Analog SFF, September 2010
Page 23
For the non-writing fan of SF, this book might be a harder sell. If it helps, this is a fun and engaging read—Resnick and Malzberg are good writers, after all—and there's a fair amount of interesting gossip about the SF publishing world (nothing salacious or titillating, I hasten to add). If you have any interest in what goes on behind the scenes of the books and magazines you read, this is a painless way to find out.
Copyright © 2010 Don Sakers
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Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
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Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Dear Dr. Schmidt:
I'm writing to thank you for your editorial “The Rest of the Data” in the 2010 April Analog. It said many of the things I would have said had I written about Dr. Kooistra's “Alternate View” article: global warming is global, not limited to US measurements, and many other data such as glacier retreat indicate that global warming is taking place. This is not necessarily a bad thing: we are about 4,000 years overdue for an ice age.
However, there is one thing I would have said that you didn't discuss, nor was it mentioned in any of the letters on the article in that issue.
Global warming is not about absolute temperatures; it is about trends in the temperatures. Even if the US temperatures are skewed, their trend, if any, should still be valid. And there is clearly a warming trend in the temperature readings taken in the past 30 years, since the changes to the thermometers cited in the article.
I recently renewed my subscription for another two years, and look forward to many more thought-provoking editorials, articles, and stories.
Jeffrey R. Carter
Mesa, AZ
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Stanley,
Thank you for responding to Jeff Kooistra's article. I agree that known systemic errors can be corrected (with an error term).
I presume that you wrote the editorial prior to the publication of the “loss” of data by the English IPCC group (I've forgotten the precise name) and the computer code with the fudge factor multiplier. Also included in the suspicious activities are the discarding of the recent Little Ice Age and the warming that produced the name “Greenland."
I am a Global Warming skeptic to the extent that I believe too much of the discussion has had the flavor of a new religion or at least a political campaign. I am not a climatologist or a meteorologist and don't have access to the data and cannot make a reasoned argument pro or con. As a long-time science fiction reader, I can imagine several reasons for actual warming—or cooling. As a professional data analyst, I also understand the problems of generating good forecasts of data trends.
I am worried on the one hand that the politically proposed remedies for Global Warming will cause more harm than doing nothing. On the other hand, I am worried that the revelations of problems with the IPCC reports will create a “boy crying wolf” effect.
The readers of Analog certainly include a large number of independent thinkers who could generate a decent analysis of the situation, given the data. Is this possible?
Dean Hartley
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Hi,
I just finished reading Mr. Kooistra's “Taken on Faith” Alternate View piece. As I read it, I could not help but think that there seems to be a consistent separation between religion and science. This separation seems fundamentally wrong because the commonly accepted definitions of “the universe” state that the universe includes everything that exists everywhere. If these are true, then the universe must include God if God exists.
It seems reasonable to expect that the proof of God's existence will be more difficult than proving Mr. Ford's existence using only the Model T, if only because Mr. Ford put his last name on the Model T. But in light of Mr. Kooistra's comment that “. . . the universe cannot be mathematically inconsistent with itself,” it seems reasonable to think that somewhere someone will eventually discover and unleash the math of God.
Sorry, I could not resist.
Thank you for the intellectual stimulation and the consistently excellent magazine.
John Harcinske
Mitchell, SD
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Dear Analog,
Stanley Schmidt's [May 2010] editorial “Growing Pains” raises a provocative question: whether a culture must make certain wrong choices, early in its history, in order to survive and flourish far enough to recognize that the choices were wrong. If this turned out to hold true, then time travelers (or anyone else visiting—and able to influence—the early stages of another culture) would face an ethical dilemma even greater than the one Schmidt sees.
