Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  No, the best model of online reviews in my experience is the third model: critique.

  I’ve done a lot of critiques over the years. The first were in creative writing classes in college, which could kindly be called the blind leading the blind. I’ve been to professional workshops including Clarion West and Rio Hondo. I was in a local critique group for almost a decade with professional writers including Walter Jon Williams, George R. R. Martin, Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, and S. M. Stirling. There are numerous guides on how to give a good critique. The most basic is the “shit sandwich” approach: You say something good about the work, then all the stuff that was crap in the middle, and end with something else good. The most honest was Maureen McHugh’s description of a good critique: “Say something true and useful.” Regardless, the point of a critique is to find fault—often to take a perfectly good story and reread it as many times as I have to in order to find something wrong, then think about how to fix it.

  Reviews—useful reviews, professional reviews, good reviews—are most like critiques given after it’s too damn late to fix anything. They aren’t there to help the author do better, but to guide readers toward books they’d like and away from books they wouldn’t. For that, a good reviewer is worth her weight in gold. Reading as a reviewer means keeping an eye toward what’s good and what’s bad. It’s an act of judgment.

  Which is to say, it’s practicing dissatisfaction. And like anything we practice, the more we do it, the better we get at it.

  My pleasure at being in the bookstore changed once I was doing it professionally. In the same way, my reading changes when I’m thinking about what I’m going to say about a book. It’s already hard enough for me to turn off my critical faculties and read for joy, for pleasure—to read as a reader. I don’t want to be a critic. I want to be an enthusiast. I want to practice loving the books I read and the experience of reading them without looking for how it could have been better. I want to practice forgiving literature its flaws and shortcomings the way I did when I was a kid, before I got sophisticated and analytical.

  Readers owe a debt to good reviewers. A mind trained to do that work has made a trade-off, and that sacrifice was made for our benefit. I want to be warned away from lousy books and pointed toward good ones, then I want to fall into the page and just take pleasure in reading. And so, as a rule, I won’t go online and post what I thought of a book. I’ll try not to pick it apart and find its flaws and think about how it could have been done better.

  When it comes to reading, I try to be bad at being unsatisfied. That’s something I’m just as happy to leave to the pros.

  About the Author

  Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

  Editor’s Desk: Six and Counting

  Neil Clarke

  We have a little news to report this month. First of all, this is our sixth anniversary issue. Thank you for your support over the years. The last six years have been amazing and you’ve helped make that possible. Considering how much Clarkesworld has managed to grow over the years, I’m eager to see what opportunities the next six provide.

  Sadly, one of the team won’t be with us for that. Jason Heller, our non-fiction editor, has turned in his resignation and will be leaving us by the end of the year. In his year with us he’s done a lot great things and helped expand our non-fiction offerings. All of us here wish him the best of luck and continued success. In our next issue, I should be able to announce his successor and reveal some of our plans for the year ahead.

  Last month, I mentioned that one of my goals is to be able to start paying our staff a real wage. I focused some attention on the importance of our Amazon and Weightless Books esubscriptions, since they are responsible for the bulk of our income. We do have other sources of income, but a few of them were sidelined by complications in my life and other issues. I’m talking about our annual anthology series and the fabled Clarkesworld chapbooks.

  I am very pleased to say that the chapbooks are finally back on track. At this moment, a print copy of our January 2012 issue is sitting on my desk. It’s only a proof, but we should be able to start producing final copies of this and other issues later this month. I hope to have at least four or five issues completed in time for the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto (along with some fun new promotional cards). These will be issued unsigned, but we will be making arrangements to have a small number of signed copies available as soon as possible.

  The same life issues put the annual Clarkesworld anthology series, Realms, on hold after the second volume. The series restarts with all the stories from our third year under the name Clarkesworld: Year Three. The introduction explains the name change, so I won’t go into it here, but I can say that it should be available in print and ebook format by the end of the year. Volumes four and five will follow quickly in early 2013.

  Last month, I encouraged our readers to leave reviews on our Amazon subscription page. Several of you left some very kind words there and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. The time you spent doing that was extremely valuable to us and impacts our visibility on a site that is responsible for sending us a lot of new readers each month.

  Thanks again for a wonderful six years. Catch you next month!

