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Analog SFF, April 2012
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2012 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 David A. Hardy
Cover design by Victoria Green
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CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: POLICY by Stanley Schmidt
Novelette: THE MOST INVASIVE SPECIES by Susan Forest
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Science Fact: PLANETS (OOPS, PLANETOIDS) X, Y, Z, AND W: WHAT THE KUIPER BELT TEACHES ABOUT THE DAWN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM by Richard A. Lovett
Short Story: A DELICATE BALANCE by Kevin J. Anderson
Novelette: ECCE SIGNUM by Craig DeLancey
Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE CHINK IN EINSTEIN'S ARMOR by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Probability Zero: TO SERVE ALIENS (YES, IT'S A COOKBOOK) by Eric James Stone
Short Story: YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION by Jerry Oltion
Short Story: FOLLOW-UP by Stephen L. Burns
Serial: TRIGGERS: PART III OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: A REFERENCE LIBRARY SUPPLEMENT by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXXII No. 3
APRIL 2012
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor
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Peter Kanter: Publisher
Bruce W. Sherbow: Senior Vice President, Sales, Marketing, and IT
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Stanley Schmidt: Editor
Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor
Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: POLICY
by Stanley Schmidt
In preparing for a recent trip, I found two motels in an off-the-beaten-track little town where I needed to spend a couple of nights. They sounded pretty similar, and they were the only two I found listed that still had vacancies, so I picked one pretty much at random and made a reservation. But when I asked for a confirmation by mail or e-mail, the clerk told me, “Oh, we don't do that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It's not our policy.”
And that, apparently, was supposed to satisfy me. It didn't.
I consider a written confirmation of a hotel reservation—or any business agreement—at the very least a basic courtesy that should be provided as a matter of course, and certainly (and without question) on direct request. I explained that, as politely as I could manage, and asked the clerk to make an exception. “That really isn't necessary,” she said. “We've always done it this way, and we've never had a problem.”
Maybe they had never had a problem, but how about their customers? Were they all equally satisfied with how their reservations were handled? Even if they were, did that mean I should be content to trust that they would have a room for me, at the promised rate and with the promised cancellation policy, with no written proof that any of those promises had been made?
My experience said otherwise. I remembered in particular a time when I had shown up at a different hotel with a printout of a confirmed reservation, and even though the clerk acknowledged that it looked like one of their reservations, they had no record of it and no room for me. He didn't seem particularly concerned, and seemed to wish I would go away and stop bothering him, but when I refused to do so, he did help me find a room at a less satisfactory hotel in a less satisfactory location. I suppose I must give him some credit for that, but he refused to do anything more by way of compensation for the hotel's breach of contract. Fortunately I had made the reservation through a very good, very conscientious travel agent, and he badgered the first hotel for more than a month until they finally coughed up reimbursement for what I had to spend at the other place.
But even he couldn't have done it if I hadn't had solid, tangible proof that the first hotel had made the reservation it refused to honor.
So no, I will not willingly make a reservation with any hotel that refuses to give me a confirmation. I want both sides to have tangible proof of what was agreed to in case of any possible misunderstanding—which can happen even with a business that prides itself on never having had one. So when I persisted in trying to get that first clerk I mentioned to send me a confirmation even though it “isn't our policy,” she said she'd have to ask her supervisor. She came back a few minutes later and said, “I'm sorry, sir. I can't send you a reservation. It's impossible.”
Which, of course, was blatant nonsense. Obviously it was possible; they just didn't want to be bothered. Even if they didn't have a computer system that could do it with a few clicks of a mouse, it would take no more than a couple of minutes for somebody to jot down the relevant details, stick them in an envelope, stamp it, and put it in a pile of outgoing mail.
So as soon as I hung up, I called my other candidate hotel (let's call it “Hotel B"), a few doors down the street, and found that they, too, had a vacancy. They also had a computer system that could send a confirmation with a few mouse clicks, and they did so, cheerfully and immediately, without my even having to ask.
Whereupon I called the first hotel ("A") and cancelled my reservation there.
So what did Hotel A get for its obstinacy? They lost my business—and, on at least one of the nights in question, they did not replace it. I was staying a few doors away and I was curious, so I looked, and saw that their VACANCY sign was hung out. So they lost at least one night's revenue, which I had offered to provide, as well as a chance for favorable word-of-mouth advertising.
