Asimov's SF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Asimov's SF, June 2011

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.dellmagazines.com

  Copyright ©2011 by Dell Magazines

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Cover art by Jacques Barbey

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  CONTENTS

  Department: EDITORIAL: ENTER A FUTURE by Sheila Williams

  Department: REFLECTIONS: NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN by Robert Silverberg

  Department: ON THE NET: FANTASTIC by James Patrick Kelly

  Novelette: THE COLD STEP BEYOND by Ian R. MacLeod

  Poetry: ANCIENT CATCH by Bruce Boston

  Short Story: ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT by Carol Emshwiller

  Poetry: RED EYE by William John Watkins

  Short Story: WALKING STICK FIRES by Alan DeNiro

  Short Story: APOCALYPSE DAILY by Felicity Shoulders

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Short Story: THE FIGHTER by Colin P. Davies

  Poetry: BOOMER DOG DAYS by Howard V. Hendrix

  Novella: KISS ME TWICE by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Department: ON BOOKS by Peter Heck

  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

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  Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 35, No. 6. Whole No. 425, June 2011. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2011 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. Please visit our website, www.asimovs.com, for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov's Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3.

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  ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION

  Sheila Williams: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Jackie Sherbow: Editorial Administrative Assistant

  Jayne Keiser: Typesetting Director

  Suzanne Lemke: Assistant Typesetting Manager

  Kevin Doris: Senior Typesetter

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

  Cindi Tiberi: Production Artist

  Laura Tulley: Senior Production Manager

  Jennifer Cone: Production Associate

  Abigail Browning: Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

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  Advertising Representative

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  Phone: (203) 866-6688 ext. 180

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  (Display and Classified Advertising)

  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Vice President, Editorial and Product Development

  Susan Mangan: Vice President, Design and Production

  Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director (1977-1992)

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  Stories from Asimov's have won 51 Hugos and 27 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

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  Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them online at www.asimovs.com or send a self-addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope, and a note requesting this information. Write “manuscript guidelines” in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic submissions, but the address for manual submissions and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're loking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

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  Department: EDITORIAL: ENTER A FUTURE

  by Sheila Williams

  With the release of its first digital anthology, Enter a Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov's Science Fiction, this magazine has plunged head-first into the frothy waves of electronic publishing.

  Digital editions of the magazine have been available for purchase since our January 2002 issue. Sales began small and grew slowly until the introduction of the Kindle, Amazon's electronic reader. The four Dell fiction magazines—Asimov's, Analog, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ellery Queen—were the eleventh through fifteenth magazines offered for sale from the Kindle Magazine Store. Readers could purchase individual issues or subscribe to the magazine for a monthly fee. It was exhilarating to watch Asimov's frenzied climb up through the ranks of best sellers. At one point, we were even in first place, ahead of The New Yorker and Time Magazine for a couple of hours.

  Naturally, being a specialty magazine, our hold on the top didn't last forever. Amazon now sells subscriptions to seventy-six magazines, and we've stabilized at around the fifteenth place, but sales have continued to grow. Digital editions of Asimov's now account for about 25 percent of all our sales. We're available in more places, too. We can now be read on the Sony e-reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and Fictionwise, and we are continually reaching out to additional e-retailers.

  Once it became clear that interest in digital subscriptions was not abating, I was asked to pull together stories for a digital anthology. There was one caveat, however. Providing the authors were interested, I could use any story I wanted as long as the material had appeared in Asimov's after our conversion to desktop publishing late in 1996. In theory, that sounded fine. We've published close to a thousand stories in the past thirteen years. Unfortunately, that giant pool of tales didn't include the one story I had my heart set on—Robert Silverberg's Hugo-Award-winning “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another,” which first appeared in our June 1989 issue.

  This story had already gotten away from me once, when I couldn't find space for it in Asimov's Science Fiction's Thirtieth Anniversary Anthology. I had promised myself I'd run the tale the next time I put together a set of stories from Asimov's. I told Bob about this theoretical digital anthology over the course of the 2009 Nebulas Awards weekend in Los Angeles. He was intrigued by the book and let me know that the novelette had been created with the software available at the time. If I could clean it up, the story would be mine (well, it
would be mine as long as I paid for it, too). Bob had used that software for quite some time and, fortunately, back in the nineties I'd created a macro for updating his reflections column. Although initially the formatting looked daunting, it took only eighteen minutes to clean it up and create a pristine manuscript. Bob was also kind enough to let me use the story's title as inspiration for the title of the new book.

