Asimov's SF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Rau was aware—I knew about it too when I wrote my story—that in the 1920s German zoologists had attempted to recreate the extinct European bison known as the aurochs by selective breeding of modern kinds of cattle, choosing for their breeding stock those that most resembled the aurochs in physique and the color of their fur. In time they produced animals that indeed looked something like the aurochs, although they were not, of course, the true item. Rau wondered whether quagga genes lurked in modern-day zebras and could perhaps be brought together by a similar breeding program that would in time arrive at what would be, in effect, an authentic quagga.

  That would be unlikely to achieve if quaggas and zebras had indeed been separate species, so far apart genetically that interbreeding in the days before the quagga's extinction would have been impossible. But Rau didn't think that was so. He knew from their terminology for the animals that the early Boer settlers had regarded quaggas and zebras as nothing more than different varieties of the same creature, and was convinced, in a purely intuitive way, that the quagga must have differed from the zebra only in the pattern of its striping and in some superficial characteristics of body shape, not in any profound genetic way. He began his project, just about the time I was writing “Born With the Dead,” by studying mounted quagga specimens in various museums—there are twenty-three of them, mostly in Europe—to get a precise idea of what the quagga had actually looked like. (He discovered that it had differed considerably from zebras in ways other than the pattern of stripes, having a straighter back and a more forward-jutting head. But he still believed that the animals had been closely related and might even have been capable of interbreeding.) When he tried to find institutional support for his breeding program, though, he had no success, and was about to abandon the scheme when, in 1981, he heard from Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo, who was collecting blood and skin samples of zebras in an attempt to understand the genetic variations among various zebra populations, and who hoped that Rau, in his capacity as a taxidermist, could help him out.

  Rau replied that he had something even more interesting than zebra material: specimens of actual quagga tissue. (He had acquired small bits of quagga muscle and blood vessels in 1969 when he remounted the badly stuffed specimen at the Capetown museum.) From these Ryder was able to extract DNA samples, a feat that gave Michael Crichton the notion of reconstituting dinosaurs from their DNA that became the seed of the novel Jurassic Park. Ryder went on to indicate support for Rau's belief that the quagga had been only a variant kind of zebra, not a distinct species. This reawakened in Rau the hope that it might be possible to breed the quagga back into existence using relatively quagga-like zebras.

  He began the experiment in 1986 with a group of zebras provided by the Namibian parks service, supplemented with a second batch captured a year later in a different area of southern Africa. The early results were not encouraging. Most members of the first two zebra batches were visibly striped both fore and aft, and so were their offspring. But Rau located some lightly striped zebras in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa and added them to the genetic mix, and this time things began to happen.

  Rau's quagga enterprise ended with his death at the age of seventy-three in February 2006, but by that time he had come to preside over a herd of more than one hundred animals, scattered through a number of private game reserves in the Capetown area. Biologically they all must be considered zebras, of course. But some are quite quagga-like in appearance. That does not, sad to say, make them true quaggas: they are just zebras with quaggoid striping patterns. The prize of the herd, whom Rau called “Henry,” is zebra-striped from head to rib-cage, but then the stripes begin to fade out, and the rear half of his body is yellowish-brown, with only a few faint stripes visible on his hindquarters. That does not make him a real quagga, but, all the same, he is as close to a quagga in appearance as anything the world has seen since Amsterdam's captive female died a century and a quarter ago.

  Most likely Reinhold Rau would not have been able to carry his quagga-revival project much beyond the point he had attained at the time of his death. Through decades of dedicated work he managed to breed a race of what are, essentially, zebras with defective striping, which is not quite the same thing as bringing an extinct species back to life. There is hope, though, that new advances in DNA research will permit further genetic modification leading to the creation of something that is more like an actual quagga. The samples of quagga DNA that Rau was able to collect from the skins of the stuffed zoo specimens are of high quality, and it should be possible through close analysis to isolate the specific genetic signposts of quagganess and to distinguish them from zebra genes. Then, perhaps, a program of genetic repair might be employed to edit the zebra genes of Rau's animals into quagga genes, producing, eventually, a creature more or less like an authentic quagga. (In case you're wondering why the cloning process used to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park can't be employed to speed the quagga quest, let me remind you that Jurassic Park is only science fiction, and that the DNA that has been retrieved from specimens of extinct animals thus far is too badly degraded to be used in cloning experiments.)

