who thinks Allush should be his. The third is a wise old woman who had been a peasant.
Does that matter? The rescuers show up again and snatch Allush away. She soon learns that it matters indeed. Home is a strange world where the food and water taste weird and appearance matters greatly. Can she go home again? Which world is home? Is there a place for her and Lorpas on either one?
That last is a question Lorpas is working on, too. The answer is perhaps inevitable, but Emshwiller does a very nice job of developing it. Her characters are quirky and genuine, and the tale is a warm one punctuated by death and loss. I enjoyed it greatly, and I think you will too.
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One does not have to do a Ph.D.-equivalent of research to realize that the superhero comics have long reflected the concerns of the real world, from fighting Nazis and Communists to racism and feminism, nor to realize that both heroes and the villains they fought were nuts enough to make a violent ward look sane. Does this mean someone should turn a shrink loose on them? In Superman on the Couch (reviewed here in October 2004), Danny Fingeroth spent as much time psychoanalyzing the reader as the heroes. Minister Faust is more to the point in From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, in which Eva Brain (the echo of Eva Braun is surely deliberate, given her tendency to coin Germanically polysyllabic hyperbafflegab at the turn of a page), official shrink for the Fantastic Order Of Justice and its FOOJsters (which I persist in reading as FOO Jesters!) attempts to induce Omnipotent Man, Flying Squirrel, Iron Lass, Brotherfly, Power Grrl, and X-Man to conquer their Secret Identity Diffusion, mortiquaeroticism, Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis, and so on to achieve psychemotional wellness and cut out the infighting that threatens FOOJ's continued existence. Unfortunately, Hawk King, ancient master of superherodom, dies in his sanctuary and thus awakens a perfect storm of conspiracy theories, backbiting, and even rebellion.
I suspect Faust grew up on superhero comics and retains a certain fondness for them. But that hasn't stopped him from writing a biting, over-the-top send-up of the genre, self-help pop-psych, celebrities, and more. Unfortunately, he chose Dr. Brain as his narrator, with the result that much of the book is as unreadable as the self-help pop-psych he parodies. Yet for those who make it to the end, there is a very interesting volte-face that suggests that Faust has his own conspiracy theory to explain what has been happening in Washington over the last few years.
But that's not enough to make me look forward to his next.
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Lou Anders offers Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge in the spirit of Damon Knight's long-missed Orbit anthologies of original fiction. He lives up to that spirit, too, for he has picked twenty-one excellent pieces by Mike Resnick and Nancy Kress, Gene Wolfe, Robert Charles Wilson, Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear, Ken MacLeod, Paul Di Filippo, and more.
I hope Anders has the chance to continue this series for many volumes. So will you when you get a taste of it.
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Howard Waldrop has been writing SF a bit longer than I have and is quite justly many times as well known. His marvelously quirky “The Ugly Chickens” alone is enough to make a writer famous even if that writer never penned another tale, and Waldrop has sprinkled tales just as marvelous and just as quirky by the dozen on his devoted admirers. It is thus a tragedy that he is not as wealthy as, say, Stephen King, or as bedecked with medals, awards, and other honors as a Ruritanian prince. He says about as much in his introduction, but of course Waldrop being Waldrop, you are never sure how much of what he says with such a straight face you should believe.
Be that as it may, his stories have a tendency to make you see the world in new ways. Indeed, the title of his new book has a definite aptness, so order Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Science Fiction, 1980-2005 right away. You'll get a bunch of Hugo nominees (more tragedy—someone always seems to beat him out!), of which the latest is “The King of Where-I-Go,” which is so sure to make you unsure of your own past that Waldrop might as well hit you in the forehead with a croquet mallet (that's a clue, Bubba). I also quite loved the Runyonesque “The Sawing Boys,” in which Prohibition-Era gangsters meet country music, as contaminated by early radio. Sixteen stories altogether, and not one you'll be sorry to have read.
Enjoy!
Copyright (c) 2007 Tom Easton
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IN TIMES TO COME
David A. Hardy's spectacular cover for our September issue heralds “Some Distant Shore,” Dave Creek's tale of a cataclysm even more spectacular than any art can truly convey: the collision of two solar systems. Granted, that's an event that unfolds over quite a long time scale, but its crucial moments make for an intensely dramatic story—especially when they attract an audience of representatives from several quite alien species and cultures, all as intent on studying (and exploiting) each other as the astronomical show unfolding before them.