  Once I knew Bob was behind the book, it was easy to pull the rest of the collection together. Just as a typical issue of Asimov's is a mix of familiar faces and brand-new authors, I wanted Enter a Future to be a collection of established professionals and promising newcomers. I was concerned about what the authors might think of a book that existed only in digital format, but everyone I approached agreed to let their story appear in it.

  Since an electronic anthology doesn't face the same constraints that a print book does, I didn't have to make decisions based on the length of each tale. As a result, the anthology also consists of Hugo-Award-winning novellas by Connie Willis (the delightful “Inside Job") and Robert Reed (the stark tale of “A Billion Eves") as well as the deeply moving Asimov's Readers'-Award-winning novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch's about “Recovering Apollo 8.” Shorter pieces include Allen M. Steele's brilliant Hugo- and Nebula-Award finalist detailing the torturous “Days Between"; Nancy Kress's taut thriller “Safeguard"; long-time Asimov's favorite Mary Rosenblum's quietly told tale of a “Breeze from the Stars"; the story that helped land Gord Sellar on the 2009 John Campbell Award ballot for best new author, “Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons’ Blues"; new author Sara Genge's desperate short story about “Shoes to Run"; and Daryl Gregory, now no longer a new author, but fresh to Asimov's when his novelette was first published, with his own Readers'-Award-winning “Second Person, Present Tense.”

  Enter a Future is available exclusively on the Kindle. If sales are strong, and early indications imply that they are, we will almost certainly put more digital anthologies together. Our print magazine remains our primary focus, but we're very happy to see that digital editions are contributing to an increase in readership. We're fortunate that so many talented authors send us their terrific stories. Our stories deserve a broad audience, so to reach as many readers as possible, we will continue to explore the opportunities that exist on the digital frontier.

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  For an upcoming editorial on the electronic reading experience, I'd like to hear from readers who subscribe via the Nook, Kindle, or any other e-reader. I'm also interested in opinions from people who have downloaded individual issues. Responses to this query should be emailed to asimovssf@dellmagazines.com. Comments may be edited and shortened for publication. Let me know if I can use your name and be sure to put “Digital Subscriptions” in the subject line.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Department: REFLECTIONS: NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

  by Robert Silverberg

  I've been reading—not for the first time —Charles Mackay's lively book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which I've owned for many years and which I browse through every time some episode of financial madness goes whirling across the landscape. I remember studying it very closely in 1968, when we had a lively little stock-market bubble involving companies whose names ended in “-onics,” and again in the early 1980s when our banks were gleefully lending billions of dollars to unstable Latin American dictatorships, and later that decade when the savings-and-loan companies were running wild, and again in the late 1990s when the Internet-stock boom transfixed the world with dreams of instant billions. And, of course, I gave it another run-through over the past year or two after the implosion of the subprime-mortgage fantasia and the associated collapse of all credit-related dreams.

  Mackay was a Scottish lawyer and journalist with a vigorous, pungent literary style, and his book, first published in 1841 and revised and expanded eleven years later, remains entertaining and exceedingly readable more than a century and a half later. It has never gone out of print, and is available today in a variety of editions, including a free Internet version. My copy of it is the thirteenth printing of a reprint that was issued in 1932, a year which, some of you may recall, saw the global economy in a very deep doldrum indeed after the speculative excesses of the go-go 1920s.

  My 1932 edition carries a foreword by Bernard Baruch, a shrewd old financier now, alas, largely forgotten, who made millions (at a time when a million dollars was a serious amount of money) by betting against the instincts of the crowds. “All economic movements, by their nature,” Baruch writes, “are motivated by crowd psychology,” and he goes on to quote the German poet Schiller to the effect that “anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.” And in the conclusion of his preface he notes, “I have always thought that if, in the lamentable era of the ‘New Economics,’ culminating in 1929, even in the very presence of dizzily spiraling stock prices, we had all continuously repeated, 'two and two make four,' much of the evil might have been avoided.”

