If you're an Asher fan, this may not put you off. If you're not, I don't think this book will make you one.
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Sixteen stories and eight essays by Jack McDevitt fill the pages of Outbound, and if in his introduction Barry Malzberg can lament that his favorite McDevitt story ("Time Travelers Never Die") isn't here, neither is “Cryptic” or “The Jersey Rifle.” But there are plenty more, all of them well worth your attention.
But that's Jack for you. Not only is he a marvelously nice guy (says Michael Bishop in the celebratory afterword), he is always well worth your attention. If you see a new book with his name on the cover, grab it. You're not likely to be disappointed.
At least with the fiction. He is a limpid and original writer not given to modernistically baroque futures but rather to bringing classic themes of exploration and discovery into the present. The essays, however, show a tendency to repeat himself as if he has only so many things to say about himself and his work and he would rather put his energy into the fiction than into saying the same old things in fresh ways. He is hardly alone in this, though some writers do seem to put as much (or more) energy into talking about themselves as into writing, but here it jumped out at me.
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There is a persistent rumor that SF editors don't buy funny SF stories. Granted, funny stories are hard to write, partly because what strikes the writer as funny may not seem so to anyone else and partly because balance and timing are more crucial to humor than to any other kind of SF. The latter may make humor more challenging to the writer than other types of fiction, which explains why almost every writer tries his or her hand at it, at least once. Enough are successful to explain why there are so many gems of SF humor on our shelves.
There are? But editors don't buy the stuff, do they? They do? Oh, yeah, he called it a rumor, didn't he, and rumors live in the garret upstairs and have very little to do with what goes on in the front parlor.
A bit too feeble for you? You'll have better luck with This Is My Funniest. Mike Resnick asked Harry Harrison, William Tenn, David Gerrold, David Brin, Jack McDevitt, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Howard Waldrop, Esther Friesner, Michael Swanwick, Joe Haldeman, Harry Turtledove, Connie Willis, the late Robert Sheckley, and fifteen more, including Jane Yolen, whose “Dick W. and His Pussy, or Tess and Her Adequate Dick” needs no more than its title to make you grin.
So. Grins and smiles, chuckles and guffaws. The perfect book for an airplane trip, or a guest room, or a gift, or just for fun. Enjoy it!
Copyright (c) 2007 Tom Easton
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IN TIMES TO COME
Our May 2007 issue features stories of all shapes and sizes, including “Damned If You Do ... ,” a lively, imaginative, and disconcerting adventure story by Lee Goodloe; a unique experiment in making the parts of a society work together by Richard A. Lovett; and a new tale by a writer too long away, Brian Plante. One of the short stories, Carl Frederick's “A New Level of Misunderstanding,” may quite rightly remind you of an earlier (and decidedly amusing) story of alien contact. It also pairs quite aptly with our fact article, Henry Honken's “I Couldn't Read You, E.T.,” about some of the real (and far from trivial) problems we might face in trying to communicate with real aliens.
Last but far from least, we'll have the third and penultimate part of Karl Schroeder's novel Queen of Candesce.
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BRASS TACKS
Dear Dr. Schmidt,
I just finished reading your (November, 2006) editorial, “The Tyranny of Physical Law.” Thanks for writing it!
Your example of pulling on an electric cord is very familiar, but I'm sure that we all know of cases where the cord was only slightly stuck, and a sharp tug released it. Too bad that what one learns from such a case isn't really applicable more generally.
By the way, I fully intend to steal some of your “you already know physics, you just don't know the formal language” for introductory physics lectures. A bit of confidence building is sometimes helpful to overcome student anxiety, and much of freshman mechanics is simply refining and systematizing the physical intuition one already has.
Your editorial did get me thinking (that's the point, right?) about problem-solving in general. Perhaps you've written about the particular point I'll raise, but in reading Analog since the mid ‘70s I don't recall it (insert “memory is the first to go” joke here).
The difficulty I'm referring to is in trying to deal with an “intermittent” problem or fault. That is, a problem that only shows up occasionally, and where it's unclear what is the real cause behind that problem. One doesn't have to use quantum mechanics to get such seemingly random occurrences of an “intermittent,” just a large number of possible causes, with complicated and unclear interconnections between them.
There are plenty of technological examples, with consumer electronics, automobiles, and computers being especially fertile grounds for frustrating intermittent faults.
