Analog SFF, April 2008
Page 25
What were the cyberpunk themes, or its “signature obsessions"? Kelly and Kessel list global perspective on the future, stress on infotech and biotech especially that with the potential to transform the human body and psyche, a gleefully subversive attitude toward traditional values and received wisdom, and a crammed prose style. Much of this of course marks SF at least as far back as the forties, and it is very easy to find it in current work, which they prove in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Here you will find stories by classic cyberpunks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but also by Michael Swanwick, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Paul DiFilippo, Mary Rosenblum (her “Search Engine” is the only tale from this magazine), and nine more.
Names to conjure with, and stories to match. Not a dud in the lot. Enjoy it.
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The late Ted Sturgeon was one of the greats. If you believe what Harlan Ellison says in his foreword to The Nail and the Oracle, Volume XI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, he may even have been the greatest SF writer ever. Sure, he was quirky, but he could write like an angel and he well deserves the adulation directed toward his ghost since his death in 1985. The present volume collects a dozen of his works from 1957 to 1970, “his prime story-writing years.” One of the stars of the collection is the famous “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” Another is “Runesmith,” cowritten with Harlan. For the rest, order a copy. Sturgeon, as long as he's been gone, is not a writer one regrets reading.
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Every year, the Science Fiction Poetry Association hands out its Rhysling Award (named after Heinlein's blind bard of the spaceways) to what its members deem the best examples of short poems and long poems. Members of the SFPA nominate one in each category, and all the nominees are presented to the membership in an annual anthology. The 2007 Rhysling Anthology holds 79 of the best SFF poems published in 2006. Some did not impress me, but a few did. Lawrence Schimel's “Kristallnacht” is a retelling of the Cinderella tale that echoes eerily of history. G. O. Clark's “Spot in Space” is a nice commemoration of the dawn of the space age. William Sanders's “The Last Madman” could be taken as a paean to Prozac and its ilk, but that's not the way to read it, not at all.
The best poetry is both provocative and disturbing. You will find here a number of examples to support that statement.
Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Easton
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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Our lead novella for May is David Bartell's “Test Signals,” a novella very different from the author's earlier stories here, but engaging and disturbingly thought-provoking. Disturbingly, because while the concepts explored may seem far-fetched to some, they're solidly rooted in questions beginning to be raised here and now. Some of a person's most bankable assets are now things far more ... personal than the ones we've tended to think of in the past, but the law has only begun to consider who actually owns them. This, or something like it, could happen to you....
Edward M. Lerner's novelette “The Night of the RFIDs” also has origins uncomfortably close to home. In addition, we'll have a mixed bag of other stories, in a wide range of flavors, from authors including Dave Creek, Ronald L. Lambert, Carl Frederick, and Sarah K. Castle (a newcomer who recently made a splash here with “Kukulcan").
The fact article comes from linguist Henry Honken, continuing his campaign to expand our linguistic horizons. The title “Strange Croaks and Ghastly Aspirations” is not his personal aspersion, but rather an early European observer's impression of the South African “click” languages, on which Honken has himself done some recent research—which will surely stretch almost anyone's understanding of just how widely languages can vary, even among humans!
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Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dr. Schmidt,
Please convey my great appreciation to Barry Longyear for his excellent stories with Harrington Jaggers and Guy Shad.
My greatest gratitude is for his wonderfully “proper” use of the English language. His adverbs are in the right place and he does not use the word “up” in improper places. His prepositions are a joy to behold. Surely he has a British education.
His stories include adequate humor, mystery, and wildly futuristic technology. That makes them distinctively entertaining. I like my stories entertaining. Not that there are not many references that inform and educate me.
Thank you for publishing his stories. Some of the others aren't too bad either.
Joye Martens Burdette
San Diego, CA
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Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I always enjoy your editorials.I find them stimulating and often instructive.It is therefore disappointing that you subscribe to the Popular Vision when it comes to population growth (most recently: “Double Standard Required,” November 2007).The Popular Vision on population growth is flawed, because it focuses on the costs of additional humans, while ignoring the benefits.Each additional person adds a pair of hands and a brain, implements that are indispensable in improving our lot.
Imagine a twenty-second century with ten, twelve, or, better yet, fifteen billion people.Imagine that technological progress in the next century will surpass that of the previous one, as it appears to be accelerating.Imagine that productivity will have increased by as much as it did in the last century—perhaps more, as dysfunctional political systems are discarded.This future population will be capable of feats we can't conceive.It will most likely be able to decide what the temperature of the Earth should be, then make it so.It will certainly be able to deal with the consequences of climate change.
