Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I take the ritual position of submission. I bare my neck. But I'm not on my knees. I'm braced and ready.

  When Grandma swings the sickle back in order to get a stroke powerful enough, it's as if, until this very moment, the others didn't really understand that such a thing would happen, even Bobby who betrayed us.

  Grandma pauses, says the ritual words. In that moment both MaryEllenson and Rosalia jump forward.

  I jump, too.

  —

  Who would have thought that Rosalia and I would find the Hidden Valley all by ourselves, and that I, myself, would become the guardian of it?

  We find a road that's hardly ever used, and there's the need for an old man to watch the turnoff. There's a tumbledown cottage and a garden in need of care. Farther on, a cluster of cottages of stones the same color as the stone around them. Water runs down from three waterfalls just as described in our stories. A good place to die and be swept out to sea. We recognize it right away.

  (First thing, even before cleaning up the garden and repairing the house, we put up a moon watching platform.)

  To ourselves, we call our land The Place, all of us here do, but to others we call it Nowhere so no one will come by. As I watch our road I always say, “This other fork leads to Nowhere.” Few people pass this way, I don't have to be on duty all the time. And the sign at the fork points left and says NOWHERE. Who would go there?

  Rosalia doesn't call me Uncle anymore. She calls me Dear and Husband. It's good we're no longer wandering because Rosalia's leg never came quite right. She can hobble, but not far. I carry her when we go up into the hills to gather berries. I carry her to the river to wash the clothes.

  Bobby lives with us, but he'll be moving on in a year or so. He wants to keep up the old ways. He wants his roaming years. But considering what happened he can't ever go near our old group. He was thinking of changing his name to Rosaliason, but Rosalia thought he would do better changing it to Janeson and be my nephew.

  He's part of our secret. A big part. If not for him, I don't know what would have happened. And he knows where Grandma ended up.... At least she's headed towards the sea.

  Rosalia wonders, should we go back and tell the others we found the Hidden Valley? But I don't think so. We'd get in trouble. I don't tell her, but, if they ever come to my crossroads, I'll pull my hat low, take my dollar, and send them in the wrong direction.

  —

  What we know so far is that, at death, a waterfall will do for sweeping us away, though an irrigation ditch might also serve for us to be swept out to some sea or other.

  —

  We never had a chance to give our Janeson his leaving gifts, among which was the shawl Rosalia knitted for him long ago. We feel bad about that. We know how much he loved it. Though if they're together (and we shouldn't hope for it, but secretly we do), she'll be knitting him another.

  —

  What we know is that even in the middle of nowhere, there's beauty when you least expect it: top a hill and suddenly whole fields of poppies as far as the eye can see, or wake up early to the smell of sage after a rain....

  Copyright (c) 2008 Carol Emshwiller

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS

  by Peter Heck

  THE MERCHANTS’ WAR

  By Charles Stross

  Tor, $24.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 0-7653-1671-4

  The newest book in Stross's alternate-realities Family Trade series raises the tension several more notches.

  Once again, the protagonist is Miriam Blackman, the Boston techno-journalist who discovered (in The Family Trade, first in the series) that she is one of an aristocratic family from an alternate world with a quasi-medieval culture. Miriam, whose branch of the family has the inborn talent to shift between worlds, is now beginning to learn just how complicated her clan's dealings with our world are.

  Having survived an assassination attempt that did manage to kill off several key figures in the kingdom of which her family is the leading progressive force (despite its Mafia-like treatment of political opponents), Miriam has ducked into a third alternate world she has discovered, hoping to find shelter. Not surprisingly, what looked like a good idea at first now turns out to have complications of its own.

  In this installment, Miriam discovers that, while she was away, the society of this world—a staunchly royalist quasi-Victorian world in which the American Revolution didn't happen—has taken an even more oppressive turn. Her local friends are in trouble, and their political allies—the democratic underground—are at first suspicious of her. But she's short on options, so she needs to go along with their plans—which involve a trans-continental train ride to meet one of the anti-monarchist leaders.

  Meanwhile, back on the “medieval” world, a full-scale war has broken out between Miriam's family and an even more conservative faction that wants to free itself of the world-shifters’ influence. Looking for ways out of the cage that's begun to close around them, Miriam's relatives send out an exploration team, hoping to learn if there are still other alternate worlds to be explored. As it turns out, there is at least one—but we get only a few intriguing hints about it before a crisis forces the team's recall to deal with more pressing problems.

  At the same time, on our Earth, the authorities have begun to learn more about the broad shape of the multi-world universe. What they already know gives them plenty of incentive to find out more. For one thing, the government has tipped to the idea that there are several whole worlds where the oil reserves haven't been tapped—if only they can get there.

  Stross has taken the broad idea with which he began the series—I've heard it described as “Amber with economics as the science"—and expended it logically in several initially unexpected directions. The action continues to be compelling, with the author throwing in new surprises every time a reader thinks the story's about to settle down for an easy lope through a world that many writers would consider sufficiently interesting to explore without searching for still more wrinkles. Of course, this one ends in still another blatant cliffhanger—so Stross addicts will just have to grit their teeth and wait for the next one in this series.

