Andromeda spirals toward
the milky way,
they may
collide and merge.
Then,tentei will change;
his face will have thick lines,
laugh wrinkles.
All will say he looks younger.
Orihime's river will swell,
drawing magpies to flutter round her
weaving rack.
Hikoboshi will be waiting
beside the water
to see if there is
a newly formed bridge.
While waiting he will
write a wish.
A poem that sounds like a hum
that massages his belly
to his throat.
* * *
A Work in Progress
G.O. Clark | 54 words
When they blast off,
the great starships are like
heroic symphonies-
Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.
Free of Earth's gravity,
solar sails unfurled,their songs
turns to minimalism-
the gradual musical changes of
a Riley, Reich, or Glass.
Passing through our
solar system,each planet triggers
a symphonic movement-
that classical pomp of hoist.
At destination's end,
across our star studded galaxy,
a new world silence,
a blank score waiting for some
latter day Dvorak.
* * *
Phantom Limb
Robert Frazier | 56 words
Lost in the jungle wars
Against encroachment
His leg an empty space
Defined only by memory
Like a wild-hearted bird
Trained with sweet seed
The mutant forest repays him
colonizes life back into limb
Reddish casting scarabs
Build bone from chitin
Their bug brethren form
sinews of elastic wax
Flesh made of wingless bees
A skin of interlocking mites
In this way he strides home
On the rebirth of his sole
* * *
Tea Rex
Robert Borski | 64 words
It emerges out of time
and leaf,
mouth full of steam,
rip-roaring hot
and unsweetened
(no placid chamomile
or lavender here-
those are dried-out beasts
more fit for bedtime
than daybreak),
and not even milk can neutralize
its first bitter taste,
as shot through with tannin
and caffeine
(the more toothsome chemicals
in our rousing brew),
this apex predator of muddleheadedness,
this creature of morning
and herbal dregs,
takes a monster bite oout of sleep,
chasing away,
swallow by swallow,
the last remaning brontosauri of dreams.
* * *
SOUTH OF OZ
jane yolen | 117 words
"(s)outh of oz,and north of shangri-La."
-George R.R Martin
If there is a place south of Oz,
my compass will find it.
If it is the true north,
that lies past Shangri-La,
I have sought that way
since childhood,fairytale needle
always spining toward strangeness.
My father,whose Life was built
on careful lies-of where he was born,
of what he had done in the war,
of how many women he loved-
always wondered at the cardinal points
of my longings,declaring them
unreal,as if his make-believe
was more natural than my compass rose.
I am aligned to the magnetic field
of the human heart,his was always a gyro,
spinning rapidly to keep up with a world
rotating solely on his solipsistic lies.
There was never adventure for him,
no Shangri-La,no Oz, only a cold trail,
trackless plain,and a meal of salty regret.
* * *
The Fate of Worlds
william cullen jr. | 15 words
A bat's swoop
blinks out some stars
ever so briefly
like an oracle revealing
where black holes will be.
* * *
GUEST EDITORIAL
Alice Sola Kim | 1748 words
BUMMED OUT AND UGLY ON THE OCCASSION OF PHILIP K. DICK'S BIRTHDAY
Last June, we ran a guest editorial commemorating the birth of Isaac Asimov. This year, we celebrate Philip K. Dick with an essay by Alice Sola Kim that has been reprinted from BuzzFeed Books. Alice's essay originally appeared on December 16, 2013, which would have been Phil Dick's eighty-fifth birthday.
The great thing about the library was that nothing too fucked up could happen there.
Untold multitudes of librarians and patrons would disagree with me, but I'm only speaking for myself. Even when I went to the library with my father, things were relatively chill between us, and would remain that way until we left. It was a building decorated in every shade of brown the seventies had on offer.
We walked to the back of the library, past the magazine racks, to the reference materials and the study tables. All sorts of people sat back here, but the ones I noticed the most were the crazy people, because I was with one. The library was wonderful because it was calm and full of books and this peace could be anyone's for no price at all. If you're crazy at a certain level, chances are, you don't have an office to be crazy in. The library is a decent replacement—an office of crazy, where you can work on projects no one cares about or understands, sitting at a heavy wooden table next to lamps and metal carts and encyclopedias. And my father worked very hard.
"Come back fast," he said. "You have to help me."
He sat, and I escaped like I was spring-loaded and shot at the science fiction section. I brought some books back and sat down with him. I hated to look at him writing his crazy-ass letters. He wrote with such care, his letters so pristinely serifed they looked Old German, and everything he wrote was straight garbage at best, something that would put him in jail at worst. I hated it so much, and it got sadder the more I thought about it until I thought I would start scream-crying at the office of crazy. So I went elsewhere. I read about anywhere but here. I read about space shit. No one wants to be that predictable and psychologically obvious, but sometimes things are exactly the way you expect them to be.