In my own work (experimental particle physics) the large and complicated detectors that I design, build, and work with are certainly not immune to intermittent problems in spite of the enormous resources (money, equipment, and brainpower) that are devoted to making them work. But at least we do most of our own bug chasing and fixing. For consumers, intermittent faults are particularly frustrating when having to deal with customer support reps and warranty service. The problems inevitably disappear when you most need them to show themselves to get some help. This must be a corollary of Murphy's Law: “When you need something to go wrong, it won't."
The basic difficulty is this: if you don't know what caused a problem, how do know when it is fixed? That's in addition to the difficulty that without a known cause, any fixes that are attempted are unlikely to work. An intermittent fault, by it's very nature, isn't regular or predictable, so if it occurs right after a fix is attempted, that will tell you that the fix didn't work, but otherwise you have to wait a long, long time before one has some confidence that the problem really was fixed.
In addition, it seems to be something in human (or group?) psychology that will assign blame on some particular cause, in spite of the lack of definitive evidence. An example of this is blaming “power glitches” for computer problems. It's easy to blame, and unless one has (expensive!) power-line monitoring and recording instruments, it's difficult to eliminate such glitches as a cause. It's much easier to spend some money on power filters, note that the problem has gone away (has it?), and be happy until the next intermittent fault occurs. This logic sells lots of power-filters, but it's not clear that it really solves many problems.
There are implications beyond technology for such intermittent fault problems. Just look at the rate of major terrorist attacks in the US, and the measures taken to prevent them. How do you know if the measures work? You can say “Well, there hasn't been an attack,” but how long do we have to go without an attack to prove it? Five years? Ten? I could just as easily point to my lucky pen that protects me from rhino attacks: no attacks so far—it must be working!
To really solve intermittent faults in technology, one first has to find a way to trigger the fault. Repeatability is the key, as it is for much of science. It doesn't require knowing all the mechanisms by which the fault occurs, at least not initially, but having a “if you do this, then you get that" allows one to test possible fixes to find out if they really work or not. So the first step in diagnosing a piece of equipment is to really break it well. That's also the first step in getting warranty repair. Although they sure aren't going to tell you to “break it first, then give us a call,” that's often what you have to do.
I hope I haven't tried your patience with rambling on too long. As always, I greatly enjoy the entertaining and thought-provoking material you publish, whether it's an editorial, fact article, or fiction. Keep up the good work!
Sincerely,
Prof. Charles Lane
Dept. of Physics
/> Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA
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I have written about intermittents at least once before, in “Now You See It,” Mid-December 1995. But I didn't have many answers, either!
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Dear Stan,
[Re: the January/February 2007 Editorial]
I am English ... but please, what is cheesesteak?
Ted Truscoe
Horley
Surrey
England
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Ah, I suppose I should have thought to explain that—probably a lot of Americans don't know either. I didn't till the first time I visited Philadelphia, where it's a regional specialty: a sandwich made of thinly sliced grilled beef piled on a long roll with cheese melted over it, sometimes with variations such as sautéed onions and/or peppers added.
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Hi Dr. Schmidt,
While some people may enjoy Rajnar Vajra's stories or ramblings, I do not believe any science fiction buff does. His stories are more like fantasy and don't belong in Analog. Other than that, keep up the good work.
Peter Asselyn
Durham, ME
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I'm sorry you don't like these stories, but our mail and reader comments on our website say loud and clear that a great many science fiction buffs are very enthusiastic about them. It's important to understand the difference between “I don't like X” and “No right-thinking person could possibly like X.” In this particular case, I can't help wondering how many of Vajra's stories you've actually finished reading. It's true that they often start out looking like fantasy, but if you read them all the way through and pay attention, they turn out to be very solidly Analog-ish science fiction.
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Stan,
Re: How to Write Something You Don't Know Anything About
I really enjoyed Richard Lovett's article on writing about a topic where one initially has no knowledge of the subject matter. I had never thought about the problems faced by science writers. But, after reading the article, I realized we are brothers-in-arms.
During the last ten or so years of my aerospace engineering career prior to retiring, I was called a “systems engineer.” Now, this has many diverse meanings depending on the field and the employing company. It makes job-hunting difficult because no one knows what you did without a lot of arm-waving explanation. Even in the organization that employed me for thirty years, I was often asked, “What is it you do?” or told, “Why are you sticking your nose in? You don't understand it and it isn't your responsibility anyway."