What did they gain? Nothing that I've been able to think of.
But the whole episode seems to me a good example of a trend that has long been prevalent in our culture, and may be increasing: the tendency to lay down a policy for How to Handle Things and then cling unthinkingly to it forever after, regarding “It's policy” as the final and definitive answer to anyone who dares question how things are done or why they're done that way.
But of course it isn't an
answer at all. In at least some cases, policies are established because there are real reasons to do things in a particular way. For example, when most manuscripts were submitted to publishers as hardcopy (as they were until quite recently), most publishers had a policy that authors who wanted a response had to provide a self-addressed stamped envelope. The reason was that publishers couldn't afford to pay for postage and envelopes for thousands of submissions that they couldn't use. If an author asked (as one reasonably might) why he or she had to provide an SASE, that was the answer—not just, “It's policy.”
Yet over and over I encounter (and I suspect you do, too) cases where a business insists on doing something in a way that doesn't seem to make sense, and when I ask why, the answer, delivered with an air of finality, is, “It's policy.”
Another recent example (and by no means the first of its kind I've seen) was a restaurant where a waiter told a large party that he “couldn't” give separate checks to small groups within the large one, which everybody at the table wanted in order to avoid the common hassle of figuring out who owed how much. When one of the diners pointed out that he would have to do that if the same groups distributed themselves among several smaller tables, he shrugged the reasonable objection off with, “It's policy.” When pressed for an explanation of why it was policy, he said it was “too much trouble” to keep track of several small checks instead of one big one.
Thereby implying that while it was too much trouble for him, even though he was being paid to keep track of that table's orders and was the one person in the room who had a good overview of them, it was perfectly okay to slough that “trouble” off onto the loosely organized committee of eighteen people who were paying him.
Only when he began to suspect that there was a real possibility of those eighteen customers getting up and leaving without paying him or the restaurant anything did he conveniently find a supervisor who would grudgingly approve an exception to Policy.
I don't really know to what extent this affliction, this slavish devotion to following established policy without regard for why it was established or whether the reasons still apply, is peculiar to our culture. Certainly I've read of examples of it in earlier ones. Nor do I know to what extent it's peculiar to “western civilization.”
I do know that it's increasingly dangerous in a world already complicated and rapidly changing. Probably most cultures have found it necessary to establish policies so that decisions with a good chance of being appropriate can be made even by functionaries without much personal knowledge or powers of analysis. The trouble is that policies are a little like evolutionary adaptations in biology: They're not necessarily the best possible solutions to today's problems, but rather workable solutions—sometimes just barely adequate ones—to yesterday's problems. In a world as complex and rapidly evolving as the one we now live in, those are less and less likely to be good enough. What we need is not increasingly strict, unswerving allegiance to old policies, but an increasing prevalence of people competent to analyze a new situation and make a sensible judgment about what it really needs.
Sometimes it's actually necessary to follow an established policy, and impossible to make exceptions. In print publishing, for example, book contracts commonly undergo appreciable negotiation before they're signed, but magazine contracts can't. A novel published in book form is a single story sold by itself; if the author has a grudge against Albania (or vice versa), it's not especially difficult to exclude Albania from the contractual list of territories where the book will be sold. But if a magazine has a standing agreement for Albanian or e-book editions of every whole issue, in its entirety, there's no way it can agree to exclude those rights for individual stories or authors. That would make it impossible to publish the Albanian or e-book edition of that particular issue, thereby upsetting a large metaphorical applecart and sending metaphorical apples rolling every which way.
But sometimes—I'm tempted to say more often than not—an absolute insistence on sticking to the letter of a policy No Matter What is just stupid. One amusingly extreme example from fairly recent experience: A few years ago the supermarkets in my area insisted on carding anybody who wanted to buy beer. Not just anybody who looked under thirty or forty or some other arbitrary line that might give a reasonable margin of error, but anybody—even someone who any idiot could see was at least ninety.
Such a practice annoys customers, by wasting their time on obvious nonsense. It insults employees, by treating them as if they are even less able than “any idiot” to recognize that a customer is obviously far beyond legal age to buy beer. By treating them as if they lack even rudimentary judgment, it gives them no incentive to develop any and take pride in exercising it.
