Analog SFF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The tale is not complex. Much of the progression from finding the book to building the starship is omitted, and the progression thus seems far too easy. The aliens remain offstage, and the resolution owes far too much to the deus that pops up in the machine. But the ideas are interesting, and if you remember the individual stories fondly, you surely want the book.

  Enjoy!

  * * * *

  The Science Fiction Book Club keeps sending me books that aren't quite the traditional book club sort of thing. They are priced affordably, but they're not special editions of books from other publishers. They're SFBC originals, and that makes them fair game for this column.

  The latest is One Million A.D., edited by Gardner Dozois. The gimmick is stories set much, much further into the future than usual. For the occasion, Robert Silverberg ("A Piece of the Great World") revisits the world of At Winter's End, when the rain of comets is finally over and folks can finally emerge from the burrows; folks are not human, however, for genetic engineering and evolution have long since, and more than once, replaced our kind. Robert Reed in “Good Mountain” visits a colony world where civilization has grown upon a mass of floating vegetation, which periodically disintegrates. Nancy Kress's “Mirror Image” gives us a galactic civilization centered on QUENTIAM, an omniscient supercomputer that resides in the brane of reality; normally it enables people to slip in and out of bodies and perform quite extraordinary tasks, but something is going wrong, worlds are dying, and all-knowing QUENTIAM isn't even aware of the problems. Alastair Reynolds’ “Thousandth Night” involves a clone clan that roams the galaxy collecting experiences and periodically meets to share memories; at this reunion, there is a murder mystery. Charles Stross's “Missile Gap” peels Earth like a grape and spreads it across an infinitesimal fraction of an accretion disk with a great view of a Milky Way that looks like it has been engineered. The new world has wide oceans and numerous continents, on one of which explorers find ruins of Earth's cities, quite as if the peeling is a repeated event; if you choose to call it a murder mystery, don't expect a happy ending. Greg Egan's “Riding the Crocodile” considers just how an immortal couple might go about deciding to call it quits, and how long they would take to do it.

  A stellar lineup and excellent stories whose greatest defect is surely that they are so understandable to our present-day minds. Their characters are familiar in thought and pattern, despite the obvious departures, motives are familiar, and the story situations are not beyond our grasp. With my tongue slightly in cheek, I cavil that so far in the future there should be more—and more fundamental—differences.

  * * * *

  Robert Reginald (pen name of Michael Burgess, professor and librarian) is well known in the SF&F field for his scholarly endeavors, for running Borgo Press for many years, and most recently for such interesting novels as The Exiled Prince. Most folks, however, are unaware that in the summer of 2003, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack. During the recovery period he eased up on his workload and began concentrating on what he loves best, his writing. That has included a number of reflective, autobiographical essays that reveal a thoroughly likable Type A fellow, review his life from childhood on, and comment at some length on just what surviving a heart attack does to you. Since many of us may face a similar crisis at some point (my own father wasn't much older than I am now when his heart gave out), Trilobite Dreams or, The Autodidact's Tale, A Romance of Autobiography has a certain relevance quite aside from the author's eloquence, which is more than enough to make the book very readable.

  If you have any interest in the people behind your favorite literature, you have a shelf full of biographies and autobiographies. (I do!) Add this one to the collection.

  * * * *

  The US is remarkable for the life that remains in the religion-based delusions that the world (the universe, even!) is only 6,000 years old and that evolution is “just a theory.” In all the developed world, only here could we have school districts seriously trying to put creationism (currently known as Intelligent Design, or ID) into the curriculum or to remove evolution from tests (so that teachers who teach to the tests will skip over it). Even geology and astronomy, insofar as they deny that 6,000 years, are under attack.

  Fortunately we also have judges who can laugh the creationists out of court, referring to their arguments as “breathtaking inanity.” Unfortunately, that is not enough to shut the other side down. Their agenda—mooted amongst themselves if not in open court—is to revive theistic supernaturalism; their strategy is to defeat materialism by cutting it off at its source, in science.

  If I sound a bit extreme, too bad. I'm a scientist and a materialist, and I was very happy to find Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement in my mailbox. Editor John Brockman invited sixteen scientists and other scholars (including Leonard Susskind, Daniel Dennett, Tim White, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Lee Smolin, Stuart A. Kauffman, and more) to contribute to “a thoughtful response to the bizarre claims made by the ID movement's advocates, whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages.” The resulting essays explicate evolution, dissect the ID movement and its real intent, discuss consciousness, SETI, and complexity, and in general defend the bastion of science against the barbarian yahoos. I found them pungent, cogent, fascinating, and illuminating, and so may you.

  Unfortunately the book is a perfect example of preaching to the choir. I find it hard to imagine that a creationist or ID-ist would read it.

