Asimov's SF, April-May 2007
Page 38
And on the evidence, this seems all too true, and I suspect that this sort of intellectual compromise is one direction so-called hard science fiction is going to be taking in order to survive at all. So I can hardly blame Howard Hendrix or anyone else for taking it, as long as they really know what they are doing and why.
But such intellectual compromise with demographic reality is a vicious circle, a negative feedback loop. Writers with a hard science fiction bent are forced by cultural and therefore publishing circumstance to compromise the intellectual rigor of a literary mode whose signature is intellectual rigor. This in turn contributes at least in some small way to the cultural circumstance that produces that very unfortunate necessity.
Is promoting this cultural confusion on scientific matters really the only way something like “hard science fiction” can survive?
Maybe not.
Time will tell.
Peter Watts, Mary Rosenblum, and even David Louis Edelman seem to be pursuing alternate strategies. There are nine and sixty ways of composing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.
But that doesn't mean that all the results will be commercially viable.
Copyright © 2007 Norman Spinrad
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JUNE ISSUE
Popular and prolific British writer Neal Asher gives us a ringside seat for a fast-paced, suspenseful, and violent game of intrigue, double-cross, and double-double-cross, as a hunt for a stolen alien artifact of immense value forces a former agent out of retirement and into a tense chase across interstellar space into hostile landscapes where wiser humans would never dare to venture, with life or death hanging in the balance at every turn, for some hard lessons in “Alien Archeology.” This one is a full-blown, flat-out, unabashed Space Opera, and a thriller of the first water, so don't miss it!
ALSO IN JUNE
Hugo-winner James Patrick Kelly, who has had a story in every June issue for more than twenty years, maintains this long tradition by returning for June with “Don't Stop,” the compelling story of a woman who never lacks for company—whether she wants it or not!; R. Neube shows us how a scholarly researcher on an alien world comes to question the policy of academic detachment and non-interference while carrying out some “Studies in the Field"; Hugo-winner Harry Turtledove, King of the Alternate History genre, takes us sideways in time to view the unsettling effect that some “News from the Front” could have had; popular new writer Elizabeth Bear relates the poignant story of a battered and limping robot warrior who must struggle to perform one last task for her fallen human comrades, one that has her endlessly searching the “Tideline"; new writer Carrie Vaughn, making her Asimov's debut demonstrates the drawbacks—and the advantages—of “Marrying In"; popular new writer Jack Skillingstead, who has become something of an Asimov's regular in recent years, wanders through the mirror-maze labyrinth in the mind of a “Scrawl Daddy"; and new writer Holly Phillips, making her Asimov's fiction debut (she's had poems here before), guides us to a parched desert town at the End of All Things where the inhabitants wait endlessly for “Three Days of Rain."
EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg puts in some time “Resurrecting the Quagga"; Peter Heck brings us “On Books"; and James Patrick Kelly's “On the Net” column, in honor of Robert A. Heinlein's centennial birthday, searches the internet world for signs of “RAH"; plus an array of cartoons, poems, and other features. Look for our June issue on sale at your newsstand on April 10, 2007. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—either by mail, or online, in varying formats, including in downloadable form for your PDA, by going to our website, www.asimovs.com)—and make sure that you don't miss any of the great stuff we have coming up for you!
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