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Cover Art by Benjamin Carre
CONTENTS
Department: EDITORIAL: ROSE-TINTED GOGGLES by Sheila Williams
Department: REFLECTIONS: MORE ABOUT THE PLOT GENIE by Robert Silverberg
Department: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: CELEBRATING ISAAC by James Gunn
Poetry: RELIGION IS CANCELED by Danny Adams
Novelette: THE DAY THE WIRES CAME DOWN by Alexander Jablokov
Poetry: BALLAD OF THE WARBOTS by Jack O'Brien
Short Story: AN EMPTY HOUSE WITH MANY DOORS by Michael Swanwick
Poetry: MONSTERS OF THE STRATOSPHERE by Darrell Schweitzer
Short Story: NORTH SHORE FRIDAY by Nick Mamatas
Novelette: CLOCKWORKS by William Preston
Short Story: THE HOMECOMING by Mike Resnick
Short Story: THE FNOOR HEN by Rudy Rucker
Short Story: SMOKE CITY by Christopher Barzak
Poetry: GARDEN FAIRIES by Jane Yolen
Novelette: A RESPONSE FROM EST17 by Tom Purdom
Short Story: THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Esther M. Friesner
Poetry: SEEKING OUT LOBE-FINNED TRUTHS by Robert Frazier
Short Story: THE FLOW AND DREAM by Jack Skillingstead
Novelette: BECALMED by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Poetry: BLACK HOLE by William John Watkins
Department: NEXT ISSUE
Department: ON BOOKS: URBI ET ORBI by Norman Spinrad
Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss
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Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 35, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole No. 423 & 424, April/May 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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Department: EDITORIAL: ROSE-TINTED GOGGLES by Sheila Williams
When I was in school, SF was usually labeled “escapist fiction.” Since the stories were often set in the future and dealt with aliens or mind reading or time travel, it was assumed that they glossed over real life issues. My teachers assured me that I would soon outgrow my fascination with science fiction and settle down with more adult literature. As an inveterate reader, I actually enjoyed all sorts of fiction and I knew that while there were many different types of conventional tales, there were just as many varieties of SF. I might read Edgar Rice Burroughs just for fun, but Robert Silverberg and Ursula K. Le Guin were as capable of shining the cold light of reality on the human condition as any mainstream author. Still, one thing science fiction certainly had going for it was its cool toys.
An early enthusiasm for SF is often sparked by these toys—starships, ray-guns, and alien action-figures can capture a child's imagination long before they read through Dune or The Foundation Trilogy. Although I discovered the toys long after I began reading the stories, I'm still a sucker for novelty spaceships and little red robots. On a superficial level, at least, one of the major attractions of the relatively new subgenre, steampunk, is its really cool toys. Steampunk has goggles and dirigibles, it has dress-up clothes for you or your dolls and gorgeous brass time machines. Most of all, steampunk has trains.
As a child, we want to get down on our hands and knees and play with those trains. Who doesn't enjoy watching the little train choo-chooing past the Victorian village under the Christmas tree? As adults, it's easy to imagine ourselves riding in a first-class compartment—dining off bone china and sipping wine from cut crystal glassware. Speeding into the past, our imagination takes us away on these trains almost as fast as the rocket ships of our daydreams take us into the future.
Of course, just as accurate predictions of the future are rare in SF, so too are realistic depictions of the past. We know that most of the people who traveled in those trains weren't riding in first class. About ten years ago, it was a toy, though not an SF toy, that led me to a vivid description of what an 1854 trip from New York to Chicago might have been like. My daughter had received the now discontinued Kirsten Larson American Girl doll for Christmas along with an introductory boo
k called Meet Kirsten by Janet Beeler Shaw. The young Swedish immigrant's journey does not sound romantic: “Inside, the train was so hot it felt ready to explode. There was coal grit on the floor and cinders in the air. Kirsten could hardly get her breath. She saw that the windows had been nailed shut. The agent said the train would be safer this way.” Although Kirsten, her mother, and younger brother find a seat on a hard wooden bench, her father and older brother stand all the way to Chicago.