  If Tom Kidd's artwork has a recurring theme—other than considerable talent and wit—it is Laocoonian entanglements. Again and again, his paintings include statues and wall paintings showing heroes wrapped in snakes and dragon tails or maidens wrapped in snake-like veils. What this says about the artist's psyche I leave to those more qualified than I, for Kidd himself is silent on the matter, if not on many more. In Kiddography: The Art and Life of Tom Kidd, he deploys a pleasantly self-deprecating humor to display in both text and art his past, his id, his profound horrors, and more. As usual with such a book, the experienced reader is reminded of past pleasures. If those pleasures included a book's cover as well as its content, they are enhanced by revelations of the thinking and influences that went into the artwork.

  A distinct pleasure and essential to anyone who pays attention to SFF art.

  Copyright © 2006 Tom Easton

  * * *

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  Your editorial in the April 2006 issue of Analog ends with the proposition that “killing others of your kind is bad, period.” While I agree that this is probably close to correct, the novel Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury certainly presented a plausible situation that called this and other standard “do nots” into question. I don't offer this as an actual counterexample to your proposition, but rather as food for thought. (You may have left this out of your editorial because the book may be unfamiliar to many of your readers.)

  I think it is clear that prescriptions that ignore human nature do not work (well). If we only knew just what “human nature” is and what variables are involved, we could make firm statements about human relationships. For example, it is possible that Kingsbury's situation would never occur because actual humans could not change in the ways posited. Until we actually know, we have SF to provide us with thought experiments to compare to historical examples and help us consider what may be firm and what may be variable.

  Dean Hartley

  Oak Ridge, TN

  * * * *

  And those thought experiments and apparent exceptions are important to consider. However, please note that I did not say, “...and therefore should never be done.” You forgot the rest of the quote: “...even if it sometimes becomes necessary in order to avoid greater badness." Courtship Rite is certainly an especially interesting situation, and many of our readers do know it, because we serialized it here. But I suspect even the members of that culture who were
necessarily killed were less than fully enthusiastic about it and would have welcomed an alternative. (Food for thought, indeed! I almost got myself thrown into a swimming pool for remarking that the matter was handled “tastefully"!)

  * * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt:

  You've done it again! You've run the first part of an extended story as if it were a standalone story. I'm referring to “Boundary Condition” by Wil McCarthy in the April 2006 issue. The story ends with nothing whatsoever resolved; it fact it ends in a cliffhanger exactly as one expects an episode of a serial to end. The difference is that the next installment will not be in the next issue (I'm sure of that because the May issue has already come, and it's not in it). No telling how many months or years will pass before we get the next piece of the story, and then there won't be a synopsis to tell us what's gone before. I've written you about this practice before, but you still haven't changed your ways.

  All that aside, however, I find myself against my will fascinated by the proposition that quantum decoherence can suppress free will. McCarthy doesn't give us a real idea of what it feels like to someone undergoing this effect. He seems to imply that the victim wouldn't notice anything unusual. My own idea is that free will is inseparably intertwined with consciousness, and therefore anyone robbed of all free will would simply be rendered unconscious. The only thing supporting this idea is that it works the other way around: after all, an unconscious person has no free will at all.

  I'm anxiously awaiting “The Pope and the Weatherman."

  I have some comments on “Lighthouse” by Michael Shara and Jack McDevitt as well: It seems the recently discovered chimeras mark the positions of already known black holes. What good is a beacon that is harder to detect than the danger that it is warning about?

  The story uses a frequent SF idea: that of a space elevator suspended from a geosynchronous satellite. I've often wondered about that idea. What supports the weight of the cable (or “nanowire ribbon"), which is at too low an altitude to be in orbit? Possibly the satellite is at a higher orbit than a free-orbiting geosynchronous satellite, thereby experiencing a greater centrifugal force to balance the additional centripetal force from the cable. Does that sound right?

  Another problem: Since a geosynchronous satellite has to orbit over the equator, doesn't the base station also have to be on the equator? According to my atlas, Mt. Kilimanjaro is about 2 degrees south of the equator. Wouldn't that cause a sideways drag on the satellite, thereby wrecking its orbit?

  Bruce M. Foreman

  Chambersburg, PA

  * * * *

  Neither Mr. McCarthy nor I will rule out the possibility of a sequel—any sequence of events, whether in fiction or real life, will be followed by others, some of them related—but we don't agree that one is required. We're sorry you didn't find the ending satisfying, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

  As for “Lighthouse,” one of the authors replies...

  * * * *

  Hi Mr. Foreman,

  Good questions. At her thesis defense, Kristi states:

  “I would argue they were deliberately placed in orbit around black holes that were born without companions.

  Some of each chimera's stellar wind now falls towards its black hole. That gas is super-heated so X-rays are radiated. That's why the chimeras coincide with catalogued X-ray sources. They used to be invisible. Now you can't miss them."

  The chimeras’ wind makes the black holes “visible” in X-rays. Before the chimeras were placed in orbit around those black holes, they were invisible. The chimeras themselves aren't effective beacons; it is their superheated winds that do the trick. Because these black holes now radiate X-rays, as a result of an engineered nearby wind source, humans were able to discover them.