Schmidt suggests that benevolent time travelers visiting Earth's past (and initially hoping to save their ancestors from embracing such illogic as astrology or the practice of keeping slaves) might instead adopt a hands-off, “Prime Directive” premise, on the grounds that these wrong choices laid the necessary groundwork for further and better developments (astrology became astronomy, enslavement led some of its practitioners as well as its victims to understand—by contrast—the importance of freedom). However, Schmidt has not looked at the other side of the “Prime Directive” premise: If developing cultures somehow need to embrace certain wrong ideas at some stage—even cruel, silly, or otherwise destructive ideas—in order to arrive at better ideas later on, might well-meaning time travelers (or space explorers) regard it as their duty to introduce those wrong ideas to cultures that lacked them? If so, how would the people in such a culture respond, if they learned that their visitors were teaching them new things not because the visitors believed these things were right and good, but because the visitors believed that these things were wrong and harmful but that generations afar off might—or might not—someday benefit somehow from having had their ancestors believe wrong things?
In today's USA, at least, we are reluctant to sacrifice the interests of living people for the possible interests of potential people not yet born. We would, for instance, respond with horror if someone said: “I have decided to systematically miseducate my children. I'm teaching them that pi equals three, the moonwalks never happened, whales are fish, and blue-eyed people are mentally inferior—none of which I believe myself—because I believe that someday my children may decide to have children or grandchildren of their own who may benefit from my action. If I teach my children today that pi equals three and blue-eyed people are inferior, their unborn descendants in 30 or 100 or 300 years may become better and greater people from learning to reject such notions, and I have no right to deprive them of that opportunity.” We would react with horror if someone proposed to do that to his or her own children, for the sake of unborn future generations—should we feel less horror if time travelers or space explorers introduced wrong ideas (no matter how culturally necessary these ideas appeared to the explorers) into some culture that had not yet made those particular mistakes, and that seemed unlikely to do so without external “help"?
Other comments on the May 2010 issue:
David Livingstone Clink's poem “Skippy the Robot” jarred me, and likely jarred others, because of its inexcusably sloppy scansion. Whether a subject is painful or merry, whether its treatment is grave or light-hearted, a reader of SF poetry (as of any other kind of poetry) should not have to dig through metrically inept verse to find out. Metrically (and otherwise) competent verse abounds today in the world of SF fandom; if this was the best SF verse that Analog could find to print, I can only hope that more of today's SF poets will submit their works in order to give Analog anything better.
Further sloppiness annoyed me where I had least expected to find it: in a story by H G. Stratmann. His “The Day the Music Died” made a small musical blunder, but one quite out of key (if you'll pardon the pun) with this generally proficient writer's usual high competence at checking facts in any subject he writes on. Specifically, Stratmann has his narrator, an aficionado of music,
improbably referring to a well-known composition by Villa-Lobos as “Bachiana Brasileira No. 5” instead of the correct “Bahiana Brasileira No. 5": the bahiana is a Brazilian samba form that has little, if anything, to do with Bach. Please get that corrected before this otherwise excellent story enters some anthology—as I hope it will.
Kate Gladstone
Albany, NY
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Your speculation is a good example of the kind from which stories grow, and if you decide to try that, I'd be interested in seeing the result. I must confess that I find it harder to imagine circumstances in which time travelers would want to introduce an idea like slavery, as distinct from deciding not to try to root it out, but I suppose it could happen. I did not mean to suggest that every culture needed particular bad ideas as indispensable steps toward a greater good, but only that they may well have played such a role in our particular history. There may be other, and perhaps better, ways.
I'm sorry you didn't like “Skippy,” but I don't agree that it's “inexcusably sloppy” or “metrically inept.” Yes, it has some playful deviations from the prevailing metrical pattern, but it's been a long time since most readers thought every poem had to follow a strictly regular metrical pattern throughout. Such a requirement is a little like saying music that is predominantly tonal should never use a chord more dissonant than a dominant seventh, or allow an occasional 5/4 measure in a tune that's mostly 4/4.
And speaking of music, I recommend extreme caution and carefully “checking facts” when tempted to accuse H. G. Stratmann of sloppiness in regard to it. In the case you cite, I regret to inform you that you're wrong. I don't doubt that there's a dance form called the bahiana, but that's not what Villa-Lobos wrote and Stratmann referred to. The Bachiana Brasileiras (and that is what they're called) is a group of pieces fusing Brazilian folk and popular music with a Bach-based contrapuntal style—hence the name. You can find a complete list of them in Wikipedia (and there's not a bahiana in the lot).