  About the Author

  Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 74

  Table of Contents

  (To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

  by E. Catherine Tobler

  Aquatica

  by Maggie Clark

  Everything Must Go

  by Brooke Wonders

  Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

  by Mark Cole

  The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

  by Peter Hodges

  Another Word: It Gets Better with SFF (but SFF has to Get Better, too)

  by Lev AC Rosen

  Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

  by Neil Clarke

  New World

  Art by Ken Barthelmey

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  (To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

  E. Catherine Tobler

  Close your eyes. As you travel farther away from me, your ship becoming little more than a pinprick of light amid infinite pinpricks of light, I want you to remember me as I was the first time you saw me, in the field. The day I glowed.

  All right, it was an interface malfunction, but I still glowed. You told me I had been set on fire, that I was all colors and so seemed white, holy, pure.

  How we laughed.

  Query: If two interstellar ships leave Point A in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities in opposite directions, at what distance does communication between Ship A and Ship B break down?

  As first meetings go, it wasn’t terrible.

  When you’re assigned a new partner, you never know how you’ll mesh. In this business, it usually doesn’t matter. We are expendable and know that from the outset. What matters are the multitrillion dollar cargoes of compressed titanium, the ships, the Manifest Destiny. The fallibility of machines in the vastness of deep space means bringing a human to tend them, to coddle when needed. Assigning one crewmember per ship keeps costs down. Keeps the murders down, too. The company took its time in understanding this. They tried multiple configurations: complete crews with chains of command; pairs; loners.

  The traditional chains of command became problematic almost from the outset, crews slaughteri
ng each other over money and station when they realized both were all they would have in the deep black. Sometimes it went quickly: the men killed each other over the women, the women killed each other over the men. When the wreckage of the Prospero was finally recovered, the company required only two more similar incidents to convince themselves.

  Launched-as-pairs had more success in the early years, but the fucking ruined everything. Regardless of sexual orientations, interests, configurations, it always came to fucking. Two humans, confined in an enclosed space for more years than one can rightly imagine when the contracts are signed, create an immense amount of havoc, destruction, ejaculate, and blood.

  Providing crewmembers with other means of relief for such long voyages was deemed outside the company’s scope, if lacing MREs with birth control and controlling one’s carry-on luggage was not. Even employing homophobes in an effort to avoid such base desires did not have the desired outcome. They fucked, killed their partner, and then went insane as the ship drifted untended. One can presume with half a dozen such reported incidents, there were three to five times more that number.

  The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally-invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

  Response: “If” is a terrible word. When two interstellar ships leave Point A. There is no if involved, for the ships do leave, in the same instant, travelling at identical velocities. Ship A heads toward illusory west. Ship B heads into illusory east. Point A becomes the anchor around which all other stars move, a point where you can calculate all those distances you love so well.

  At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce. But even voice becomes too heavy in the deep black, so thought and emotion are condensed into communiques, nearly old fashioned letters which speak perhaps twice as well as any VR interface might. They are slow, but allow for harder truths. In the end, there will be only silence, even as the ships whisper via radio, via small Bracewell probes launched into the black in an attempt to extend communication range. Ships don’t care how long a thing takes. Neither do loners. Usually.

  “Are you awake? I hope you’re awake.”

  They were the first words I spoke to you as I waited for your avatar to log in to the virtual environment. The first place I conjured for you was that field, empty but for the grass and the sky. Earth blues and greens, mid-summer, northern hemisphere. It could have been anywhere of course. I chose these intentionally. Not to ground you in something familiar, but to show you something familiar to me.

  “Sometimes the avatar takes a while to come online.”

  I could see your name on my console, small and green and hovering in the lower left. You weren’t a known entity to me then, but Company-approved nonetheless and green-lighted. I walked a slow circle as I waited, hands outstretched to brush the scentless white blooms that reached up through the grass. I couldn’t feel the grass either, of course, but memory filled those blanks easily enough. Drought grass stubble, my palms would itch. The grass moved in a slow wave even though there was no wind. If I concentrated elsewhere, the scent of coffee intruded, so I didn’t.

  You coalesced from copper clouds. Tall, though not as tall as you would become. Pale, but not so pale yet, either. I stopped pacing and curled toes into grass that did not exist. “I don’t mean to get you out of bed.” Of course, I did; the Company required such things. “Can you confirm the distance?”

  Your voice cracked as it came online—I blamed the interface even then, because your voice was only ever even from this moment on. “Eleven,” you said, and it seemed as though you had not spoken for a very long time. “Eleven point two AU.”