  And there's no problem with Kilimanjaro. See www.mit.edu/people/ gassend/publications/NonEquatorialUniformStressSpaceElevators.pdf, especially Figure 7. You need to supply a horizontal tension, and your efficiency is about 5% less, but you regain a lot of that by starting up high. And yes, you place the geosynchronous station a little higher to produce the tension to support the cable.

  Mike Shara

  * * * *

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  In your May 2006 editorial, you mentioned that Seattle faced a potential threat from a volcano (presumably Mt. Rainier). You did not mention a more likely threat from a devastating earthquake. Seattle sits on top of a fault. Every few years we experience a class 5 earthquake that does not do much damage. According to the seismographs, we frequently get little shocks that we do not even feel. However, the geologists tell us that every so often in geologic time, the Seattle area gets a devastating earthquake (7 or more) with a tsunami, and that we are due for a repeat.

  Why do we want to live here?

  Answer: mild climate, beautiful scenery, no yearly hurricanes, tornados, floods, or blizzards.

  Look at Japan—tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but the Japanese still choose to live there.

  Switzerland has avalanches. Kashmir has earthquakes. Sicily has Mt. Etna. North Africa has plagues of locusts.

  Anywhere in the world has some sort of threat. We just accept it as the price of living there. If you do not like it, move somewhere else and accept the risk(s) of your new home.

  Brian Cary

  Seattle WA

  * * * *

  You don't need to sell me on Seattle—that is, in many ways, my favorite part of the country! Naturally every place has risks and, as you say, you have to choose which ones are worth living with—but in the process, you also have to consider the likely costs.

  * * * *

  Dear Stan,

  Regarding your editorial in the May 2006 issue.

  I agree offering Federal Flood Insurance without regard to risk evaluation was and is a large mistake—one which would not have been made by private industry which likes to make a profit. Without such insurance, who would lend anyone money to build on the coast or flood plains?

  In my area, along the northern Mississippi river, there are people who get flooded out one year in three—and rebuild in the same place.

  The current government answer is to attempt to get everyone to purchase flood insurance—so the taxpayers can pay for the idiots outside of their tax bills.

  I disagree that expanding population necessarily means we must build and live in high risk areas—we can concentrate our population vertically in stable areas, using the others for agriculture, recreation, and nature preserves—where the number of people at risk is minimized. In tornado and hurricane areas with enough altitude to avoid storm surge, we can build hurricane resistant buildings. (See www.monolithic.com)

  As to the long term safety of the planet, no place is risk free—don't put all your eggs in one basket. Part of the reason that major storms and other disasters kill so many fewer people in the technologically advanced countries is that they can draw on resources further away from the area.

  There is argument about the risk of “large rocks” and extinction events, but they are irrelevant. Do we care what causes these events? Or is it insufficient to know that some sort of extinction level event happens every few million years? Sure, the really big ones get all the attention, but there are many, many more confirmed smaller events.

  We do not need to protect our “eggs” better in the basket: we need more baskets, widely separated if the species is to survive. Whoever takes the risk to move off the planet will inherit the universe (or at least our section of the galaxy).

  Charles M. Barnard

  Menomonie, WI

  * * * *

  Dear Mr. Schmidt:

  Re: “Home, Vulnerable Home,” Analog, May 2006

  Editorials are concise and to the point, so there was little room in your editorial for the nuances associated with the repercussions resulting from the hurricane damage to New Orleans. Nevertheless, considering the lessons to be learned from New Orleans, I feel obligated to respond. In terms of New Orle
ans’ location, the decision (in 1718) to establish the city at its location was not irrational and akin to the mistake of camping in a dry wash. New Orleans became a hazardous location as a result of nearly 300 years of inappropriate terraforming. To explain, channelizing the Mississippi river system deprived the area of sediment. This, in conjunction with urban growth, allowed the city to subside to below sea level and eliminated protective wetlands. To theoretically “solve” the threat, pumps and levees were used to protect the city. Unfortunately the engineering and political commitment to maintain these facilities was lacking. The result, as we all know, was a cumulative and sudden catastrophic failure.

  I totally agree with you that we are losing our sense of personal responsibility. As I watched the story unfold, I was taken aback by the growing cacophony that the federal government was slow to respond and failed to protect its citizens. I am not attempting to defend FEMA, as disasters can overwhelm any government's ability to respond. To paraphrase an old saying, “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” One of the first things I have been taught relative to natural disasters is to be personally prepared to live on your own for three to seven days. It seems that those seeking to point the finger of blame towards the federal government have overlooked this level of personal preparedness and responsibility. Furthermore, both the city and state governments (as responders who should have interceded before the federal intervention) were themselves not up to the task. In our hierarchical system of disaster response, the federal government is theoretically the agency of last resort. Unfortunately, the so-called pundits have designated the federal government's response as the scapegoat. That will translate into the federal government becoming the lead agency for future disaster response and reconstruction rather than the agency of last resort. Personal responsibility is being placed into the hands of Big Brother.