  I'll be waiting with them.

  * * * *

  THE AREMAC PROJECT

  By Gerald M. Weinberg

  Little West Press, $23.95 (tp)

  ISBN: 0-932633-70-6

  This one's a bit of a sleeper, a near-future thriller built around neuroscience and nanotech by one of the giants of the IT revolution.

  The key characters are Roger Fixman, a near-genius Muslim-American engineering grad student, and his equally brilliant girlfriend/co-worker Tess Myers. Working for Professor Wyatt, an exploitative faculty member whose entire reputation rests on work he has stolen from his students, the pair develop a machine that can capture images from a person's memory.

  As it happens, the FBI has a captured terrorism suspect, severely wounded in the latest of a series of bomb attacks that have ravaged Chicago. And Wyatt, who has been working with the FBI, sees a way to maximize his value as a government asset by developing his students’ machine into a practical way to read the suspect's memories.

  Weinberg throws a couple of curves right off the bat: first of all, Roger's family are thoroughly unlikely potential terrorists. Except for his cousin Azara, who has demonstrated for religious freedom for Muslims, they are more interested in running their businesses and leading a happy family life. Second, Tess is by a lot of measures even smarter than Roger—although she lags slightly behind his genius-level engineering abilities, she is far more attuned to the way the everyday world works.

  The major plot complication arises when Wyatt's FBI contacts press him to speed up the development of the memory-imager in response to an escalation of the terrorist attacks. Against their better judgment, Roger and Tess skip to trials with human subjects—Tess volunteers—and something goes wrong. Tess is suddenly paralyzed and incapable of communicatin
g. Now Roger has to complete the project himself—while worrying whether Tess will ever get back to normal.

  I'd describe Weinberg as more an “idea man” than a smooth stylist—but he has plenty of ideas, and a way of making them convincing. He has a likeable pair of protagonists, a supporting cast that manages to avoid stereotyping, and he contrives to keep a few plot surprises up his sleeve for the final showdown. Probably the closest comparisons among established SF writers would be Robert Forward and James P. Hogan. If that's your kind of reading fare, I suggest you give Weinberg a try.

  * * * *

  PEBBLE IN THE SKY

  By Isaac Asimov

  Tor, $24.06 (hc)

  ISBN: 0-7653-1912-8

  An author who needs no introduction! Originally published in 1949, and now reissued by Tor, this is one of the first SF novels I ever read.

  Although this early novel does share the broad historical setting of Asimov's other “Galactic Empire” novels, it was clearly written pretty much as a standalone. So we see the author, not in the process of filling in the chinks of a fully developed future history, but in the process of inventing it.

  It is also, significantly, his first novel written as a novel, rather than by retroactively stitching together a group of shorter works meant to stand on their own, as was the case with the original “Foundation trilogy.” For the first time, the author had a chance to build up a book-length plot from scratch, and to take advantage of the world-building possibilities of the bigger canvas.

  The book begins by taking a more or less ordinary American of the twentieth century and flinging him into an unfamiliar world: a starting point common to SF almost as far back as you want to go. The act itself is done by a bit of hand-waving, under the time-honored rubric, “there are a lot of things science doesn't really understand.” The point is, by the end of the first chapter, Joseph Schwartz, a retired tailor from Chicago, has traveled to the distant future of the first Galactic Empire.

  Most readers of this magazine probably know what he eventually learns. Earth is not, as Schwartz naively expects, the capital of the empire. Rather, it is a backwater world, its natives despised by the galactic citizens sent to administer the colonial government. It is overcrowded, unproductive, and radioactive. Its ludicrous claim to be the original home of the human race is, to the rulers, just another indictment against its superstitious natives. And, as Schwartz learns all too soon, there is a law requiring everyone on Earth over the age of sixty to report for euthanasia. Schwartz is sixty-two.

  Lost and confused, Schwartz is taken in by a farm family that for all its sympathy, sees him as a problem: obviously ill, at best a pathetic amnesia case. With considerable relief, they hand him over to a research scientist working on a machine he believes may help increase Schwartz's memory. Gradually, Schwartz begins to learn the language, and something about the world he has come to.

  Meanwhile, a galactic archaeologist, Bel Ardavan, has come to Earth to investigate its curious folklore traditions. He is convinced that it may be older than many of his colleagues believe and wants to dig for evidence. And in the background of all this, the rebels of Earth are planning to strike a blow against their oppressors.

  I'll leave off any more plot summary in case some of you haven't read the book. (Lucky you!) What I do want to say is that this is a fine example of Golden Age SF when its authors were still discovering just how much could still be done with this gorgeous new literary medium that had metamorphosed out of the science fiction of their youth. At the time he wrote Pebble, Asimov was still a rising star, not yet thirty years old—and yet a ten-year veteran whose style and approach had been formed under the demanding tutelage of John W. Campbell.