Once in a while, my dad would interrupt me. "How do you spell 'legislation'?" he'd say. "How do you spell 'inheritance'?" Questions like that, words like that. Sometimes he had me copyedit the whole thing, fixing spellings and sentence structures for letters in which he politely requested the return of three million dollars from the governor, or a helicopter to Seoul. And I would go from crazy-ass letter to book to letter, book, letter, book.
The world my dad lived in was the one in which dark forces thwarted him at every turn, keeping his fortune just out of reach and turning his family against him. He knew it was a false world, and none of the letters he wrote to the president or the rants he subjected us to were able to bring back the true world. At the library, he would write his letters and I would read Philip K. Dick and, each of us, in our own way, would hate this world.
Today is Philip K. Dick's birthday. Even if you don't care about science fiction, you know about him. There's the Philip K. Dick who belongs to everyone: American science fiction writer, known for drugs, paranoia, ontological fuckery, and the occasional really awful sentence. A heap of screen adaptations, most of which are glos
sily plastinated trash. At this point, dude is even recognizable as an adjective: You can throw Dickian on the heap with Dickensian, Orwellian, and, like, no women.
There's also the Philip K. Dick who is mine. The one I've been reading for half my life. The one who wormed his way into my life before I could be thoughtful and critical about the things I loved. The one who reigns in my personal pantheon.
Recently I hung out in a group with a guy who said innocently, "Being fat led me to Star Trek. " We all laughed, but he hadn't been joking. That would've been a bad joke, a ha-ha-ha-nerds-are-like- this joke of the variety I have absolutely no time for. We laughed because he wholly meant it. It's not the whole truth, but I will match that guy and say that being bummed out and ugly led me to Philip K. Dick. Helped, anyway.
At fifteen, there are a multitude of things that can make us bummed out and ugly. Physically, I did not have my shit together—haystack hair, a round and unfinished face, a gawky body with these boobless tits that were all nipple. Even when we're hideous as teenagers, we also look sort of uniquely, never-again great, so when people claim they were ugly back then it's hard to believe. Yet it felt irrefutably true. And we were poor and my dad was crazy, major bummers both and a formula that equaled staying long hours at the library while embarking on the grand project of reading everything in the science fiction section.
When I found Philip K. Dick, he was no big secret. He was in a partial state of rediscovery—there were a bunch of nice paperback reissues from Vintage, plus a five-volume set of collected stories on which I systematically placed holds at the library. Everything—I placed holds on everything. Why'd I get it so bad for Philip K. Dick?
I first loved the twists. The showmanship! The pulpy excitement of it all! The first PKD book I ever read was Eye in the Sky, about eight visitors to a particle accelerator who get trapped in each others' subjective realities. Back then, it was so easy to wow and surprise me, and each time the world as we knew it turned out to be a construct, false, somehow not right —it knocked me over. Imagine PKD typing in a Benzedrine tap dance thinking that this would really get them. Did it ever. If you pet a dog in a PKD novel, get ready for the dog to melt and in the puddle will be a slip of paper that reads "SOFT-DRINK STAND."
Guest Editorial: Bummed Out and Ugly on the Occasion of Philip K. Dick's Birthday
Of course, there was more to it. Knowing that reality could be up for grabs, manipulated, and twisted gave me a prickly, shivery joy. But this would be a shallow pleasure without the deep sense of sadness in the best of PKD's work. When the world you knew was ripped away from you, even if in that world you had a shitty job and couldn't get a date, he recognized that you had to mourn. You mourned for the false world that you missed, you mourned that any kind of true, real world was elusive or else completely lost and that nothing would ever be the way it was meant to be, whatever that was.
There are cool ways to be into science fiction, and there are less cool ways. If I'm really going to dig into it, being into Philip K. Dick used to be a hipster's way of liking science fiction. (It's now probably sub-hip, a little past-hip, a bit like being into Haruki Murakami.) However, PKD is great at eluding coolness. It's a singular joy to read his work and find what is elegant and transcendental about it but also very much pulp trash—lowdown and frumpy. In Ubik, PKD performs a kind of genre Tourette's by continually describing the weird outfits that all of the characters wear. For. No. Good. Reason. He loved a good throwaway idea, and sprinkled things like telepathic Martian jackals and slime molds from Ganymede and psychic newspapers throughout his stories. Appropriately, his characters were often losers. They were hustlers and auditioners, scrappy people who seemed anxious all the time and had to balance getting ahead with being decent protagonists.
PKD cared about trash—or, rather, that which others deemed to be trash.
