Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  Departments

  Thursday, December 1, 2010

  EDITORIAL: SHEILA AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

  Sheila Williams

  The Oscars may have their red carpet, the Tonys, their Broadway stars, but this year’s Nebula Award weekend included an affair that outshone any actor or Hollywood affair. This was not the actual...

  REFLECTIONS: REREADING KORNBLUTH

  Robert Silverberg

  I first saw his name on the contents page of the July 1949 issue of the now forgotten pulp magazine Startling Stories. I was a high-school sophomore then, reading too much science fiction when I should have been studying my geometry and Latin. His short story, “The Only Thing We Learn,”...

  NEXT ISSUE

  JANUARY ISSUE In our January issue, we start the year off with a sparkling novelette by Britain’s prestigious Edge Hill-Prize winner, Chris Beckett. In his new tale, we follow the misadventures of “Two Thieves” and keep our fingers crossed that their larcenous nature doesn’t...

  ON BOOKS

  Peter Heck

  THE BIRD OF THE RIVER by Kage Baker Tor, $25.99 (hc) ISBN: 978-0-7653-2295-9 Baker returns to the world of The House of the Stag, her World Fantasy Award nominee, for a coming of age story set on a fabulous riverboat. This is the story of Eliss, the teenage daughter of Falena, a woman who has fallen...

  SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

  Erwin S. Strauss

  October is the busiest month of the year for SF meets. I'll be at AlbaCon and CapClave. NecronomiCon is good too. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines...

  Top of Departments

  Novelettes

  Next Article

  Departments

  EDITORIAL: SHEILA AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

  Sheila Williams

  Ted Kosmatka and the Saturn V

  Photo by Sheila Williams

  The Oscars may have their red carpet, the Tonys, their Broadway stars, but this year’s Nebula Award weekend included an affair that outshone any actor or Hollywood affair. This was not the actual ceremony, but the May 14, 2010, launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. I had the great pleasure of watching this event from the VIP bleachers of the Banana Creek Viewing Site with Asimov’s Nebula Award finalist Ted Kosmatka.

  I’ve always wanted to attend a space launch. Last month I mentioned that my father was frequently in the Cocoa Beach area. On December 7, 1972, he and my mother witnessed the launch of Apollo 17. While I was enchanted by my parent’s vivid description of the night sky on fire, I knew theirs was an experience I couldn’t hope to duplicate. Apollo 17 was both the first crewed night launch and the last Moonshot. It seemed to take years before the Space Shuttle program was in full swing, and by then I was living in New York and my family no longer made regular visits to Cape Canaveral.

  Naturally, I was thrilled when I heard that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America had decided to hold the 2010 Nebula Awards weekend in conjunction with what would most likely be the ultimate launch of the Atlantis. I jumped at the chance to get a ticket to the space shot and was included in a small group of presenters and finalists who were able to watch the shuttle lift off three miles from its launch pad.

  I had much of the same sort of fun at the Apollo/Saturn V Center, which is next to the viewing site, as I usually have over the Nebula weekend. I got to shop for souvenirs with my good friends, Betsy Wolheim and Sheila Gilbert, co-publishers of DAW Books; I had lunch at the center with SFWA’s executive director, Jane Jewell, and her husband (and Asimov’s book reviewer) Peter Heck; and I got to wander around with my author.

  Ted and I marveled at the enormity of the gigantic Saturn V rocket suspended from the center’s ceiling. When Ted went outside to save a couple of seats, I ducked into some of the special exhibits. In addition to a backup Apollo command module and an unused Lunar Module, the center had a fascinating exhibit on the evolution of the spacesuit and casts of some of the Apollo astronaut’s hands.

  After a while, I began to worry that I would miss the launch so I hurried outside to join Ted and a talented group of award finalists that included Rachel Swirsky, Eugie Foster, and Catherynne M. Valente, as well as Keith Stokes, who was being honored at the Nebulas with a SFWA Service Award. It looked like I had cut it fairly close since there was less than twenty minutes left on the Countdown Clock. We thought that meant that the shuttle might be taking off early, but we soon discovered that there would be a forty-five minute scheduled hold at the T-9 minute mark.