  On the other hand, as the first significant piece of work he didn't write explicitly for Campbell, Pebble is in some ways a look ahead to what Asimov would be doing in his next creative period. While it can be made to tie in loosely with the future history of his earlier books, the book really was an independent creation. (Asimov's later efforts to tie together almost all his book-length fiction always had the look and feel of a juggling act, to me.) It also foregoes the large arena of the Foundation series, confining the action to a single apparently unimportant planet—foreshadowing the title of his later short-story collection, Earth is Room Enough.

  Asimov's fictional output, taken as a whole, is varied enough that it would be hard to point out any single book as his best. I can say that Pebble is one that non-SF readers readily respond to; and, unlike most of Asimov's work of his last few years, it requires no knowledge of (or interest in) his other novels to get into it and enjoy the ride. For that reason, it might be the book to recommend to someone just beginning to discover SF and interested in finding out what one of its major figures wrote at the top of his game.

  And, of course, for those of you who have read Pebble in the Sky, here's a very useful reminder of just how good Asimov was at the top of his game.

  * * * *

  ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE

  30th Anniversary Anthology

  Ed. by Sheila Williams

  Tachyon, $14.95 (tp)

  ISBN: 1-892391-47-3

  This one's a sure bet—a selection of outstanding stories from three decades of the magazine you hold in your hands.

  The stature of Asimov's over the years has pretty well guaranteed that its editors get first look at most of the best stuff being written at any given time. Oh, every editor can give you a list of the great stories somebody else got first. But I'd guess that Sheila Williams, like her predecessors, rarely has to worry about getting enough quality material to fill an issue.

  The table of contents lists some of the most distinguished names of the modern era: John Varley, Robert Silverberg, Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Connie Willis, Jonathan Lethem, Mike Resnick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Charles Stross, Lucius Shepard, Stephen Baxter, and Robert Reed. Three grandmasters, and a whole crew of “lesser” award winners—not a bad lineup.

  Some of the stories are classics in and of themselves: Varley's “Air Raid,” the harrowing inspiration for the movie Millennium; or Stross's “Lobsters,” the starting point of his trademark “Accelerando” sequence; or Asimov's “Robot Dreams,” one of his most thoughtful explorations of the border territory between machinery and humanity that his robots began increasingly to inhabit as he returned to the theme again and again over the years.

  But in fact, most of these authors are of such stature that even a throwaway story would be something most readers would look forward to—not to suggest that there's such a thing as a throwaway from Le Guin, or Silverberg, or Willis. For that matter, with three decades of published stories to choose from, there wasn't much chance that the editor was going to have to settle for “filler,” no matter how big the name of the author.

  All of which means that you can pick this collection up and know that every story is going to be top quality. Loyal longtime readers of the magazine will of course have seen them all the first time around, not to forget that many of them have appeared in “Year's Best” collections. But this would be a great gift for anyone who enjoys SF; and it's certainly as good a one-volume history of the last thirty years as you could order up.

  It's also good to see a top small-press publisher getting the chance to do a project like this. From recent evidence, publishers like Tachyon, Golden Gryphon, and Night Shade are going to be very important in the future of the field. If you really want to keep abreast of the best new work, you might start bugging your local bookstore to stock their books—starting with this one.

  * * * *

  NEW THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

  By John D. Barrow

  Oxford, $29.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 0-19-280721-2

  A new look at the central question in modern science: whether science can develop one master theory that can account for everything in the universe.

  Barrow, an astronomy pro
f at Cambridge (and a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot), jumps into his subject with a look at the fundamental issues. The key areas of the subject, as he lays them out, are laws of nature, the starting conditions of the universe, the character of the forces and particles, the constants of nature, broken symmetries, organizing principles, selective biases, and categories of thought. Each of these is explained clearly and its implications carefully examined.

  For example, in discussing laws of nature, he lists all the ways the universe, scientific laws, and God might be able to interact—including the possibility that any or all of the three do not exist. A lot of scientists are ready to dispense with the notion of God; it takes a brave one to look solipsism or chaos in the face and admit that the search for meaning might itself be an illusion.

  One key question is whether our math is adequate to describe the deepest level of reality. After all, Godel's incompleteness theorem holds that every mathematical system entails theorems that cannot be proved or disproved. Barrow finds a way out of the apparent dilemma, suggesting that Godel's insight, while true of pure mathematics, doesn't hold for the applied math that scientists deal in.

  He even takes a stab at the ancient question of whether or not time and space themselves predate the universe—although he comes short of a definitive answer. That, of course, is the great problem: there are no definitive answers to most of the really big questions, only more or less promising approaches to them. One of the biggest difficulties is the fact that the universe we can observe is a small fraction of what is believed to exist. Nor can anyone be certain that the observable portion of the universe is typical of the whole—although scientists must assume so, to play the game at all.

  The hot approaches to cosmology nowadays seem to be the various spinoffs of string theory—M theory, brane theory, and others that are frankly incomprehensible to those of us who can't do the math. The up-to-date cosmologist has to figure out what to do about the data showing that dark matter and dark energy—neither of which anyone really claims to understand—are the dominant components of the universe. Not to forget older problems such as the imbalance of matter and antimatter, or the still perplexing question of what was going on before the Big Bang, assuming that question even means anything.