What do you do when you grow up in a world you hate? Sometimes, you do a 360-degree pivot turn on your heel and run right back into its arms. I thought absolutely none of this at the time, I'm pretty sure, but looking back, PKD's was a science fiction that made my life seem okay. Granted, the crazy of PKD's work and my dad's crazy weren't the same. My dad's crazy was sad, boring, degraded, and degrading, and as I've hopefully established, the crazy in PKD's work is incredibly the greatest, as well as heartbreaking and dignified in the most unexpected of ways. But all throughout PKD's stories and novels I found loserness and crazy and I found trying one's best and having it all be futile, swept into the trash with the leavings of a discarded world. I found both the things I did not want to think about and the opposite of those things, aka space shit. I think it helped.
Years ago I briefly dated someone and the best thing this person did was try to take me to the apartment PKD had been living in when he died. I say "try" because it's unclear that this was the actual apartment he lived in. It was in Orange County, and the sun was hot like a huge hand pressing down on us. Things were pretty much over between us, but I stepped closer and draped my arms over him. Pickup artists everywhere, take note: Bring her to the place where her favorite science fiction writer had a stroke and she'll go wiiiiiiiiiiiiild.
"We should ask someone," one of us said. No one came in or went out. I squinted at the ugly building trying to glean anything PKD-like about it, and the Necker Cube in my mind shifted drowsily left then right. It was probably not his building. It probably was. This was exactly the kind of place where is life would end. This was not a fitting place for him spend the last years of his life. This guy and I were being momentous and interesting. This guy and I were deluded and confused.
Oh, and now I see that was, I guess, the whole point. Happy birthday, Philip K. Dick.
Alice Sola Kim's fiction appears in Lightspeed, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and a MacDowell Colony residency, and has been honor-listed twice for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
* * *
REFLECTIONS
ANOTHER TRANSITION Robert Silverberg | 2171 words
This is a time of computer transition for me—a rare event, because I'm not someone who trades in his computer for a new model every year or so. Quite the contrary: I am maddeningly, preposterously, insanely retentive when it comes to computers.
I was one of the first SF writers to switch from the typewriter to the computer. I started to investigate that possibility in 1979—not for writing, because in 1979 I had vowed to stop writing fiction forever, and actually thought I meant it—but for my financial and business records.
Computers in 1979 were pretty primitive things. The Apple II was around then, and various other makes, the Altair 8800, Imsai 8080, Tandy TRS-80, etc. They had screens, and most of them, not all, had keyboards, but where they fell short was in the matter of memory, for which an achingly slow tape-deck thing was used. I visited one of the pioneering computer stores in Berkeley, explained my needs, and the clerk suggested that I wait a year or two before buying. "They're going to put out something called a Winchester drive," he said. "All of today's computers will be obsolete overnight." A "Winchester drive" was what we call a hard disk today.
So I put the computer-buying project on the back burner, even though my "permanent" retirement from writing fiction had ended with the writing of Lord Valentine's Castle in 1980. A long novel like that was a considerable chore, with plenty of paper wasted as I banged out two six hundred-page drafts. But a lot was going on in my life besides writing, just then, and so it was easy to sidestep the business of buying a computer for a while.
What tipped me over into modern technology was my 1982 novel— Lord of Darkness —half again as long as Castle, nine hundred manuscript pages, and then a second draft just as long, and by the time I was done with that I never wanted to use a typewriter again. So I asked my friend Jerry Pournelle, one of the earliest computer users in our field, to explain this whole computer thing to me. He did, in a letter of about eighteen page
s, a splendid essay on what computers were and how to use them, and swiftly I headed out to find one.
Those of you who weren't on the scene in 1982 may be unaware that the computers manufactured then had unique operating systems; nothing was compatible with anything else, but for machines using the CP/M operating system, and the various CP/M computers tended to exist in isolated universes. Nor did they come equipped with the fabled Winchester drives; they used floppy disks—the old fiveand-a-half-inch size. The most popular among writers then was a portable computer, the Osborne, with a postage-stampsized screen; it looked like a toy to me. But then I discovered the world of dedicated word processors made for office use. They had proprietary software that was remarkably easy to use, they were much sturdier than the flimsy machines that most of my colleagues had, and they came with hard drives—not called Winchesters any more—with enough capacity to hold several complete novels.
So I bought a Compucorp word processor, and for a huge extra amount equipped it with a gigantic ten-megabyte hard drive, the biggest available then, and in November 1982, I began with much trepidation to write a novella on that newfangled thing. I didn't really believe that yesterday's work would still be on the hard disk when I sat down to work the next day, so I printed out my new pages every day, just in case. But yesterday's work was always there the next day. And the computer proved its value in many other ways. In order to change a character's name fifty pages through the story, because it conflicted with another character's name, I simply did a search and replace, and the name-change was instantaneous, no need for me to hunt through a bulky manuscript to find every instance of the name I wanted to scrap. And when I was done with the first draft, I did my revisions by hand on the print-out, keyed them in, pressed the "print" key, and out came a flawless final draft.
Asimov's Science Fiction - 2014-06 Page 17