  Many space shots are delayed due to weather or mechanical issues. I had come to Florida with some expectation that I might not get to see the shuttle take off at all or that the launch would be postponed until the next day, when we would all have to watch it from the beach (which wouldn’t have been half bad), because SFWA only had one-day access to the bus that would ferry us to the official site. The weather was beautiful, though, and everything seemed to be moving along fine when suddenly it was announced that unresolved questions about a stray ball bearing might force NASA to scrub the mission. Although the wait seemed endless, it probably only took about ten minutes before we were told that the ball bearing wasn’t a problem, the shuttle was still on the clock, and that it would almost certainly take off at the 2:20 launch time.

  The moment of lift-off can only be described as exhilarating. I’m not sure if my heart was pounding so hard because of the reverberations from the launch, my excitement at being there, or some subconscious fear for the astronauts’ safety. It was a sensation unlike any I’ve ever experienced. Our view was perfect. Less than two minutes after T-0 we were told that the shuttle had already traveled twenty miles—nineteen of them straight up into the stratosphere.

  In 2009, SFWA asked the singer/song-writer Janis Ian to act as Toastmaster for the awards. The words to the lovely song she performed as a tribute to the Nebulas were printed in last month’s issue and the song can still be heard on our website. This year SFWA arranged a shuttle launch in honor of Ted and the other finalists. I can’t imagine what this group of speculative authors will come up with next year, but I’m certainly looking forward to the adventure.

  Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  Departments

  REFLECTIONS: REREADING KORNBLUTH

  Robert Silverberg

  I first saw his name on the contents page of the July 1949 issue of the now forgotten pulp magazine Startling Stories. I was a high-school sophomore then, reading too much science fiction when I should have been studying my geometry and Latin. His short story, “The Only Thing We Learn,” probably made little impact on my adolescent self, because—as I observed when I read it last week—it’s a subtle, oblique, elliptical, sardonic piece of work. Those adjectives apply to most of what Kornbluth wrote during his short, brilliant career, but I was only mildly interested in subtlety in those days, and in that issue I was probably more impressed by George O. Smith’s slam-bang lead novella, “Fire in the Heavens.”

  I encountered the Kornbluth byline again a few months later in a second-hand issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader, the superb bi-monthly anthology/magazine that Donald A. Wollheim was editing, devoted to reprints of weird, horror, and fantasy classics. The Kornbluth story was “The Words of Guru” of 1941, from a pulp magazine that Wollheim had edited before the war. Wollheim explained that in his pre-war career Kornbuth had employed an assortment of pen names—S.D. Gottesman, Cecil Corwin, Kenneth Falconer, etc. What he did not say was that this reprint of “Words of Guru” used Kornbluth’s own byline for the first time in any science fic
tion magazine, because all his pre-war work had been done under pseudonyms. He also didn’t tell me that Kornbluth had been not quite sixteen, a junior in high school, when he wrote it. I probably would not have been happy to know that, because “The Words of Guru” is a taut, crisp, perfectly executed story with a final sentence that hit me so hard when I first read it that I have never forgotten it. I would be happy to write a story that good today. I had my own teenage writing ambitions back there in 1949, but I could never have come within a mile of what Kornbluth had accomplished in that precocious masterpiece.

  That one story taught me to keep my eye out for the work of C.M. Kornbluth. He turned up again in the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction with “The Little Black Bag,” which even at the time I recognized as something special. It was destined to be anthologized many times over, and in 1967 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America chose it for the definitive anthology of great short stories, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

  Six months after “Little Black Bag” came “The Mindworm,” in the first issue of Damon Knight’s splendid, short-lived magazine, Worlds Beyond. Knight believed that SF could be something more than fast-paced pulp fiction, and that December 1950 issue contained not only stories by regular science-fictionists like Jack Vance, Fredric Brown, and Kornbluth, but reprints of work by Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, and Philip Wylie. Kornbluth’s story, lean and frightening and driving relentlessly on to a surprising but inevitable conclusion and an aphoristic final sentence, fully lived up to the two great ones of his I had read in the previous year.