  For that matter my story “Born with the Dead” is still only science fiction, too, nearly thirty-five years after I wrote it and a decade or so beyond the future year in which I set it. Not only don't we have any method for bringing dead human beings back to life or even a glimmer of it on the horizon, but there's no sign out there of the possibility that my rekindled deads will be able to go off to African game parks to hunt dodos, moas, giant ground sloths, or quaggas. I did indeed have them hunting quaggas in that story of long ago, though, which is why it gave me such a shiver to learn that Reinhold Rau, all unbeknownst to me, had actually spent nearly four decades striving to restore the quagga to our world. This is not a case of life imitating art, since Rau's research and my speculative idea were simultaneously generated in complete independence of each other. But it can, I suppose, be considered an example of parallel evolution.

  —My thanks go to Howard Waldrop for calling the Rau story to my attention.

  Copyright © 2007 Robert Silverberg

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  On the Net by James Patrick Kelly

  RAH

  future history

  I was a science-fiction-crazed sophomore in high school when I first pulled Robert A. Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow off the new arrivals shelf at my hometown library. It wasn't the first Heinlein I'd read; like most kids with an obsession with SF, I'd read all of his juveniles that I could get my hands on. I'm pretty sure I'd also read The Door into Summer and Double Star. And I'd already come across some of the stories in this groundbreaking book, since I'd read his earlier collection The Man Who Sold The Moon. But I was very much taken by the scope of Heinlein's ambition. A history of the future told in twenty-one stories! Are writers allowed to do that? It boggled this fifteen-year-old's mind! Actually, as Damon Knight tells us in his Introduction rvt.com/~ lucas/heinlein/dknight.html to The Past Through Tomorrow, “future history” was John W. Campbell's coinage and Heinlein was “mildly embarrassed by it.” What struck me about these stories was not only that they took place in a coherent future, but that Heinlein's future was filled with all kinds of people. Some of the stories are about billionaires and some are about common folk. Some of the stories are funny, some are heart-breaking. A few are slight, and several are among Heinlein's best. When I returned that book to the library back in 1967, I was quite sure that it had been written by the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived.

  For reasons I don't exactly understand, I've had Heinlein on my mind this past year. Maybe it has something to do with the debate that's been going on about whether we need more entry level stories. Has the fiction in this magazine become so complex that only longtime readers of SF can parse it? How do we coax fifteen-year-olds—or bright ten-year-olds, for that matter—to read science fiction? I'm not sure whether Heinlein is the answer, b
ut in any event, I've been rereading his classics.

  Actually, I haven't been rereading but rather relistening. In a previous installment I commended Audible audible.com to your attention. They have a tidy, though woefully incomplete, assortment of Heinlein audiobooks. I've listened to unabridged recordings of Double Star and Starship Troopers and the juvenile Farmer in the Sky, which I had somehow missed back in the day. Probably because I thought a novel about farming would be boring, although Heinlein managed to sell homesteading on Ganymede to this fifty-something. But the surprises among the Audible collection were two other juveniles, The Rolling Stones and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. They were produced by Full Cast Audio full castaudio.com and my inner ten-year-old, fifteen-year-old, and fifty-something-year-old were thrilled. Bruce Coville brucecoville.com came up with the brilliant concept behind these productions, which is to give the listener “unabridged recordings of fine children's novels using a full cast rather than a single reader. Whenever possible, we invite the author to serve as narrator. Our recordings are always unabridged—the only things deleted from the text are those attributives ('he said,’ ‘she growled,’ etc.) made unnecessary by having a full complement of actors.” These wonderful titles occupy a middle ground between the traditionally narrated audiobook and an audioplay complete with music and sound environments. In addition to the catalog available on Audible, Full Cast sells CDs from its website. I highly recommend FCA!