Natural resource depletion is a myth.The only truly limited resource—the only resource whose unit price has consistently gone up throughout the history of civilization—is man (in a gender-neutral sense).Therefore, we need more humans, not fewer.
Henri Hein
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And more Easter Bunnies, Tooth Fairies, and Santa Clauses would help even more. Each additional person also adds a digestive system, a respiratory system, and a body that has to be housed, and the needs those are making are currently more significant than the contributions that future hands and brains might make. When our numbers are already causing big problems, increasing them further with the vague hope that our descendants will solve the problems we've created seems the height of irresponsibility.
And besides, not everybody likes living in crowded conditions.
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Dear Stan:
I enjoyed your November 2008 editorial, “Double Standard Required.” Allow me to suggest that, though your observations were correct, you didn't go quite far enough.I suspect the reason no one nowadays wants to discuss overpopulation is that in order to solve it, we must inevitably find ourselves discussing an even more third-rail-type issue:playing God.
Given the state of society today, no discussion of population controls will take place without some—probably all—factions insisting those controls should be imposed on everyone else:on, in other words, the less deserving—those of the wrong religious or racial persuasions, those with the wrong sexual preferences, those with family histories of genetic disorders, lower IQs, lower earning potentials, those who tend toward obesity, those with substandard vision, those with a tendency toward zits, flat feet, or early balding—those whose families demonstrate a predilection toward elitism...
No one who breeds dogs or horses, or has seen the result, can have any doubt that selective breeding coupled with rigorous culling eliminates negative traits and reinforces positive ones.The question that will have to be faced one day is just what constitutes negative and positive traits, and who gets to choose.
From the beginning of life here, every life form has encountered something that eventually limited its spread.The arrogance with which Mankind denies that this applies to himself is little short of breathtaking.I predict t
hat the philosophical difficulties surrounding population controls won't be settled prior to Mankind's learning what his own limiting mechanism is.I predict even more certainly that we won't enjoy the discovery.
David R. Palmer
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Dear Stan,
“Drilling to the Golden Age” was an interesting article with a number of good points. However, I feel that the points raised do not provide sufficient evidence to change our educational system.
I can testify as to the “Mark Twain” comments.I was raised on a cattle ranch, where we had between 250 and 300 cows.As a youngster I was amazed at the ability of my father and our foreman to discuss specific cows and their calves.They knew every cow and who their mothers were.I was going to high school at the time and I was only exposed to most of the cattle in the summers and on weekends during the winter when we fed them.Then when I was a sophomore, I started to develop this ability.By the time I was a senior, I could do fairly well—still not as good as my father and foreman, but okay.
Then I graduated from high school and went to college.The ranch was sold because of my father's health.I had had a “river pilot” moment, but it passed and I never needed to recover it again.
In college I discovered computers and became a pretty good programmer.I became good at discrete event simulation programming and environmental analysis programming.In both of these areas I could see a problem and almost always sit down at the keypunch or terminal and write down a solution.Not at the same time, however.It took me several years to develop this ability and it was lost if I didn't keep it up.After these, I never had any more “river pilot” moments because my duties were more varied.
Not trying to brag—I never did go on to get a PhD—just explain my credentials.I had what I believe was the last (remote) account on ILLIAC in Urbana-Champaign—it didn't work for us, I used primarily the 50-75 ASP (or perhaps HASP) system at the U of I and then we moved to Boston and I used the MIT cp-67/cms system—never MULTICS.After funding evaporated I got a position at Washington State University, where I did mostly environmental analysis for a number of years.Then Reaganomics hit and I did junk jobs until I retired.
The point I am trying to make is that the total internalization of a subject—the “river pilot” moment—is absolutely essential for excellence in a very specific subject area.However, it is not generalizable if the person is faced with a change in requirements—a job change for example.
The idea of “making learning fun” is somewhat of a cheap shot.What I think you need in a general education—say less than the PhD level—is enough familiarity with the subject so that if the need is there, you can go on and self-educate yourself in a particular area.If you are planning on being a mathematician or physicist you may very well need to totally internalize most mathematical operations.This would be totally useless for an anthropologist, biochemist, or history major.They would have other needs.I was able to develop this ability three separate times—but after that it became useless and I lost it.