  By then I knew he was a short-story writer endowed with wit, grace, a powerful imagination, and—not so common back then—a distinctive, immediately recognizable style. For the next seven years I pounced on his work wherever I encountered it. As a young would-be writer I met him at a small science fiction convention, and he treated me kindly. We became friends.

  And then, in 1958, he died. He was only 34.

  * * *

  You probably haven’t read any of C.M. Kornbluth’s work. You should. He was one of the masters. There are two essential books that will tell you all you need to know about him. One is Mark Rich’s magisterial biography, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, published in 2009 by MacFarland & Company. The other is His Share of Glory: the Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Timothy P. Szczesuil and published in 1997 by NESFA Press.

  The Rich book, 437 large, densely packed pages, is the product of fifteen years’ research. It follows this short-lived genius from his birth in 1923 through his adolescence as a science fiction fan, his eerily precocious ventures into writing, his boyhood friendships with such later great figures of the science fiction world as Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, and Donald A. Wollheim, his arduous military service in Europe during World War II, and his glorious though troubled post-war career as a first-rate science fiction writer, on to his miserably early death, on a railway station in a suburb of New York, after he had overexerted a heart that most probably had been damaged by the stress of his military life. It’s a fascinating, chilling story, full of marvelous literary gossip about the science fiction world of the forties and fifties, some of it new and startling even to me, though I was part of that scene myself during the last four years of Cyril’s life (and was one of the many sources interviewed for the book).

  The NESFA book is even bigger: 670 pages, 56 stories, going back to his early pseudonymous work for the pulp magazines of 1940-42, and continuing on beyond the wartime hiatus to his great post-war work and the superb posthumously published stories of 1958 that indicate the even greater unrealized accomplishments that surely lay ahead. Even then the book, though it claims to include his complete short fiction, may not include it all, for seven other early pulp stories, all of them hastily written hackwork, were collected in the 1980 paperback Before the Universe, published as being by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, but—so Mark Rich believes—written entirely or mostly by Kornbluth. According to Rich, Pohl supplied outlines for most or all of these stories, but Kornbluth did the actual writing. Back then they both lived in a sort of science fiction writers’ commune, along with Blish, Knight, Wollheim, and various others, and after a lapse of nearly seventy years it’s impossible to determine who wrote what in that milieu of free-floating collaboration. But my own recent rereading of those stories leads me to think that they are mainly the work of the teenage Kornbluth, though far from his best work even at that time.

  Even that early hackwork, knocked out overnight at top speed, holds some interest, though. The plots derive from the formula pulp SF of the day, the characters are strictly cardboard, the dialog is full of comic-book clichés like “What the—” and “That tears it!” But there is a sparkling inventiveness throughout, and sly little touches (in one story a character quotes a line from Dante, without attributing it, as she views the stars from her ship) that reveal the young prodigy, slumming.

  I suspect his best-known story is “The Marching Morons,” from 1951. Even people who have never heard of Kornbluth are familiar with its basic idea. He first proposed it, obliquely, in his 1950 classic, “The Little Black Bag”: that after centuries in which the least intelligent members of our species reproduced incessantly and the brightest ones rarely had children at all, the human race would consist of billions of morons shepherded by a tiny high-IQ elite that would constantly be at wits’ end to keep the world functioning. He told that story first by having a bag of futuristic medical equipment, designed so that any dope could use it to perform advanced medical techniques, accidentally sent back in time to 1950. In “The Marching Morons” he reversed the theme, sending a twentieth-century man forward in time to the moron-dominated world of three or four hundred years from now. Rereading it last week with the sharp eyes of someone who has been writing science fiction for two decades longer than Cyril Kornbluth’s entire lifespan, I noticed certain plot problems in it that I hadn’t spotted on earlier readings: the solution to the Too Many Morons problems that the story proposes, not very different morally from the Hitlerian Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, doesn’t really make sense in terms of Kornbluth’s own stated story information. But that hardly matters. The fundamental point of the story remains intact, and there is no way to find fault with Kornbluth’s elegant narrative style. As for the moronic world of the far future that he depicts for us, it is all too uncomfortably similar to our present-day culture of idiotic TV reality shows, crudely ungrammatical newspapers, and unending texting by barely literate teenagers. He saw the future that lay ahead for us better than anyone except, perhaps, Philip K. Dick.