We'll also have “Vertex,” the climactic story of C. Sanford Lowe and G. David Nordley's “Black Hole Project” series, in which everything comes together (or does it?), and stories by E. Mark Mitchell, Uncle River, Ri
chard A. Lovett, and Howard V. Hendrix.
Finally, Edward M. Lerner's fact article, “Beyond This Point Be RFIDs,” is unusual in that most of its science-fictional content is already upon us—but its implications extend far into the future, as will heated controversy over what those implications can and should be.
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THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY
Thanks again to everyone who voted in our annual poll on the previous year's issues. Your votes help your favorite writers and artists by rewarding them directly and concretely for outstanding work. They help you by giving us a better feel for what you like and don't like—which helps us know what to give you in the future.
We have five categories: novellas, novelettes, short stories, fact articles, and covers. In each category, we asked you to list your three favorite items, in descending order of preference. Each first place vote counts as three points, second place two, and third place one. The total number of points for each item is divided by the maximum it could have received (if everyone had ranked it 1) and multiplied by 10. The result is the score listed below, on a scale of 0 (nobody voted for it) to 10 (everybody ranked it first). In practice, scores run lower in categories with many entries than in those with only a few. For comparison, the number in parentheses at the head of each category is the score every item would have received had all been equally popular.
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NOVELLAS (2.50)
1. “The Good Kill,” Barry B. Longyear (3.95)
2. “Puncher's Chance,” James Grayson & Kathy Ferguson (2.78)
3. “A Pound of Flesh,” Richard A. Lovett (2.72)
4. “The Little White Nerves Went Last,” John Barnes (2.53)
5. “Kremer's Limit,” C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley (2.28)
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NOVELETTES (1.18)
1. “Lady Be Good,” John G. Hemry (2.26)
2. “Dinosaur Blood,” Richard A. Lovett (1.85)
3. “Takes Two to Tangle,” Ben Bova (1.73)
4 (tie) “Original Sin,” Richard A. Lovett (1.37)
“String of Pearls,” Shane Tourtellotte (1.37)
“From Wayfield, From Malagasy,” Robert J. Howe (1.37)
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SHORT STORIES (0.71)
1. “Kyrie Eleison,” John G. Hemry (1.83)
2. “Nigerian Scam,” Richard A. Lovett (1.78)
3. “The Door That Does Not Close,” Carl Frederick (1.61)
4. “Mop-Up,” Grey Rollins (1.39)
5. “Total Loss,” James Hosek (1.22)
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FACT ARTICLES (1.82)
1. “The Great Sumatran Earthquakes of 2004-5,” Richard A. Lovett (2.97)
2. “From Fimbulwinter to Dante's Hell: The Strange Saga of Snowball Earth,” Richard A. Lovett (2.83)
3. “Solar System Commuter Trains: Magbeam Plasma Propulsion,” James Grayson & Kathy Ferguson (2.10)
4. “Pollution, Solutions, Elution, and Nanotechnology,” Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D. (1.88)
5. “Floatworlds,” Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D. (1.52)
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COVER (2.00)
1. September, by Jean-Pierre Normand (2.76)
2. November, by Jean-Pierre Normand (2.56)
3. December, by Mark A. Garlick (2.24)
4. June, by Jean-Pierre Normand (2.18)
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This year all categories had clear winners, but there were as usual some interesting patterns among the contenders. John G. Hemry had the unusual distinction of placing first in two categories, Richard A. Lovett captured the top two spots in fact articles and had at least one story in the winners’ circle for every fiction category, and Jean-Pierre Normand won four of the top five cover slots. We had a three-way tie for fourth place in novelettes, and several newcomers made strong showings: James Hosek with a short story that drew an unusual amount of reader comment, and James Grayson and Kathy Ferguson with a linked story and fact article in the same issue.
Since Anlab votes are so useful to everyone concerned, we hope to get even more next time. Use e-mail or “snail mail,” whichever you prefer, but please vote! (Please be careful to vote in the right category, as listed in the annual Index. Sometimes a few votes are wasted by being cast in the wrong category, and those simply can't be counted. If you didn't use the online voting on our website [www.analogsf.com] this year, you might want to try it next time; it makes that problem virtually impossible!)
Pete Bullock of Charlotte, NC, is this year's winner of a free one-year subscription in a random drawing from all ballots received. Next year that could be you—and the more votes we have, the more the results mean!
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BRASS TACKS
Dear Mr. Schmidt,
When I worked 8 to 6 ("9 to 5” certainly is a euphemism now, isn't it?) I used to read at lunch and kept up with my monthly Analog and Asimov's, and sometimes even a Hugo novel winner or two. When my husband became ill, and then passed this last year, my daily schedule became chaotic and remains so.
