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The Passionate Astrophysicist To His Love
171 words
In Andromeda two molecules of Hydrogen were fused.
This minor cataclysmic jolt one Helium produced.
Among the many side effects were heat that could be used
To warm up local planets. And a photon was induced.
This photon, one of many such, was launched into the depths of space
And in a couple million years it struck an asteroid.
It bounced off that and headed for the eye in Pisces' face.
Neanderthals evolved and died while it was thence deployed.
It passed close by a neutron star invisible to any man
Whose gravitation shifted its direction just a bit.
It traveled twenty thousand years until it neared Aldeberan
Where it encountered comets, the tail of one of which it hit.
So the physics of reflection set it in a new direction
And for sixty-five more years it sailed its new course straight and true.
It came right to our planet for its final interception
Which took place this morning when it was reflected off of you.
From your face to my retina's one thousandth of a mile.
What better way to end than to illuminate your smile.
—Robert Lundy
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The View from Cruithne
66 words
Each one much smaller than a fly,
at winter's death and springtime's birth,
Cruithneans watch their small world's sky
awaiting the approach of Earth.
You might dismiss these humble mites
as wisps of my imagination.
To you, they're just my fancy's flight:
to them, we're cause for celebration.
For when our huge blue planet looms,
their world approaches near the sun,
whose warmth gives rise to alien blooms,
and then they know their winter's done.
—Mary A. Turzillo
* * *
GUEST EDITORIAL
MEDITATION ON A BAR STOOL Stanley Schmidt | 1923 words
No, I don't spend a lot of time in bars, but I recently had occasion to assemble a couple of bar stools. They were two of many pieces of furniture needed for the house we had just moved into—in this case, to provide seating at a kitchen counter too high for regular chairs. While putting them together I was struck by the fact that the assembly instructions were almost entirely pictorial.
And, therefore, equally useless for speakers of all languages.
No doubt the entities who decided on this format would word that differently, saying that the all-pictorial format made them equally useful for everybody. But this seems to me to miss some very important points about how people think and learn, and to disregard the advantages of—and, in effect, to discard—one of the most valuable tools our species has ever invented.
If this were an aberrant behavior by one out-of-touch manufacturer, I wouldn't consider it worthy of an essay. But it isn't just one. It's part of a widespread trend in our current culture. While I was first moved to comment on it by the bar stool instructions, I saw the same phenomenon in many other items I assembled over the next few months—and also in areas far removed from furniture assembly.
To stick for the moment to my initial example, I'll mention first that the stool directions consisted of a single sheet containing pictures of five different types of hardware, labeled "A," "B," "C," "D," and "E," and six line drawings representing various stages of assembly, numbered sequentially. The only words accompanying those six drawings were "Do not fully tighten Bolt (B) after assembly" (in Step 3) and "Tighten all Bolt [sic] (B) after assembly" (in Step 4). The assembly drawings were on a radically different scale from the hardware drawings, and the hardware in the assembly drawings was not to the same scale as the other parts.
Furthermore, the four legs of the stool were of two slightly different shapes, one intended for the front and one for the back. I'm quite confident that a goodly number of customers trying to assemble this thing will not notice the difference in leg shape until they've done quite a bit of the assembly assuming the legs are all identical, then realize they've done it wrong and have to undo part of their work and redo it with the legs in correct order.
Why didn't the perpetrator of these directions recognize that likelihood and insert in Step 3 a simple phrase like, "Be sure to put the two doubly curved (front) legs in front"?
A somewhat similar problem cropped up when I was assembling a new desk chair. Here the hardware set included two kinds of screws, identical except for a slight difference in length. The manufacturer attempted to distinguish them by putting the two kinds in separate compartments of a plastic container (resembling large bubble wrap, but with parts instead of pressurized air in the "bubbles"), labeled "A" and "B" to match the pictures in the instructions. Unfortunately, the partitions between bubbles weren't very durable, and all the screws wound up mixed together. It took close examination to be sure there were two different sizes, and pure guesswork to decide which size belonged where.
All of which could have been avoided very easily by putting something like "7/8 in" and "1 in" next to the drawings of the two sizes of screw.
No doubt you've experienced lots of other examples, including some having nothing to do with furniture assembly. If you fly on commercial aircraft, you've probably noticed that words have almost disappeared from the safety and emergency instruction cards in the seat back pockets (except for the long paragraph about "What to do if you can't understand this paragraph"). Instead of any explanation of how the seat belts and oxygen masks work, or what kind of brace position you should use for which kind of impending crisis, you're supposed to get all that from a few very stylized drawings.
And that, unlike most furniture assembly, can be a matter of life and death. So can the interpretation of road signs meaning things like "NO LEFT TURN" or "DO NOT ENTER."