We know life was hard during the industrial revolution. We've studied the era in school and heard about the difficulties from our relatives. Stricter workplace laws protect most of us from the conditions our grandparents and great-grandparents labored under. I'm thankful that unlike my not-so-distant ancestors, I wasn't chained to a machine in the paper mills as a tween or sent down into the coalmines as soon as I turned eight.
Authors Nisi Shawl and Charles Stross have both lobbed cogent criticism at the way some steampunk seems to view history through rose-tinted goggles. While Charlie blasts the subgenre from his blog for everything from glutting the fiction market to celebrating totalitarianism and overlooking the exploitation of women and children, Nisi takes a more targeted approach. At Tor.com, she argues that the stories she's read have “Almost without exception . . . glorified British Victorian imperialism. They did this despite the fact that many of the cultural, scientific, and aesthetic elements steampunk celebrates had been appropriated from nations the British Empire conquered."
I recognize the tendency to gloss over the past is a factor in many types of historical fiction. Sometimes fiction makes historical eras seem as real as the world outside my front door. Other times the author's past really is a “foreign country"—one that bears no more resemblance to history than those confectionary Victorian houses under the Christmas tree ever resembled the average American home. There are times when I read to be entertained and times when I read for edification. Often I am edified even while being entertained. I've enjoyed stories that look unflinchingly at the issues Nisi raises and I've enjoyed stories set in a past of the author's creation that seemed almost entirely divorced from reality. The most rewarding of any of these tales never fail to teach me something about what it means to be human.
When I read fiction, I rarely think about whether the character or the author has an agenda. I avoid didactic prose at every opportunity. Yet the best stories are usually ones where real-life concerns have been subtly interwoven into the fabric of the tale. I'm sure authors will continue to borrow toys from steampunk to fashion marvelous dioramas for their train set. Nisi and Charlie offer great food for thought and for future stories. I'm looking forward to seeing to seeing new work from authors who push steampunk's boundaries by reflecting on these issues as well.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: REFLECTIONS: MORE ABOUT THE PLOT GENIE by Robert Silverberg
Last issue's column was devoted to a discussion of the Plot Genie, an early twentieth-century gizmo with which writers struggling to generate story ideas could produce them by twirling a cardboard wheel and using the numbers that the wheel landed on to assemble plot components from a predesigned list. Its creator, a Hollywood screenwriter of the silent-film days named Wycliffe A. Hill, called it a “plot robot,” but what it really is is a sort of primitive computer—no battery required—that uses stochastic methods to assemble information from random bits. By that I mean that the book that Wycliffe Hill published about eighty years ago (which included the vital cardboard wheel as an insert) first establishes what he called a “general formula for all types of stories,” which has nine elements, listed by Hill as LOCALE OR ATMOSPHERE, FIRST CHARACTER, THE BELOVED, A PROBLEM, OBSTACLE TO LOVE, COMPLICATION, PREDICAMENT, THE CRISIS, and CLIMAX. The cardboard wheel has a small peephole in it. You turn the wheel and a number will become visible in the peephole. After three turns, you note down the number that appears, which will determine each of your nine necessary elements. These are catalogued numerically in the text of the book, and you have to hunt them down, number by number, to put your story outline together. The book provides long lists for each plot element: under “Backgrounds or locale” we are given “at the morgue,” “in the swamp,” “in court,” “on a yacht,” and 176 others. A list of 180 “usual male characters” offers us “spy,” “diver,” “guide,” “judge,” and so forth. “Unusual male characters,” the next list, “gives us more exotic professions: “anarchist,” “archduke,” “wizard,” “troubadour."
More spinning of the wheel and we fill in our female character, our main plot problem ("relief from stigma opposed by lack of influence,” for example), the obstacles to love, for love is what usually drives the plot ("beloved possessed with fatal ambition for revenge"), complications ("fatal ambition threatens to deprive loved one of health"), and onward through predicament and crisis to climax and resolution. It is a goofy way to construct a story, and some mighty goofy stories must have come from it, but evidently the Plot Genie had its followers, because my copy of the book, which dates from 1932, is the third edition. And in its cockeyed way it does impart to would-be fictioneers some useful knowledge of the basic building blocks of a story, not that I would really recommend your writing one about an archduke trapped in a swamp because his beloved is possessed with a fatal ambition for revenge.
