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CONTENTS
Editorial: Generations
Reflections: Robert Burton, Anatomist of Melancholy
Generations by Frederik Pohl
Pipeline by Brian Aldiss
Second Person, Present Tense by Daryl Gregory
Harvest Moon by William Barton
Finished by Robert Reed
The Company Man by John Phillip Olsen
A Rocket for the Republic by Lou Antonelli
Verse
On the Net: SETI and Such
On Books: Paul Di Filippo
The SF Conventional Calendar
In Our Next Issue
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Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
September 2005
Vol. 29 No. 9
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Editorial: Generations
As we all know, enthusiasms and skills are often passed from one generation to the next. The expert weaver passes on the craft to the apprentice, anglers pass the hobby on to their children, and the parent may pass on the joy of reading to the child. In science fiction, authors have the opportunity to learn from the masters of the past. You, too, may have been introduced to the joys of science fiction through the works of the field's masters. Your first book or story recommendations may have come from your own moms and dads.
I first encountered SFWA's newest Grand Master, Anne McCaffrey, in my teens when I was spellbound by a reprint of her 1968 Hugo-award-winning “Weyr Search.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes Ms. McCaffrey's as a “writer of romantic, heightened tales of adventure explicitly designed to appeal—and make good sense to—a predominantly female adolescent audience.” True perhaps, but I know that Anne's fiction was brought to my attention by my father. He was as enthralled by that story, and by her 1968 Nebula-award-winning “Dragon Rider,” as I was. I next encountered, and was deeply moved, by The Ship Who Sang. It was my delight, years later, to reprint “The Ship Who Mourned” in one of my own anthologies, and, two years ago, I introduced my ten-year-old to Dragonquest and watched her zip through that novel and The White Dragon. Now she and her friends avidly trade and reread books like Dragonsong and Dragonsinger.
While rows of Anne's books can be found in bookstores and libraries, meeting her has been a little more difficult. Anne moved to Ireland long before I became active in the SF field. Although our paths have crossed briefly at a few conventions, and I had had the pleasure of meeting her son, the author Todd McCaffrey, I'm not sure if I'd ever had a chance to speak to Anne until this year's Nebula Awards Ceremony. At a cocktail party beforehand, I congratulated her on the imminent presentation of her Grand Master award and thanked her for her remarkable fiction. I was moved when she showed me a beautiful dragon necklace that had been made for her to mark the occasion by Andre Norton—a wonderful woman, Anne told me, who had deeply influenced her.
Andre Norton died shortly before the Nebulas, but she left behind a stunning legacy. Andre Norton's first book was published when Anne McCaffrey was six. Her last book is just out. The first works I read by Andre Norton include the haunting “All Cats Are Gray” and Forerunner Foray. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her, the imaginative avenues that she opened for me and for others are legend. We will miss this Grand Master, but her influence and her works remain.
This issue carries on the heritage of fine storytelling. Three of our authors—Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, and our regular columnist Robert Silverberg—are also Grand Masters. Brian celebrated his eightieth birthday this past summer, and Fred beat him to that milestone a few years ago. As is evident in the stories here, both men continue to add powerful work to their oeuvres. Andre Norton, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Anne McCaffrey, and Robert Silverberg helped set the cornerstones of a tradition that constantly reaches out to new readers and continues to produce clear and refreshing new voices. This issue also includes stories by brand-new authors John Phillip Olsen and Lou Antonelli.
Another new writer, Ted Kosmatka, has a story in our next issue. Ted, a laboratory analyst, is a third-generation steel-industry employee. I met him at the Nebulas, too, when I spied his name on his nametag as he walked across the hotel lobby. In turn, he introduced me to his mother—a twenty-year subscriber to Asimov's. Mrs. Kosmatka passed on her own love of SF to Ted when he was twelve and recovering from a near-fatal bout of meningitis.
As long as we pass on our joy of reading, and of reading SF, to the children, and the children's children, science fiction writers will continue to influence each other, perfect their skills, and create new stories for generations to come. Although Walter Jon Williams couldn't attend the Nebulas due to illness, we were delighted when he won a Nebula for his novella, “The Green Leopard Plague” (Asimov's, October/November 2003). Fortunately, one of our Readers’ Award winners, Mike Resnick, was able to attend. Mike's “Travels with My Cats” (February 2004) was named best short story in our poll. On Saturday morning before the Nebulas, he was feted at our Readers’ Award breakfast in the 312 Chicago Restaurant. Other writers and guests in attendance included Connie Willis and her daughter Cordelia, Paul Melko and his wife Stacey, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, and the singer and SF anthologist, Janis Ian.