  The NESFA collection—not, alas, arranged chronologically—also shows us the late masterpieces, the 1958 stories, that indicate where Kornbluth may have been heading as an artist. “Theory of Rocketry,” about a boy who wants to be an astronaut so badly that he is willing to commit any betrayal necessary, was science fiction in its day; time and the space program have made a mainstream story out of it now. “Shark Ship,” showing the world transformed by ecological disaster, may seem familiar today, but it was a dazzling extrapolation fifty years ago, and is a gripping story even now. And “Two Dooms,” perhaps his most mature work, portrays a United States conquered by Japan and Germany with a vividness that has only been matched by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle of six years later. Judging by the quality of his prose and his insight into character, Kornbluth in his final year had grown restless with the limitations science fiction imposes and was looking toward the mainstream of fiction.

  I haven’t even mentioned the collaborative novels—The Space Merchants and two others done with Frederik Pohl, Mars Child and Gunner Cade with Judith Merril, the three (The Syndic, Takeoff, Not This August) he did on his own, or the six pseudonymous mainstream books. He crowded a lot of living and a lot of writing into a very short time, did Cyril Kornbluth. Then on a winter day in 1958 he shoveled snow from his driv
eway and hurried to catch a train and died of a heart attack, at thirty-four, at the railway station. Stanley G. Weinbaum (“A Martian Odyssey”), an earlier precocious genius of science fiction, died at thirty-five. Mozart did also. What any of them might have created in the later years of life that were denied them belongs in the realm of alternative history. But we are grateful that Weinbaum and Mozart wrote what they did; and I think you will add C.M. Kornbluth to their number when you discover his stories.

  Copyright © 2010 Robert Silverberg

  Previous Article Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  Departments

  NEXT ISSUE

  JANUARY ISSUE

  In our January issue, we start the year off with a sparkling novelette by Britain’s prestigious Edge Hill-Prize winner, Chris Beckett. In his new tale, we follow the misadventures of “Two Thieves” and keep our fingers crossed that their larcenous nature doesn’t interfere too much with their survival instincts. The issues counterweight is an excellent new novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. In a locked-space-station mystery, hotelier Hunsaker must get some “Killer Advice” if he hopes to track down a murderer before losing too many guests!

  ALSO IN JANUARY

  Elizabeth Bear’s first two stories for us have both received Huto Awards. We’ll see what happens to the third. “Dolly” is another mystery tale, and this one contains more than a passing nod to the works of Isaac Asimov. In new author Gwendolyn Claire’s short story, Riti makes a desperate journey across India so that she can spread “Ashes on the Water.” New author Ian McHugh presents us with a bizarre tale about an unusally strange carnival troupe who must protect the world from a vicious “Interloper.” Long-time Asimov’s author, Steve Rasnic Tem spins a heart-breaking tale about persevering “Visitors.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  January brings our annual Readers’ Award ballot along with the yearly Index. Sharpen your pencils or warm up your computers so you can access our online form, but don’t forget to VOTE for your favorite stories, poems, and art! Robert Silverberg’s “Reflections” ponders what is lost in “The Ruin”; Klaxons are blaring in James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net: “Warning: The Internets May Be Hazardous to Your Health!”; Paul Di Filippo contributes “On Books”; plus we’ll have a set of poetry you’re sure to enjoy. Look for our January issue on sale at newsstands on November 9, 2010. Or you can subscribe to Asimov’s—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We’re also available on Amazon.com’s Kindle!