  * * * *

  centennial

  Robert Heinlein would have turned a hundred this year. To celebrate, Heinleinaficionados will gather in Kansas City on July 6-8 for the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial heinleincentennial.com. There will be SF writers in attendance, like Spider Robinson spiderrobinson.com and Robin Wayne Bailey robinwaynebailey. net, spaceflight stars like NASA administrator Michael Griffin www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/griffinbio.html, SpaceShipOne Pilot Brian Binnie scaled.com/projects/tierone/binnie.htm, and the winner of the first five hundred thousand dollar Heinlein Prize for Accomplishments in Commercial Space Activities heinleinprize.com,Dr. Peter Diamandis web1-xprize.primary.net/who/bio.php?bioname=diamandis, as well as a number of noted Heinlein scholars. I'd consider going myself if I wasn't already committed to teach usm.maine.edu/stone coastmfa in Maine. But I can celebrate the man here and now by pointing you toward the abundance of Heinlein resources on the web.

  If you Google (isn't it amazing how this obscure noun from mathematics has passed into common parlance as a verb?) Robert A. Heinlein, the first hit is Site:RAH The Robert A. Heinlein Home Page nitrosyncretic.com/rah. This well-designed site is the work of James Gifford and features, among other things, some of Gifford's astute critical and bibliographic writing. Among its other treasures are two facsimile articles from Popular Mechanics popularmechanics.com. One, from 1950, describes the making of Destination Moon geocities.com/scifiart/DestinationMoon/moon1.htm, which was adapted from a Heinlein story and on which Heinlein worked. The other article, from 1952, is a tour of the house that Heinlein and his wife Virginia engineered and built in Colorado Springs. The writer takes a breathless “House of the Future” approach to his subject. Site:RAH also has several sound clips from a Heinlein interview given in 1980.

  There are sixteen sites listed on the Robert A. Heinlein Ring ringsurf.com/netring?ring=Heinlein;action=list, several of which are worth a click. For example, the Heinlein website members.fortunecity.com/tirpetz/authorpages/heinlein/heinlein.htm opens onto a gallery of some of the cover art that graced his many books, while the heinlein blog heinleinblog.blog peoria.com “exists to post articles whenever The Master's name is evoked in the press.” The Asa Hunter Memorial Heinlein Book Exchange pixelmeow.com/BookExchange/index.htm takes on a very Heinleinesque mission, sharing copies of Heinlein's work.

  One of the most controversial sites on the Heinlein ring is Alexei Panshin's enter.net/~torve/contents.htm The Critic's Lounge enter.net/~torve/critics/lounge.htm. There was bad blood between Heinlein and Panshin, which arose out of Heinlein's attempt to stop publication of Panshin's book-length critical analysis of the grandmaster, Heinlein in Dimension. In The Critic's Lounge you can read Heinlein in Dimension, which was published after Panshin won a Hugo for pieces of it that appeared in fanzines. You can also assess Panshin's version of his history with Heinlein. Tucked into a far corner of the Lounge is Starship Troopers: The PITFCS Debate, which documents a fascinating conversation from a fanzine letters column that took place in 1961-2. Some of the field's most accomplished writers and thinkers weigh in with opinions on the morality of Starship Troopers, people such as Philip José Farmer, Brian Aldiss, Damon Knight, James Blish, Poul Anderson, and John Brunner.

  The Heinlein Society heinleinsociety.org was founded after Heinlein's death by his widow, Virginia. It is a non-profit educational organization charged with disseminating the works and wisdom of Heinlein. Among other programs, it sponsors an annual Heinlein Award, “for outstanding published work in hard science fiction or technical writings inspiring the human exploration of space.” The award was won in 2006 by Greg Bear gregbear.com. When you visit the Heinlein Society website, be sure to click the Robert Heinlein link, which will take you to an eclectic collection of reviews, commentary, pictures, and appreciations as well as excellent short biographies of both Robert and Virginia Heinlein.