Since writing the Plot Genie column, though, I've discovered that Hill's book was not even the first of its kind. It had a predecessor, Plotto, the work of William Wallace Cook (1867-1933), which deserves our attention not only because it, too, can teach one something of the logic of storytelling, but because its creator seems to have been a science fiction writer and may indeed have used his own system to create his books.
That invaluable work of reference, Everett F. Bleiler's Checklist of Fantastic Literature, tells us of six SF books by Cook published between 1903 and 1925. A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1903) depicts a future dystopia in which a sinister monopoly controls the supply of oxygen and work is done by seven-foot-tall robot slaves. (He calls them “muglugs,” since the word “robot” had not yet been coined.) 1904's The Blue Peter Troglodyte brings an eight-foot-tall prehistoric man, found preserved in a mine, back to life. Marooned in 1492 (1905) is similar in theme to Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, but apparently is a much less cheerful book. In The Eighth Wonder (1907), the earth's rotation is brought to a halt.
From the experience of writing these and other novels, Cook derived a basic structure for all fiction, which he set forth in his book Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, published in 1928. A plot, he says, can be summarized in a sentence made up of just three clauses: “An initial Clause defining the protagonist in general terms, a middle Clause initiating and carrying on the action, and a final Clause . . . terminating the action.” Nothing very surprising there; all he is really saying is that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Cook goes on to declare that all plots are driven by desire for one of the three kinds of happiness: happiness in love and courtship, in married life, or in enterprise. “All that is possible to a mortal craftsman,” he observes sagely, “is the combining of old material into something new and different."
Cook next lets us know that these three motivations can be developed into just thirty-six master plots for fiction. (Robert A. Heinlein, many years later, boiled them down to just three, Boy Meets Girl, the Little Tailor, and the Man Who Learned Better, but that's a different story.) So far it all seems very easy to follow. But as Cook sets out to illustrate his three-clause system, his three great motivations, and his thirty-six master plots, he uncorks such a plethora of possible choices for generating stories that the task becomes bewildering.
First clause, for example, could give us “a male criminal.” Clause Two, perhaps, is “seeking retaliation for a grievous wrong that is either real or fancied.” Fine. Now to fill in some of the basic details. What kind of criminal? A bank robber? A kidnapper? A Mafia don? And what kind of grievous wrong has been done him? The perfidy of a t
rusted colleague? Betrayal by a promising protégé? The treachery of a lovely mistress? And then there is the problem of choosing a scenario for the middle of the story. “Stricken with fever in a wilderness country,” maybe? Does our Mafioso follow his enemy into the heart of darkness, then, tracking him—or her—to some Congo forest? Not bad. But whatever we choose must lead on to a satisfactory Clause Three: “Emerging happily from a serious entanglement,” perhaps, or “foiling a guilty plotter and defeating a subtle plot."
Suddenly it all becomes less simple. We need detail, subplot, character shading, and we are offered plenty: “an important secret that called for decisive action,” “an erring person committing a grievous mistake and seeking in secret to live down its evil results,” “an object possessing mysterious powers,” and more. Much more. Too much more. The possibilities become almost infinite. Plotto buries us under such a welter of choices that the diligent would-be writer, working through the maze of structural options, soon is wandering down some dead-end path or finds himself doubling back into impossible contradictions. As we pick this item and that to decorate our simple three-clause structure, we find ourselves lost in a thicket of interlocking alphanumeric categories drawn from his lists—B153 (A11 [B14] C22 [B31, A2-6], B66, C9, B41, B51 [C11]), etc., etc.—out of which, if we emerge, we have concocted a bizarre, incoherent surrealist epic made up of incompatible modules that are next to impossible to unite in the glowing fulfillment of “a final Clause . . . terminating the action."
Someone who has some skill at making leaps of inductive reasoning can probably draw the mishmash of plot fragments that Plotto provides into an actual story outline, although anyone who can do that could probably make up a story on his own without such arbitrary help— i.e., is actually a real writer. On the other hand, even real writers get stuck for story ideas sometimes, and the mechanical assistance of a gimmick like Plotto might just be able to spur the inception of a story by handing the writer a few oddball plot elements that his own imagination can go to work on. It did work for Cook, after all, and he even got some good SF ideas out of it a hundred years ago.
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 1