So one might reasonably think that the creators of these things would want to make sure that as many people as possible will get the message easily and accurately. Instead we seem to be taking a giant cultural step backward. One of the greatest inventions in our species' history is written language, which enabled many ideas to be communicated more clearly, precisely, and unambiguously than the stylized pictures that were the only tool available previously. Lately, bizarrely, and in my opinion unwisely, many people and institutions seem determined to throw away the advantages of language and go back to the earlier state on which language improved.
The defense I have heard for this practice is that not everyone speaks the same language, so when possible we should instead use a simple medium that everybody can understand. One of the problems with that is that not everybody speaks the same pictorial language, either. A pictogram that all viewers have agreed means "FIRE EXTINGUISHER" can be a lifesaver for everybody in a building if truly all viewers have agreed on the meaning— and a disaster if the only person near the extinguisher is a newcomer who hasn't been told.
Why not have the symbol and the words?
There's another reason to prefer that approach, and it's related to another fact about people and their relationships with words and pictures. Earlier I claimed that pictorial-only informational signs are equally useless for speakers of all languages, but that doesn't mean they're equally useless for all people — because not all people find all ways of interacting with the world equally congenial.
The first time I met science fiction artist Kelly Freas, many moons ago, was at one of the multi-day launch parties author Joseph Green famously threw in connection with the Apollo launches. Kelly had recently painted a series of twelve posters for NASA to use in promoting the value of the space program, and for the party he had hung all twelve around the Green house. One at a time, he asked guests to look at all the posters and tell him which was their favorite. He thought of it as a psychological te
st, telling me later that he'd found that "visually oriented" people always picked the one showing a rocket bursting out of an egg, while "verbally oriented" people picked the one that showed three ghostly sailing ships with the caption, "Suppose Isabela had said no."
Personally, I picked both, and told Kelly I couldn't narrow it down any further—but then, I've always had feet firmly planted in both "verbal" and "visual" camps. I didn't pursue painting very far, but I've done a lot of photography and when I was editing Analog, I chose illustrators by watching the pictures that formed in my head as I read a story and asking myself whose style they best matched.
Most people, at least according to Kelly's admittedly rather small-scale test, tend to lean one way or the other, seeing the world primarily in visual or verbal terms. If that's true, then purely pictorial instructions may actually be better for some people—but not all. And it's hard to see how having words along with the pictures would hurt even those individuals.
I suspect there are more primarily visual folks who would be content with pictures alone than primarily verbal types who would be content with words alone. Almost all of us use visual input as one of our main ways of experiencing the real world, and even if we like to be told things in words, understanding is often greatly facilitated by the addition of pictures to clarify exactly what a word or phrase refers to in a particular context.
So I wouldn't advocate presenting assembly instructions or safety warnings in words without pictures, any more than I advocate presenting them in pictures without words. And I'm certainly not opposed to the use of pictures. Pictures and words are both extremely useful cultural inventions. They can complement each other to produce a total informational package that works more effectively, for more people, than either could alone. A reader/viewer who is comfortable using both media is likely to feel frustrated when only one is used and could obviously be enhanced by the other.
One of the oddest examples of this "fighting with one hand tied behind the back," in my opinion, is an approach to the teaching of language itself that is currently enjoying a considerable vogue. I'm thinking of one set of courses in particular that I've seen widely advertised and that some people claim to have found very effective. It may well be, for at least some people; if I worked through one of the complete courses, I might even be surprised to find that I was one of them. But on the basis of my limited experience with them, I doubt it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I haven't gone through one of these complete courses; but I have tried enough of a couple to get an idea how it works, and it seems to me to share the same weakness as some book courses I've used. The essence of its method is to show pictures of people interacting with other people and objects in various situations, while the student hears what they're saying and may also see it spelled out. It's cleverly constructed so that later situations build on earlier ones and enable an inductively-inclined student to gradually develop a feel for what patterns are used to express what. The rationale, I've been told, is that that's how we all learned our first language, so it must be the best way.
But few of us have a chance to learn our first language more than once, and we'll never again be in the same situation we were in then while learning a new language as adults. As small children, we had to learn language that way, because we had no metatools— things like dictionaries and grammar books— available to give us shortcuts to understanding why things are done the way they are. As adults, most of us do, and it can be frustrating to see them being ignored instead of used.
I think I first experienced this in my very earliest, very informal efforts at learning a foreign language, when I listened to opera recordings while comparing the original text with the translation in the libretto. I gradually came to understand a fair amount of Italian and French grammar that way, but some points (such as the use of a reflexive construction in Romance languages where English would use the passive voice) remained hazy to me until, years later, somebody explained to me, "This is how it works." Then it all clicked into place and became perfectly clear—just as it might have much earlier if somebody had given me that explanation back when I was first encountering the concept.
