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Cover art by David A. Hardy
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RELATIVITY by Stanley Schmidt
Reader's Department: BIOLOG: DAVID BARTELL by Richard A. Lovett
Novelette: MISQUOTING THE STAR by David Bartell
Science Fact: GREEN NANOTECHNOLOGY by Richard A. Lovett
Probability Zero: ALIENS by Rick Norwood
Short Story: WHERE AWAY YOU FALL by Jason Sanford
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: NOISE AS A QUANTUM SIGNAL by John G. Cramer
Novelette: MOBY DIGITAL by Joe Schembrie
Serial: WAKE: PART II OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXVIII No. 12, December 2008
Stanley Schmidt Editor
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: RELATIVITY by Stanley Schmidt
In the early days of humanity, our ancestors had to find ways to live together in groups: rules for what individuals must and must not do, and what they could be allowed to do, so that the group as a whole could survive and maybe even prosper. Their starting point was inevitably the behavior patterns inherited from their most recent ancestors, which is probably why modern political processes have so much in common with the behavior of, say, baboon troops, with their ritualized special treatment of alpha males. But humans, being humans, brought something new to the table. More than any species before them, they could think about what to do, and invent new social systems, codes of behavior, and methods of enforcement that went well beyond preprogrammed instinct.
Surprise of surprises, they didn't all do it the same way. As long as people lived in small bands that had little direct interaction with other groups, this wasn't much of a problem. Tribe A could have one set of rules that worked well enough for it, and Tribe B could have another, perhaps quite different. There was little cause for members of one group to be concerned about the ways of the other (though when interaction did occur, it tended to take the form of violent conflict).
As technology—especially improved means of transportation and communication—brought different cultures into more frequent contact, the question of how to deal with difference became more and more important. It is now more so than ever, with all the countries of the world made neighbors by such tools as aviation, radio, and the internet. How to deal with cultures who live by different rules is likely to continue to grow more problematical, as groups on this planet are becoming increasingly aware of just how differently some of their neighbors live. If we ever make contact with cultures evolved in non-Earthlike environments, it may (as much science fiction has demonstrated) become an overwhelming challenge.
Meanwhile, we have plenty to concern us in the milder forms of the problem right here on early-twenty-first-century Earth. The solutions people have tried tend to fall into two uneasy classes: (1) Accept and learn to live with those who live differently, or (2) Try to find or define moral absolutes and require everyone to live by them.
In America and much of western Europe, it is currently fashionable to favor option (1). Tolerance and cultural diversity are considered Good Things, and many people make a special effort to respect the right of others to believe and behave in ways that they themselves would not choose.
But not everyone sees it that way.
In one of many articles appearing in my local newspaper in connection with the early 2008 visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the U.S., Gary Stern mentions several recent examples of religious objection to “moral relativism.” He quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, shortly before he became Benedict XVI, as saying, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.” He quotes a Vatican document signed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000 as “ruling out” “a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.'” And he quotes a website run by an evangelical Christian ministry as saying, “Essentially, moral relativism says that anything goes, because life is ultimately without meaning."
Experience has taught me that I must explicitly state at this point that my primary intent here is not to criticize any particular individual, organization, or religion. What I object to is the attempt, by anyone who makes it, explicitly or implicitly, to equate tolerance and respect for people of other religions (or none) with a complete lack of moral principles. That's an unjustifiable logical leap, categorically attributing to people beliefs and attitudes that they don't hold.
I know many people (some religious, some not) who consider it a matter of moral principle to respect people with other views—but not indiscriminately. The ones I know do believe in larger moral principles—the sort of thing that some call “absolutes"—but not nearly as many of them as most organized religions and social systems spell out. To say they believe in nothing is simply wrong. Straw man arguments are straw man arguments, no matter who makes them.
Any culture needs a set of principles to keep itself viable, but it can come by them in a variety of ways, and they can take more than one form. That does not mean that they're all equally good and interchangeable, or that it doesn't matter which ones you follow. A code that encourages indiscriminate murder or incest will, without doubt, hurt the society that follows it so badly that it won't survive. A “good” code is one that does an effective job of ensuring the long-term well-being of the society that lives by it, and the individuals who compose that society.