The other approach to this would be from the psychology, neurology, and physiology of learning.I believe that this technique, the “river pilot” moment, is very similar to what the psychologists would call operant conditioning—the Pavlov dog or Skinner pigeon technique.The psychologists have been exploring this brand of learning for over 100 years and it has never gotten very far.The results are clear and very repeatable, but they don't generalize to the real problems of education.Try explaining children's language learning using operant conditioning.
More complex learning tasks, like learning from reading a book or listening to a lecture—or even performing an experiment—are slowly starting to yield results using the techniques of cognitive science, neuroanatomy,and neurochemistry.People like Eric Kandel, George Lakoff, and a whole lot of people in-between these two “ends” are finding out a lot about how people learn.I believe that it would be much too early to say which particular theory of human learning implies the best teaching techniques, but we definitely know that there are at least two separate methods of learning and they both work, but they work in very different manners.It would be a tremendous mistake to pick one and say that this is the correct way to design our education system.
My own personal experience in raising children and listening to my wife, a long time high school science and math teacher, convinces me that different people learn better using different techniques.It is a very great mistake to pick any one “method” and expect it to work for all students.
On a completely different logic, this is the “method” of evolution.Throw a whole bunch of possible solutions at the problem and see which ones survive.However never loose your variability, for tomorrow (or maybe the next million years) could have a whole new set of problems.It only takes one Einstein, Dawkins, or Hawking (primate?) to make your whole school system look like a winner.
Bryan Bremner
Republic, WA
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My experience parallels that of you and your wife. I taught physics and other subjects for a decade at a college small enough to get to know my students as individuals, and I never met two whose minds worked the same way.
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Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS
by Anthony Lewis
24—27 April 2008
2008 NEBULA AWARDS WEEKEND (SFWA Awards) at Omni Austin Hotel Downtown, Austin, Texas. Hosted by the Austin Literary Arts Maintenance Organization (ALAMO). Info: www.sfwa.org/awards/2008/index.html; nebulas2008@sfwa.org
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25—27 April 2008
COSTUME-CON 26 (SF and Fantasy costuming conference) at DoubleTree Hotel San Jose, San Jose, California. Membership: $85 until 1 January 2008, more thereafter. Info: www.cc26.info/; info@cc26.info; CostumeCon 26, 1875 South Bascom Ave, 116-276, Campbell, CA 95008
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25—27 April 2008
RAVENCON 2008 (northern Virginia SF conference) at Crown Plaza West Hotel, 6531 West Broad Street Richmond, Virginia. Author Guest of Honor: C.S. Friedman; Artist Guest of Honor: Stephen Hickman; Fan Guest of Honor: Erwin S. “Filthy Pierre” Strauss. Membership: $30 until 31 December 2007, $35 until 18 April 2008, $40 at the door. Young Adults (12-17) $15, Children (11 and under) FREE, 10% military discount with military ID. Day Rates: Friday $15; Saturday $25; Sunday $15. Info: ravencon.com; info@ravencon.com
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9—11 May 2008
LEPRECON 34 (Arizona Art-oriented SF and fantasy conference) at Francisco Grande Hotel & Golf Resort, Casa Grande, Arizona. Artist Guest: Howard Tayler; Author Guests: Emily & Ernest Hogan; Local Artist Guest: Liz Danforth; Special FX/Makeup Guest: David Ayres. Memberships: 1 November 2007 and after to be announced. Info: www.leprecon.org/lep34; lep34@leprecon.org; (480) 945-6890; LepreCon 34, PO Box 26665, Tempe, AZ 85285.
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23—26 May 2008
Balticon 42 (Baltimore SF conference) at Marriott's Hunt Valley Inn, Baltimore, Maryland. Guest of Honor: Connie Willis; Artist Guest of Honor: John Jude Palencar; Music Guest of Honor: Urban Tapestry; Masquerade MC: Martin Gear. Membership: $46 until 28 February 2008, $51 until 30 April 2008, $59 thereafter. Info: www.Balticon.org; balticoninfo@Balticon.org; (410) 563-2737; Balticon 42, PO Box 686, Baltimore, MD 21203-0686.
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23—25 May 2008
CONduit XVIII: (General interest science fiction convention) at Radisson Hotel Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City, Utah. Guest of Honor: Michael A. Stackpole. Membership: until 1 May 2008, adult $35, teen $30, youth $17.50, child FREE, family (2 adult, up to 4 teen/youth) $125. Info: conduit.sfcon. org, CONduit, P.O. Box 11745, Salt Lake City, UT 84147-0745.
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