—Sheila Williams
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reflections: Robert Burton, Anatomist of Melancholy
I spoke last time about Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, that marvelous Elizabethan book which under the pretext of exploring the subject of depression gives us an astonishing 900-page survey of virtually all of the science and pseudo-science of its era. But I barely scratched the surface of this lively, irrepressible, and wholly enthralling old tome.
&nbs
p; I quoted in that column, and will again now, this description of intention that Burton provides, a choice example of his resonant Elizabethan prose and a fitting characterization both of his purpose and his style:
Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stupend, vast, infinite Ocean of incredible madness and folly: a Sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, Euripuses, and contrary tides, full of calms, Halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies and Tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits, that I know not whether they are more to be pitied or derided, or may be believed, but that we daily see the same still practiced in our days, fresh examples, new news, fresh objects of misery and madness in this kind, that are still represented unto us, abroad, at home, in the midst of us, in our bosoms.
This curious man, who lived a cloistered life as an Oxford scholar from 1593 until his death in 1640, must have read every book in the great university's libraries, combing their pages for pertinent lore on the subject of melancholy and how to escape it. His sources are myriad, from the most ancient writings to the most recent and, as he tells us on an early page, “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a Giant may see farther than a Giant himself.” (This familiar phrase he credits to one Didacus Stella, author of a volume of Biblical commentary.) Burton's text is a colossal webwork of quotations, assembled into a complex structure divided into a number of “partitions,” each made up of “sections,” “members,” and “subsections,” along with three long essays labeled “digressions,” the whole thing intricately woven together by thoughtful, wry, and frequently profound observations of his own.
To provide an anatomy of melancholy he says he must first provide an anatomy of physiology, for mental states have their origin in the body's own substance. Here he brings forth the old theory of the four humors of the body—blood, phlegm, bile, and serum—and gives particular attention to “black bile,” which was supposed to bring about melancholy. This part of the book becomes a long (and, to us, exceedingly quaint) treatise on melancholy's causes, symptoms, and prognosis, all of it now wholly obsolete medically, and much of it cryptic and even opaque to modern readers—but much is charming and fascinating. (Hypochondria, he tells us, is called that because it is an ailment of the “hypochondries,” the section of the abdomen that contains the liver and the spleen: even this propensity for imaginary maladies is thus shown to have a physiological origin.)
Once he is done with his great jumble of anatomical material, assigning different types of melancholy to different sectors of the body, Burton launches into a section on curing these many varieties of depression, and here we get a summary of seventeenth-century medical practices, which of course includes a good deal of what we would now call magic. This disquisition requires him to examine whether magic actually does work, and he adduces such authorities, no longer known to us, as Caelius, Delrio, Libanius, and Lemnius, who “deny that Spirits or Devils have any power over us, and refer all to natural causes and humours.” But then, ever fairminded, he refers us to a second crew of experts—Paracelsus, Agrippa, Pliny, Oswoldus Crollius, Dr. Flud, etc.—who have demonstrated magic's efficacious nature: “They can make fire it shall not burn, fetch back thieves or stolen goods, show their absent faces in a glass, make serpents lie still, stanch blood, salve gouts, epilepsies, bitings of mad dogs, toothache, melancholy, and all the ills of the world, make men immortal, young again, as the Spanish Marquess is said to have done by one of his slaves.... “And so on for quite some length.
From there we go to an extensive catalog of medicines, which at times takes on a poetic tone that reminds me of Jack Vance at his best. One kind of melancholy, he says, is caused by “wind within the hypochondries” that must be expelled, and his long list of specifics for this problem include Bezoar Stone, Calaminth, Grain of Paradise, the Blessed Laxative, the Electuary of Laurel, the Powder Against Flatulence, the Florentian Antidote, the Charming Powder, Aromatic Rose Wine, Oil of Spikenard, and Aristolochy, though care must be taken in their use “so that they do not inflame the blood and increase the disease.” We are told also of the use of “fomentations, irrigations, inunctions, odoraments,” and other treatments for the head and stomach, the value of bloodletting, of applying medicines against the skin, of curing shyness and blushing with a mixture of white lead, camphire, water of nightshade, and nenuphar (or, says another authority he quotes, with water containing frogs’ eggs)—on and on and on, a grand melange of what we now know to be, mostly, nonsense. But what glorious nonsense!