This morning I decided to take the time to eat breakfast out and grabbed an unread Analog to take with me.
I tend to read cover-to-cover, but more and more am evolving into a “read the editorials first” SF-type person. I once again delighted in your viewpoint and your style. I have never written an editor a letter, tho’ I certainly have an opinion. Yet you moved me to think a step further and to desire to add to the conversation. Although I can join any conversation (I hope intelligently), rarely are there conversations intelligent enough to feel “moved” to add to.
I hurried home to write my letter before I let other things demand my time, and as I looked closer to reference the article, I saw that “Attack of the Giant Oxymorons” was a November 2004 issue. My! Aren't we behind!
Well, for me the conversation was new, but for you it is a time warp, so, suffice it to say, I treasure your wisdom, your thoughtfulness in your communication, your courage in front of a sometimes schizophrenic public, and your willingness to share yourself with us. You improve my life.
Ms. Renee Taylor
Kagel Canyon, CA
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Dr. Schmidt:
I read your editorial on the anthropocentric principle (Jan/Feb 2007) and immediately thought of “Candide.” So some people think that this universe is designed especially for us? Well, I think it's too bad we ourselves weren't designed with more care. How any rational person can scrutinize the human body and conclude it is the height of creation is beyond my comprehension. A case of willful blindness. A few keywords—scoliosis, scurvy, appendix, caries, allergies, slipped discs, hernias, cancer, gender fuzziness. These all seem to me things that truly intelligent design would have prevented.
Walt Bjorneby
Lt/Col, USAF (ret ftr plt)
ASF reader since 1944
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Dr. Schmidt:
It seems I was a little hasty in responding to your “Anthropocentric” editorial. I just arrived at “The Letters to the Editor” and the first four really rang my bell. I suppose it is comforting to a lot of people to think that there is a loving, caring Deity watching over their every move, and that they were personally created in His image. The seemingly never-ending series of wars we have experienced have dissuaded me of this view if I ever thought that way, which I doubt. I'll have logged 76 years in this vale of tears before your next issue is out, and after a recent weeklong visit with my highly learned brother-and sister-in law, we all came to the conclusion we are deists. Until somebody comes along with a sound explanation of the creation of our cosmos, what else are we supposed to think? Here is the true miracle as I see it—from as little as three independent particles, our entire universe sprang into being and from the interactions of these particles over a span of perhaps 14 billion years—here we are, with all our faults and our beauties. (I posit three, purely for sake of the Law of Parsimony.)
Bye the bye, I cannot comprehend how anyone with a knowledge of the human body's shortcomings can imagine that we were created by Someone Who knew what He/She/It was doing. Certainly every woman should view the bony-ringed human birth canal with great skepticism as to its Deistic origin. It, like much else amiss with our body design, is quite obviously a scrap-basket hand-me-down from our forebears. The human foot, knee, wrist, spine, appendix, tonsils, adenoids, sinus cavities, teeth, all reflect major faults in design. We, alone of all animals as far as I know, are the only species who cannot drink and breathe at the same time. And we, unlike most other animals, cannot manufacture our own Vitamin C, hence scurvy, a truly horrible deficiency disease ... tsk, tsk. Oh, I almost forgot; a brain that lets emotion flavor its reasoning. Our body rates a big half-black spot from Consumer Research. Possibly continued evolution shall result in design corrections if the species lasts long enough. Happy New Year, I trust.
Walt Bjorneby
Lt/Col, USAF (ret ftr plt)
ASF reader since 1944
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Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I've just read your delightful, though risky, editorial “The Cheesesteak Nazi, The Colonel, and the Food Police” in the Jan/Feb Analog.
I've often remarked that Western Civilization has been conducting a gigantic, uncontrolled genetic experiment for about 200 years. Don't worry; Charles Darwin still gets the last laugh.
Global warming as practiced by 6.5 billion people is far more than 6.5 times more deleterious than global warming practiced by 1 billion people. Paul Ehrlich long since said something to the effect that, at root, every major problem you see around you is the consequence of over-population.
A recent study here in Australia showed that 25% of national medical expenditure went to the last 18 months of patients’ lives without extending those lives or improving their quality.
I imagine that when the crunch comes, medical support schemes for the “unworthy” will be among the first casualties. I was born in 1946 and anticipate that the definition of triage will be much extended by the time that I need serious medical support. “Euthanasia, or the door is that way..."