The evolution of civilization has been largely a story of the development and refinement of tools, both technological and cultural. The development of new ones does not necessarily render old ones useless. Rediscovering an old one does not mean that the new should be discarded. Often they complement each other, each doing some jobs better than the other. And sometimes they work together, two used conjointly doing a job easily that neither could do well alone. If you have to install a screw and nut, it won't go well with just a screwdriver or just a wrench, but becomes a piece of cake when both are used together in a coordinated way.
The same, I respectfully submit, is true of communication.
* * *
THE ALTERNATE VIEW
Jeffery D. Kooistra | 1870 words
There are three things you need to know about Bud Webster (apart from him being a science fiction writer).
The first is that Bud is a raconteur. Among the assorted definitions of a raconteur you will find "a person who excels in telling anecdotes" and "one who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit" and "a person who tells anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way." These I think are inadequate. What, exactly, is it that a raconteur does that makes him excel at telling anecdotes? When I hear the word "raconteur," I see and hear a man telling stories with a rich array of hand motions, facial expressions, witty asides, and mimicry. The story itself has to be good, of course, like the cheapest cup of joe at a Starbucks has to at least be decent coffee. But the raconteur brings to the story the chocolate and the caramel and the cream and other flavorings that made Starbucks what it is today.
The second thing you need to know about Bud Webster is that his skills as a raconteur transfer well to his written word. What you hear and see when you meet him in person is what you hear and see in your mind when you read him—and it's fun. It's damn fun.
The third thing you need to know about Bud Webster is that he has a lot of stories to tell.
Which brings us to Bud's nonfiction book, Past Masters and Other Bookish Natterings, (The Merry Blacksmith Press, 2013, ISBN 0-61584-282-8). The book is a collection of past articles and columns Bud published in an eclectic array of assorted venues, most of them online. Some of these writings were as good as unavailable unless one searched very hard and knew they existed. Now they're all together in one place and it's a wonderful thing that they are, because this is the most entertaining book about SF and SF writers that I have ever read.
Setting the "natterings" aside, let me focus on the main purpose of the book (apart from entertaining), which is to introduce the modern SF reader (or, in my case, reintroduce) to the works of Past Masters—SF writers from days gone by (but not very far gone by) who wrote great stories. Though once very well known, today, with many or most of their works out of print, it is easy for younger readers (anyone under forty I'd say) to be unaware of them and, subsequently, what they're missing out on.
These authors are not obscure. Many of the names brought from me a response of "Wait... what!? He's been forgotten?" But, alas, time marches on, new writers appear and old ones get put on the shelf, never to be taken down again. That is, until someone like Bud Webster comes along and returns them to our attention.
So who are these Past Masters anyway? Here's the list, though not in the order you find them in the book. The first eight are authors I'm personally quite familiar with, and the remaining ten are writers I've heard of and sampled a bit, but not nearly enough. Group one is Cordwainer Smith, Frederic Brown, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, Murray Leinster, Hal Clement, and Clifford D. Simak. Group two is Nelson Bond, Zenna Henderson, Leigh Brackett, H. Beam Piper, Edgar Pangborn, Judith Merril, William Tenn, Stanley G. Weinbaum, R.A. Lafferty, and Tom Reamy.
From group one, finding both Hal Clement (real name "Harry Clement
Stubbs") and Clifford D. Simak among the others gave me the strongest "wait... what!?" reaction. Both authors were still writing for many years after I discovered magazine SF. For instance, the last Clement novel I read was his Still River which came out in 1987, and Simak's "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" appeared in these pages in April, 1980, winning not only the AnLab for that year, but the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards as well. Also, both men produced novels that are every bit as much a must-read for SF fans ( Mission of Gravity by Clement and Cit y by Simak) as anything written by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, or Bradbury.
How soon the world forgets, but forget it does.
Webster's accounts of the lives and work of Murray Leinster (real name "William F. Jenkins") and Eric Frank Russell evoked the strongest sense of nostalgia, sending me straight back in time to some of my coziest memories from junior high. I don't know how it came about, but one day in 7th grade English, our teacher Mrs. Frens presented the class with a couple boxes full of an eclectic assortment of new paperbacks. Among those paperbacks was the very first SF anthology I ever laid my hands on, Groff Conklin's Great Stories of Space Travel. Along with the stories by Bradbury, Asimov, Van Vogt, and Arthur Clarke were "Propagandist" by Leinster (from the August 1947 Astounding) and "Allamagoosa" by Russell (from the May 1955 Astounding). Coincidentally, both are dog stories, the Russell of the "shaggy" variety, both delightful, and both made me an instant fan of each of their respective authors. What was most important though was that, prior to finding this anthology, I'd had no idea such collections even existed! I'd known of Bradbury, Asimov, Van Vogt and Clarke from seeing their novels on library shelves and grocery store bookracks. But that there were other, shorter stories, by incredible but previously unknown (to me) writers like Leinster and Russell, collected together in anthologies— Oh my God! What else was out there just waiting for my eyes to devour?
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