And what glorious sidebars he provides along the way. We are informed at one point, with Galileo and Kepler as the source, that heaven is 170,000,803 miles from the Earth, so that a stone dropped from the stars and traveling one hundred miles an hour would take sixty-five years, or more, before it touched ground. (Would it? I haven't checked the arithmetic.) We are told, apropos of a discussion of madness, “that lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, why, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.... Love is madness, a hell, an incurable disease.” We are told, in passing, of Cornelius Drible's perpetual-motion machine, about which I wrote last issue. On a nearby page a footnote lets us know about the robot that the philosopher Albertus Magnus constructed in the thirteenth century, given to us in this quotation from William Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers:
It is related of Albertus that he made an entire man of brass, putting together his limbs under various constellations, and occupying no less than thirty years in its formation. This man would answer all sorts of questions, and was even employed as a domestic. But at length it is said to have become so garrulous that Thomas Aquinas, a pupil of Albertus, finding himself disturbed perpetually by its uncontrollable loquacity, caught up a hammer and beat it to pieces.
Albertus’ robot, I like to believe, was governed by the Asimovian Laws of Robotics, and thus made no attempt to defend itself against Aquinas’ assault—for otherwise theologians these nine centuries past would have had to get along without the Angelic Doctor's magisterial Summa Theologica, which I assume he was in the process of writing when the annoyingly gabby robot came along to distract him.
Back to Burton, though. Here we have him, in a lengthy analysis of human love that takes in both its great benefits and its pathological transformations, offering us a diet to promote chastity, embracing such foods as “Cowcumbers, Melons, Purselan, Water-Lilies, Rue, Woodbine, Ammi, Lettice, which Lemnius so much commends, and Vitex before the rest, which, saith Magninus, hath a wonderful virtue in it.” He quotes Amatus Lusitanus on the subject of “a young Jew that was almost mad for Love,” and was cured “with the syrup of Hellebore, and such other evacuations and purges, which are usually prescribed to black choler.” There are plenty of other remedies for excessive lust here—pages and pages of them—but, of course, Burton being Burton, we are given a good many cures for impotence as well, since he brings himself ultimately to the conclusion that the best cure for love-melancholy is the fulfillment of desire.
Religious belief, too, can bring on a kind of melancholy, Burton says, in the last and perhaps most startling section of his enormous book. He does not, of course, attack the Church of England, for in his day such an attack would surely have cost him his livelihood (his income came mainly from the various church offices that he held) and perhaps his life. But how scathingly does he write of other religions! After citing “the Mahometan Priests, so cunningly can they gull the commons in all places and Countries,” he levels his big guns against “that High Priest of Rome, the dam of that monstrous and superstitious brood, the bull-bellowing Pope, which now rageth in the West, that three-headed Cerberus. Whose religion at this day is mere policy, a state wholly composed of superstition and wit, and needs nothing but wit and superstition to maintain it, that useth Colleges and religious houses to as good purpose as Forts and Castles, and doth more at this day by a company of scribbling Parasites, fiery-spirited Friars, Zealous Anchorites, hypocritical confessors, Janissary Jesuits..
.. “and so on with mounting fury for some pages further.
He is an equal-opportunity chastiser of all religions but his own. The various pagan creeds get full attention and high eloquence. ("What shall be the end of Idolators, but to degenerate into sticks and stones? of such as worship these Heathen gods, for such gods are a kind of Devils, but to become devils themselves?” Then the back of his hand for the Jews: “No Nation under Heaven can be more sottish, ignorant, blind, superstitious, wilful, obstinate and peevish, tiring themselves with vain ceremonies to no purpose; he that shall but read their Rabbins’ ridiculous Comments, their strange Interpretation of Scriptures, their absurd ceremonies, fables, childish tales, which they steadfastly believe, will think they be scarce rational creatures.” And Islam, too: “Mahometans are a compound of Gentiles, Jews, and Christians, and so absurd in their ceremonies, as if they had taken that which is most sottish out of every one of them, full of idle fables in their superstitious law, their Alcoran itself a gallimaufry of lies, tales, ceremonies, traditions, precepts, stole from other sects, and confusedly heaped up to delude a company of rude and barbarous clowns...."
Give me no political correctness here. Burton lived four hundred years ago and we read him to discover the ideas that were current in his era, not to reinforce the attitudes of our own. His book is a masterpiece of strange folklore and forgotten erudition, couched in masterly Elizabethan prose. (He writes, he says, “as a river runs, sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow, now muddy, now clear; now broad, then narrow, doth my style flow; now serious, then light; now comical, then satiricale; now more elaborate, then remiss.... And if thou vouchsafe to read this treatise, it shall seem no otherwise to thee, than the way to an ordinary traveller, sometimes fair, sometimes foul, here champaign, there enclosed; barren in one place, better soil in another; by woods, groves, hills, dales, plains, &c.)"
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