  “And the other?” My hands paused in the grass even as yours reached for it. “Earth?” How far were we at this point? Was your ship processing data as it should? Our numbers should match, they should always match.

  It happened then, that burst in the interface and your eyes went wide. I thought I could see my reflection in your eyes (you chose blue, so did I)—the way I seemed to glow as if lit from within, but nothing inside me would ever burn so bright.

  You told me I had been set on fire, and your hands reached from the grass, toward me. I did not move, knowing there might be a touch, avatar against avatar, but I would not feel it. All colors you said and looked as though you were warming your hands against a campfire. “Holy, pure.”

  We laughed, maybe the first thing we did in unison. We both knew it for a lie, considering where we were and who we must be. Loners.

  “Can you confirm the distance?”

  Your head came up, eyes taking in the landscape beyond me. Your hands slid into your pockets that formed at the mere idea of pockets crossing your mind, a place to put your hands so they would not enfold me. Your avatar flared with light then, a pulse of blue as the interface crackled.

  “Two hundred seventy-seven thousand—”

  Our minds have trouble comprehending such distances. The system compensates, makes it momentarily bearable. I drew up a chart between us, a familiar thing to anyone schooled in astronavigation (we both were). My fingers pulled gleaming lines like neon spaghetti from apparent nothingness, to illuminate the distance from here to there, but not back again.

  “ . . . six hundred AU,” you finished. How could we be so far away from Earth?

  “Sleep now,” I said, and erased the hovering lines with a sweep of my hand. You would be tired. It was hard coming out of hypersleep—in the latter days and when ships flew with full crews, it was the point when a good percentage of shipboard deaths occurred, crew disoriented and wary of everything. A body needed time. A body needed distance.

  “Online in another two hours for recalibration.”

  Query: Do east and west exist in space? North and south?

  You will think your ship is haunted; the Company tells us it is a commonplace belief, so includes this amusing anecdote in all briefings. You always laugh, until you sign the contract, find yourself on board and in the depth of space, and start to hear things. Most cities are haunted and as your ship is a city for one, so too does it hold its ghosts. You bring them on board with you—eidolons, fears, illusory things that should be beyond people of our training and education. Still, Einar murmurs.

  Einar is more like a city than not, despite its population concerns. A vast array of universe-traversing equipment rises around your room as it does mine, a one-room studio which looks much like the spaces we occupied before the Company offered its contract. Beyond the borders of tidy, automated kitchens and icon-laden desks, is a window that surveys the labyrinthine network of power conduits and production stations. Stations only you will use, but not today. In the distance, a vacuum door lit overhead with a perfectly white LED sign which reads “Cargo Observation.”

  You won’t like this door, no one does. It will come to be your least favorite part of the ship. You can cross the pleasantly padded deckplate as you want, jog through the maintenance corridors to clear your mind, but the door you will avoid. It is the starkest reminder that you are somewhere else, somewhere far from home. Such reminders are reason enough to keep the window’s opacity set to maximum, preserv
ing the room’s Terran simplicity. Your desk is orderly, fingerprints erased almost as they are left. Beyond this space, the conduits and especially the door, will fade.

  Not that you see them often. Any corridor can be transformed with the brush of a hand, any thought overlaying the great gerbil maze with varying degrees of falsehood. Atmosphere condensers become the trees of Central Park in early fall, with customizable time-of-day and alterable crowd density controls. Neat stacks of cargo crates make for lovely park benches and with one simple command, squirrels will always come for the acorns you never hold.

  The surreality of the corridors have hidden the haunting for some time, daunted your belief. The Company told you, after all, that you would hear things on occasion. The Company was diligent enough to train you on the sadly predictable failures of the human mind during long periods of isolation. Is it worse or better then, time spent together? It’s hard to say, because while it eases one ache, it intensifies others. We may come to think the sounds are us, moving ever closer to each other, stumbling in dark corridors as we reach for each other’s light, even though we know this is improbable. We occupy identical ships, with identical cargoes, heading in opposite directions.

  It was certainly one of the squirrels. You think you hear a metallic bang, like a foot stubbed somewhere deep in the corridors. The squirrel that was not there never turned, merrily eating the acorn that was not there, that had never been in your hand, and surely didn’t respond when you asked, “Did you hear that?”

  A proper New York squirrel always turns at the first shock of sound, gone to the treetops after a noise like that. Street animals know best that cruelties always awaited the careless in a city. Even Einar. Perhaps especially so.