There are a great many possible ways of doing that. At least some of the many forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, to name just a few, have done a reasonably good job of it. None has done a perfect job. The same can be said of “secular humanism."
Many religious people, of course, would vehemently deny that last claim. They maintain that th
e moral codes they propound were set forth by a Higher Power, and that they themselves know what the Higher Power said and are justified in enforcing adherence to it.
The trouble is, many different religious leaders make the same claim, but with different conceptions of who or what that Higher Power is and what it requires. They can't all be literally right. Unless they can prove their claims—something they loftily deny they should be expected to do—they have little justification for expecting others to accept and live by them.
It's perfectly reasonable for anybody to believe, of course, that life would be simpler and smoother if everybody believed and lived by what he believes. Sometimes people wish for that, in more or less explicit terms. The pope, in a less guarded moment shortly before his U.S. visit, ruffled a few feathers by reviving an old prayer for the “enlightenment” (read, “conversion") of Jews—which Jews might understandably view as arrogant and condescending. To his credit, he did not advocate any overt attempt to convert them, which cannot be said for everyone in history. There have been plenty of attempts to forcibly impose this or that religious worldview on people who didn't want it, from Christian Crusades to Islamic jihads. During a recent visit to Germany, I was told the history of regions whose entire populations were suddenly told that they had all gone overnight from being Catholic to being Protestant, or vice versa, because of a change of ruler. The notion that such a thing is even possible makes a mockery of the very idea that religious faith is a matter of strong personal belief. People do not—cannot—change what they believe just because somebody else says, “You now believe this."
But then, during another recent trip I remember seeing another quote, also attributed to the pope, to the effect that, “We must resist all attempts to make religion a private matter"—a phrase I suspect he used (if indeed the quote was accurate) because of its emotionally loaded associations with Karl Marx. But religion is a private matter, in the sense that, if it requires deeply and sincerely held belief, that can only come from within. Leaders of organized religions can certainly try to guide their followers toward certain beliefs, and even require people to hold them if they want to be members of this or that congregation. But people must be free to decide which such leaders, if any, they want to follow—and that is a moral principle higher than any church, temple, or mosque.
It may be that the world would run more smoothly if everybody in it adhered to this religion or that, but in the real world that isn't going to happen any time soon. We are all going to have to accept and deal with the fact that different people will subscribe to different religions, and some will subscribe to none. For many, their beliefs are such integral and deeply ingrained parts of their lives that they cannot realistically be expected to abandon them because somebody else thinks they should. We have to accept that and respect the right of all of them to live the way they choose, as long as it's a decent way that provides a viable life for them and does not infringe on anyone else.
That does not mean that “anything goes” or that respecting other ways of life puts “ego above all.” It does mean acknowledging that, beyond a few very basic but very strict principles that almost everyone agrees on, such as, “Hurting other people is bad,” there's a lot of room for variation in such nonessential details as when and how to eat what foods, whether to have instrumental music in church, and whether to have a church at all. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, but morality, however we come by it, is of crucial importance for everybody.
And, even though Mr. Stern says, “The pope's general target is moral relativism, the concept that moral values can vary from culture to culture or time period to time period,” the “nonessential” parts of such values can and must show such variation. “Be fruitful and multiply” makes a lot of sense in a time and place where there are plenty of food, land, and enemies; it can be fatal to a civilization being overwhelmed by problems directly linked with overpopulation and excessively rapid growth. Polygamy works against a culture's well-being when the sex ratio is very close to 1:1, but may be essential to survival if a selective plague or war wipes out almost all of one sex or the other. If we ever meet intelligent beings of other species that reproduce as many do on Earth, producing huge numbers of offspring of which only a few can be expected to survive, their code of conduct for dealing with that will necessarily be very different from ours—and we will have to learn to accept them on their own terms.
Few things are more important to any culture than developing a viable code of conduct for itself, and figuring out what principles are really so fundamental that we can require everyone else to follow them too. That second task is so large, and so important, that our best minds may still be working on it for a long time to come. But simplistic claims that it requires adherence to any particular established religion, or that tolerance of some differences mean “anything goes,” will contribute very little to the understanding we need.
Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt
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Reader's Department: BIOLOG: DAVID BARTELL by Richard A. Lovett
When he was young, David Bartell didn't want a GI Joe action figure. He wanted Major Matt Mason, astronaut. Then he went to college and majored in astrophysics. “I wanted to become a scientist, write science fiction part time, and make enough money at it to retire from science and be a full-time writer,” he says.
Being a goal-focused type, he took a stab at it young, collecting rejection slips as far back as junior high school. He also had an opportunity to go to a summer school program for gifted high school students. “You could choose science or liberal arts,” he says. “I did the opposite of what I was at the time, and met all these people who played musical instruments or wrote plays."
But college burned him out on reading.
Then, in 1990, he went to Africa to teach science in a rural area so remote that it didn't even have electricity or running water. “That got me reenergized,” he says. “I had too many ideas to leave alone."
Back home, the energy continued. “As soon as my head would hit the pillow, I had to turn on the light and start writing,” he says. He even began sleeping with a voice-activated tape recorder. “I'd wake up, lift my head, and talk. The next day I'd have one gem and a bunch of gibberish.” Though, he adds, “I've also woken up with whole story ideas."
His first three sales, including an AnLab winner, were collaborations with fellow newcomer Ekaterina Sedia, who he met on the web-based critique group, Critters. “I had a fantasy novel, 180,000 words,” he says. “Not many people on Critters want to read novels. We read each other's novels and became friends."
Their first story, “Alphabet Angels,” arose during a phone conversation. “I just mentioned an idea,” he says. “She didn't like it, but something stuck. She wrote a couple of pages, outlined, and left holes. I filled the holes. It went back and forth probably twenty times before we were satisfied."
Bartell likes stories that are both speculative and have human meaning. “I like to find some insight into human nature,” he says.
It may be a few years, though, before all of his ideas make it into print. “I have small kids,” he says. “It's not until 10 PM that I can get something done. I don't have enough time in the day."
Copyright (c) 2008 Richard A. Lovett
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Novelette: MISQUOTING THE STAR by David Bartell
Second chances aren't always what the people getting them think....
No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed “Big Bastard” exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically. Some of the refugees on the Moon wanted to gather for support during the last hour, and in the Shoemaker Pod 4 mess hall, the images were projected onto a flat wall.
When there is video
of a disaster, some people watch once in horror, and then never want to see it again. Others watch over and over, transfixed, trying to cure their souls of numbness. Antoinette Washington sat in the mess hall, but her eyes were not glued to the screen like most people's. She fidgeted on an aluminum stool, and her hands wagged uncontrollably, as if the brown stub of her missing ring finger was frantically warning the rest of her of an oncoming amputation.
"It's going to be all right, Miss Washington,” said an accented voice behind her. She turned to see a young man, an African, she recalled, though his name escaped her. His skin was light for an African, a similar shade to her own. But while she was a golden brown, he had cinnamon freckles on his broad, sharp cheeks and short hair with a rusty sheen.
"Call me Netty,” she said.
"All right,” he said. “It's going to be all right, Netty."
She nodded, but could not speak again. Her mouth had inexplicably filled with hot saliva. Nothing was going to be all right, mister, she thought. Not nothing, never.
As a caption counted down to fifty-nine seconds, her blood first rushed to her head and then collapsed away, leaving her faint. Her whole body shook. As the administrator of this lunar pod, she didn't want to be seen that way. Besides, she had never been much for kumbaya.
She heard people cry out among stifled sobs, and someone vomited as she rushed out of the small cafeteria and into a seldom-used inflatable corridor that led behind the dorm ring. The countdown haunted her, and she fixed the number “59” in her head, unwilling to let the inevitable event unfold. Her hands were numb, and she fumbled to pull back the plastic curtain that was her door. Once inside, she fell onto the cot, shaking.
Blood rushed hot through her ears, and she could hear it, chattering like a multitude of souls passing away. Her heart hammered, and she felt like she had swallowed Big Bastard, and now it was going to break out. Then she imagined the asteroid exploding through her head, and the voices instantly hushed, all but one. It spoke the name of the African man in the mess hall: Hendrik Izaaks. Then, it too was silent.
Analog SFF, December 2008 Page 1