As a systems engineer, I had overall technical responsibility for the design and fabrication of complex communication systems that included radio, digital, command and control, power, and mechanical components, most of which I initially knew nothing about. In one case my responsibility even included buildings, latrines, and roads. Of course there was at least one expert on the job in each area, but when it came to making tradeoffs, that was my job.
What all this bragging means is that I had to and did pick the brains of my resident experts, read up on several technical specialties, and just be curious about everything. In systems engineering there is even a name for the process; it's called “buttonhooking.” One drops one's “buttonhook” deeply into the specialties involved and pulls up just enough knowledge to solve the immediate problem. I did everything that Lovett recommends and (no pun intended) loved it. Always interesting and never boring.
Regards,
Sam Brunstein
Prescott Valley, AZ
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UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
8-11 February 2007
CAPRICON XXVII: A CELEBRATION OF HIGH FANTASY (Fantasy conference) at Sheraton Chicago Northwest, Arlington Heights IL. Guest of Honor: Lois McMaster Bujold. Artist Guest of Honor: Erin McKee. Fan Guest of Honor: Cat Faber. Registration: $70 at door. Info: http:// capricon.org/capricon27; info@ capricon.org.
16-18 February 2007
BOSKONE 44 (New England SF conference) at Westin Waterfront, Boston MA. Guest of Honor: David Gerrold. Official Artist: Gary A. Lippincott. Special Guest: Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J.; Featured Filkers: Lee and Barry Gold. Registration: $44 to 16 January 2007, more at the door. Info: www.nesfa.org/boskone; [email protected]; Box 809, Framingham MA 01701; fax: (617) 776-3243.
2-4 March 2007
MARSCON 2007 (Indiana area SF conference) at Holiday Inn Select, Bloomington MN. Guest of Honor: Eleanor Arnason. Actor Guests of Honor: Don S. Davis and Gary Jones. Artist Guest of Honor: Todd Lockwood. Media Fan Guest of Honor: Eric Larson. Registration: $45 until 31 January 2007, $55 at the door. Info: http://marscon.org/2007; [email protected]; MarsCon, Box 21213, Eagan MN 55121.
9-11 March 2007
POTLATCH 16 (Northwest SF conference) at Red Lion Hotel Portland-Convention Center, Portland OR. Membership: $35 to April 30, 2006. Info: www.spiritone.com/~jlorentz/potlatch; [email protected]; Potlatch 16 c/o OSFCI, Box 5703, Portland OR 97228-5703; (503) 283-0802.
29 March-1 April 2007
WORLD HORROR CONVENTION 2007 (Horror conference) at Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Center, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Guests of Honor: Michael Marshall Smith, Nancy Kilpatrick. Artist Guest of Honor: John Picacio. MC: Sephera Giron. Publisher Guest of Honor: Peter Crowther. Editor Guest of Honor: Don Hutchison. Info: www. whc2007.org; [email protected].
30 August-3 September 2007
NIPPON 2007 (65th World Science Fiction Convention) at Pacifico Yokohama, Yokohama, Japan. Guests of Honor: Sakyo Komatsu and David Brin. Artist Guests of Honor: Yoshitaka Amano and Michael Whelan. Fan Guest of Honor: Takumi Shibano. Registration: USD 220; JPY 26,000; GBP 125; EUR 186 until 30 June 2007; supporting membership USD 50; JPY 6,000; GBP 28; EUR 45. 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. This is only the third time Worldcon will be held in a non-English speaking country and the first time in Asia. Info: www.nippon2007.org; [email protected]. Nippon 2007/JASFIC, 4-20-5-604, Mure, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-0002. North American agent: Peggy Rae Sapienza, Nippon 2007, PO Box 314, Annapolis Junction, MD 20701, USA. UK agent: Andrew A. Adams, 23 Ivydene Road, Reading RG30 1HT, England, U.K. European agent: Vincent Doherty, Koninginnegracht 75a, 2514A Den Haag, Netherlands. Australian agent: Craig Macbride, Box 274, World Trade Centre, Victoria, 8005 Australia.
Copyright (c) 2007 Anthony Lewis
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Visit www.analogsf.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Analog SFF, April 2007 Page 24