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Stanley,
I appreciate your philosophical comments. What I find lacking is definition of some growing pains mistakes. And possible solutions. For instance I believe that one of our growing pains mistakes was allowing the automobile to out-compete mass transportation and ignoring alternate energies in favor of petrochemicals. Still we persist in not only allowing these entrenched vested-interest industries to continue defining our future, we subsidize them. Refusing to learn from our mistakes in favor of feeding our professional and intellectual communities.
Les Platt
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Hi,
Just read this story ["Swords and Saddles,” May 2010] and it was excellent! The characters were realistic and the story entertaining. But it was not science fiction. A nearby lightning strike makes the group of men translate to another world/dimension, which happens to have a slightly different history—a classic fantasy premise, but definitely not science fiction.
Dan
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Stanley Schmidt,
I have a comment about your generalization that astrology is “largely nonsense” in your May 2010 editorial. I have a scientific & engineering background and my wife does astrology readings. She uses the full birthday/birthplace for individuals and her results are (to me) surprisingly accurate. She does personalities, trends, and challenges/easy areas that individuals are or will have. The horoscopes in the paper are meant to cover such large variations in birthdates and locations that they are of not much use. A personalized chart using exact data is much more accurate. I have seen her predict problems with surgery, how a person's office is organized, challenges a person is facing now, challenges a person will face (and been right), and other things. With my background this all makes no sense, but it is not nonsense. Like anything else, some individuals will try to apply it in ways it is not accurate to apply it. This makes the whole discipline look bad—the subject of a number of your editorials.
Steven Hodder
Laramie, WY
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I'm willing to be convinced by suitable data, but so far I haven't seen it.
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Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
24-26 September 2010
FOOLSCAP 12 (SF/Fantasy literature and art conference) at Redmond Marriott Town Center, Redmond, WA. Guests of Honor: Emma Bull & Will Shetterly, Cory & Catska Ench. Membership: $50 until 17 September 2010. Info: www.foolscapcon.org; P.O. Box 2461, Seattle, WA 98111-2461
1-3 October 2010
CONJECTURE (San Diego SF conference) at Town and Country Resort, San Diego, CA. Guest of Honor: Robert J. Sawyer. Membership: $35 until 30 April 2010, $40 until 31 July 2010, $45 until 30 September 2010, $50 at the door. Info: 2010.conjecture.org, P.O. Box 927388, San Diego, CA 92192-7388.
22-24 October 2010
CAPCLAVE (DC area SF conference) at Hilton Washington DC/Rockville, Executive Meeting Center, Rockville, MD. Guests of Honor: Connie Willis; Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. Membership: $55 until 30 September, $60 until 17 October. Info: www.capclave.org/ capclave/capclave10/; Blog: www. capclave.org/capclave/capclave10/
28-31 October 2010
WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION (Fantasy convention focused on the whimsical side of fantasy) at Hyatt Regency Hotel, Columbus, OH. Guests of Honor: Dennis McKiernan, Esther Friesner, David Hartwell, Darrell K. Sweet. Membership: until 15 June 2010 (see website for updated information) attending: $125; supporting $35. Info: www.contextsf.org/WFC/; WFC2010@contextsf.org; WFC 2010, 3824 Patricia Dr., Upper Arlington, OH 43220.
17-21 August 2011
RENOVATION (69th World Science Fiction Convention) at Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, Nevada. Guests of Honor: Ellen Asher, Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo. Membership from 1 May 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending adult: $160; Attending 17 to 21: $100; Attending 0 to 16: $75; Supporting: $50. [Ages as of 17 August 2011.] This is the SF universe's annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: www.renovationsf.org/, info@renovationsf.org, PO Box 13278, Portland, OR 97213-0278. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ pages/Renovation-The-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref=ts; LiveJournal: community.livejournal. com/renovationsf/
Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone or fax number, e-mail address, or web page, please let us know so that we can publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX months before the date of your convention.
Attending a convention? When calling conventions for information, do not call collect and do not call too late in the evening. It is best to include a S.A.S.E. when requesting information; include an International Reply Coupon if the convention is in a different country.
Copyright © 2010 Anthony Lewis
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