  Charles Mackay was born a century too soon to have written about the great stock-market crash of 1929, and two centuries too early to have known about the Internet mania of seventy years later, but he had no shortage of other material to discuss, as the 724-page bulk of his book demonstrates. In those 724 pages he covers many of the great herd-driven delusions of history: the Dutch tulip mania, the Crusades, the witch-hunts of the middle ages, the belief in ghosts, in alchemy, and in the healing powers of magnetism, and ever so much more. Of course he deals with financial fantasies, too—in particular the Mississippi Company scheme that nearly wrecked the French economy in 1720, and the South Sea Bubble that did the same for England at about the same time.

  Perhaps I should remind you, first, of what went on during our own Internet bubble of about a decade ago, for, as both Charles Mackay and Bernard Baruch take pains to remind us, we forget nothing so quickly as the financial follies of the past, and thus are always ripe for repeating them. The Internet, of course, has completely transformed the world since it exploded into our midst in the 1990s. It is hard now for most of us to imagine life without e-mail, without Google, without amazon.com, without Wikipedia, without eBay, without the myriad apps of our smartphones. As the new medium took form, a swarm of new companies sprang up to meet its needs, and some very clever entrepreneurs made a great many billions of dollars thereby. But not every Internet startup turned out as well as amazon.com or eBay, and more than a few billions of dollars were lost by ill-advised speculation in the companies that didn't make it.

  There was Webvan, for instance. Order your groceries on line, have them conveniently delivered to your door. Ideal for those snowy days, right? It raised $375 million from investors in 1999; before long its stock value was $1.2 billion; it expanded from one city to eight, and was aiming for eighteen more when it discovered that there really wasn't much profit to be made in selling groceries that way. By July 2001 it was bankrupt, two thousand employees were out of work, and the investors had lost every dime.

  Or Boo.com, an online fashion store whose site was terribly slow to load. In six months it went through $188 million of its investors’ money before going broke in May of 2000. Another casualty of that year was Kibu.com, an on-line community for teenage girls, that lasted just 46 days before it ran short of money. August 2001 saw the demise of Flooz.com, which was supposed to provide an alternative to credit cards. You bought on-line currency called “flooz"—the Internet has always been big on baby-talk terminology —and could spend it at various retail outlets. Nobody saw any point to the use of flooz, and the collapse of the company in 2001 took out $35 million of stockholder money. Freeinternet.com, unsurprisingly, found that free Internet service did not generate much in the way of earnings, despite having 3.2 million users, and it, too, went broke. So did dozens of other companies, some of whose stockholders were briefly billionaires before their stock plunged
to zero while they held on too long. A billion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.

  When we turn to Mackay's account of the South Sea Bubble, a scheme that was supposed to pay off the British national debt, expand British commerce with Latin America by exchanging British cotton and wool for South American silver and Mexican gold, pay huge dividends to stockholders, and otherwise enrich the nation, we see one of the earliest versions of a Ponzi scheme (and how much fun Mackay would have had with Ponzi himself, or his later incarnation, Bernard Madoff!) Through a cunning public-relations program, the directors of the South Sea Company kept stirring excitement in the stock of their corporation in the London press and selling more shares to an eager populace, using the proceeds to finance the projects in hand and as collateral for ever-growing bank loans. South Sea stock rose from 130 to 300, 340, 550, 890. Dukes and princes and cabinet ministers were known to be stockholders. People clamored to buy in. “During the progress of this famous bubble, England presented a singular spectacle,” Mackay tells us. “The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation. Men were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure profits of cautious industry. The hope of boundless wealth for the morrow made them heedless and extravagant for today.”

  The inevitable collapse came when the shrewdest investors, aware that the bubble could not be inflated indefinitely, began to sell their stock, and others, belatedly catching wise, took their profits also, and then their losses, as the stock dropped swiftly back to 135. Plainly some sort of stock manipulation had taken place, and angry bilked investors demanded and got a parliamentary investigation and vengeance upon the company directors who had brought the country to the brink of ruin.

  “Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people,” Mackay writes, “the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors. These things were never mentioned. The people were a simple, honest, hard-working people, ruined by a gang of robbers, who were to be hanged, drawn, and quartered without mercy.”