  Robert A. Heinlein, Dean of Science Fiction Writers wegrokit.com is an excellent general interest site, with a fine listing of the published works—many of them reviewed—and an impressive Museum of Book Covers. However, this site had not been updated in a year when I stopped by.

  At The Quotable Heinlein quotableheinlein.com, you'll find a search engine attached to a database of Heinlein's fiction, non-fiction, and correspondence. You type in a keyword and up pop all the occurrences of that word in the database. For example, when I typed in “critics” I got just one result:

  Lately some literary critics have been condemning my stories as being elitist and concerned only with superior people—instead of the little people, the common people, the born losers. Those critics are correct: the sort of hero I like to write about is a boy from a broken home and a poverty stricken background who pulls himself up by his bootstraps....

  —Personal communication, letter of 15 June 1981

  * * * *

  exit

  I count myself a fan of Heinlein, although I must confess that his last works disappoint me. The narratives get windier and crankier and some of the people are hard to believe. He headed into territory that I wasn't all that interested in exploring, and so I stayed behind with Mannie and Mike, Delos D. Harriman, Kip and Peewee, the Great Lorenzo and all the rest of his competent, decent, free-thinking, and admirable heroes.

  But I want to come back to the question of whether Heinlein is a good candidate for turning new readers on to science fiction, because I think the answer is mixed. Some of the juveniles ought to work very well, and I think that Full Cast Audio has made shrewd choices in what they have produced thus far. However, when my daughter Maura was a sophomore in high school, she asked me to recommend an SF novel and I gave her what is probably my favorite Heinlein, The Door into Summer. She was, and is, an omnivorous reader and yet she couldn't finish it. I was shocked. I asked her why, but didn't press that hard; teenagers are experts at shrugging off clueless parental inquiries.

  I do have a theory, however. The novel is set in 1970, ten years before Maura was born. It was set in Heinlein's future when he published it in 1956, but it would have been just a chapter from her Modern American History text. Except she could see that we didn't have household robots, alas. And suspended animation—not so much. Could there really be a nuclear war that destroyed Washington and yet didn't really bother people much? And by the way, what the hell is a slide rule? Some kind of calculator?

  I grew up on the works of Jules Verne. And yet I wouldn't think of giving Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to someone who was interested in finding out what contemporary SF was all about. Any writer so bold as to atte
mpt to write near-future science fiction must be aware that its sell-by date will come and go. As time passes her well-considered extrapolations will become increasingly ... well ... quaint. Heinlein is slowly but inevitably undergoing Verne-ization. And believe me, I feel Heinlein's pain. I won a Hugo for a story that posits nuclear holocaust in 2009. And I have any number of stories that depend on there being a Soviet Union in the middle of this century.

  Wait a minute! Who am I to be feeling Robert Anson Heinlein's pain? I realize that I've been impertinent in print to one of my favorite writers. Someone who has had a huge impact on my own career as a writer.

  I apologize, sir; let me try to make amends. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. HEINLEIN!

  Copyright © 2007 James Patrick Kelly

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  NEWS FROM THE FRONT by Harry Turtledove

  In a variant of “If this goes on...” Harry Turtledove's latest story takes a chilling look at what could have happened “If this went on.... “He warns us that, as with his tale “Bedfellows” (F&SF, June 2005), which looked at politics from a rather different slant, he agrees with Larry Niven's contention that it is foolish to infer anything about a writer's politics from his or her work. Harry's latest book, a fantasy, Every Inch a King, is just out from Del Rey, and an alternate history, In at the Death, is forthcoming from that same publisher.

  * * * *

  December 7, 1941—Austin Daily Tribune

  U.S. AT WAR

  * * * *

  December 8, 1941—Washington Post

  PRESIDENT ASKS FOR WAR DECLARATION!

  Claims Date of Attack Will “Live in Infamy"

  * * * *

  December 8, 1941—Chicago Tribune

  CONGRESS DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN!

  Declaration Is Not Unanimous

  * * * *

  December 9, 1941—New York Times editorial

  ROOSEVELT'S WAR