Which is exactly the opposite of what we need. An advanced and advancing civilization needs citizens—lots of them—who have well-developed judgment and who understand and accept the need to be accountable for its quality and consequences. It does not need a straitjacket of policies that were developed to fit one set of conditions, have no flexibility to adapt to new ones, and are viewed as a substitute for thinking.
Copyright (C) 2012 Stanley Schmidt
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Novelette: THE MOST INVASIVE SPECIES
by Susan Forest
Doing the right thing is commendable, but first you have to understand what that means. . . .
I picked up Doc's replacement in my safari rover, at the bungalow where Lloyd put her, just off the road to Eddy's orchard. I'd come to drive her out to the nomads’ place. It was a Saturday, hot and sunny, about a week after the transport landed, and I was thinking how good it'd be to have another professional woman besides Jessica and me in the colony.
Half-unpacked boxes were still stacked on her veranda as Karen hugged her son, Sam—just a preschooler—and gave her husband a peck on the cheek. Michael was tall and gangly, and he wore a toothy smile as he waved at me from the open door. He was to be Tumbling River's first schoolteacher.
The new doc lugged her med kit to the rover and puzzled over the back end.
“Looking for the thumb print?” I hopped out of the driver's side and shoved on a wide-brimmed hat.
“Everything's so new.” She slapped at a fly. “I keep walking into doors.”
“Old, you mean.” I turned the handle and lifted the trunk lid.
“A mechanical latch.” She chuckled at its simplicity and threw her med kit in. “I already love it here.”
I slammed the lid and watched with amusement as she methodically opened the passenger door. “So they still using thumb prints in the Alliance? Everything kept all locked up?”
“How long have you been here?” Karen climbed into the passenger side and threw her satchel in the back seat.
“Eight years. I'm an old timer.”
She snapped the seatbelt with casual pride in her own skill. “Not so much has changed. By the way, my name is Karen.”
“Amanda.” I started the rover and handed her a pair of sunglasses.
“This vehicle burns hydrocarbons?”
“Colony's brand new. Twelve years. We rough it. Ancient technology's pretty simple. You find these old trucks on a lot of new planets.” I pulled onto the track and we followed the ruts over the bridge and out onto the savanna. “There's a factory town in the mountains, about a hundred miles north. Makes pretty much everything we use. Even have a paved road to get there. Off planet stuff's too expensive.”
“But carbon fuels are so dirty.” She grabbed the dash and the door as we jounced over a rock hidden in the grass.
“Hey, we got a whole planet.”
She stared at me in shock.
Oh, yeah. That kind of a joke probably sounded pretty bad to someone from Away. “Hydrocarbon trucks're only temporary. ‘Till the quarkian fuel cell factory's done. Another year.” We bumped along the track. “Look.”
She pushed her head through the open window. “Gazelles?”
“We got a guy here
we call Adam ‘cause his job is to name all the animals. He's got some long handle for these things, but we just call them deer. Because of the antler-thingies. I make carvings from antlers I find on the ground.”
The graceful, long-legged beasts startled at the sound of the vehicle and darted as a group a little farther onto the savanna, then returned to their grazing, some watching our progress across the endless flat. For the next couple of hours I pointed out a bunch of plants, herd animals and birds, the farming machines and a pack of feral dogs. Karen just gaped.
“So, those were Alliance dogs? Not natural panspermic origin?” She eased back into her seat as I slowed the vehicle to negotiate the narrower track through the forest. “Isn't there some kind of law against introducing new species to a virgin planet?”
I pulled the netting down over my face and Karen did likewise. It was better than rolling up the windows. “I guess. Lloyd's pretty laid back about Alliance law. We mostly get along okay here. He drags out the books when he has to.”
“But don't the dogs out-compete native species?”
“Don't seem to.” I geared down.
“Not yet, maybe.”
“Come on, Doc. Ecosystems change all the time.” The rover's big wheels crawled over a log. “Whether the dogs got loose or not, no ecology stays the same.”
She put both hands on the dash as we went down a steep embankment. “But when you let animals loose—”
“Well, you can argue that with the big wigs.” I steered into the creek—fewer obstacles. “We came to farm. That means Earth crops.”
“Crops, okay—”
“There's no half-way. The only way to keep this planet untouched is for no human colonization at all. That's not what the Alliance is about.” I pulled the wheel around and brought the rover up the bank. “We're the most invasive animal there is.”
Well, she couldn't argue with that.
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