Asimov's SF, June 2006
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Asimov's SF, June 2006
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
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Copyright ©2006 by Dell Magazines
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Asimov's Science Fiction
June 2006
Vol. 30 Nos. 6 (Whole Numbers 365)
Cover Art by Kuniko Y. Craft
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NOVELETTES
The Leila Torn Show by James Patrick Kelly
A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange by Beth Bernobich
SHORT STORIES
Life on the Preservation by Jack Skillingstead
The Tiger in the Garden by Scott William Carter
Eight Episodes by Robert Reed
The Ninth Part of Desire by Matthew Johnson
The Edge of the Map by Ian Creasey
Chu and the Nants by Rudy Rucker
POETRY
Growing Old the Mythic Way by Jane Yolen
The Analects of Decomprecius by Wil McCarthy
Reiko by W. Gregory Stewart
The Unified Field of Dreams Theory by Laurel Winter
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial: The Yellow Pill—or, Altered Perceptions by Sheila Williams
Reflections: Sixtus the Sixth by Robert Silverberg
On the Net: Adventures In Podcasting by James Patrick Kelly
On Books by Peter Heck
The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss
Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 30, No. 6. Whole No. 365, June 2006. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $43.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $53.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov's Science Fiction, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2006 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov's Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Quebecor St. Jean, 800 Blvd. Industrial, St. Jean, Quebec J3B 8G4.
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CONTENTS
Editorial: The Yellow Pill—Or, Altered Perceptions by Sheila Williams
Reflections: Sixtus The Sixth by by Robert Silverberg
On the Net: Adventures in Podcasting by James Patrick Kelly
The Leila Torn Show by James Patrick Kelly
Life on the Preservation by Jack Skillingstead
The Tiger in the Garden by Scott William Carter
Growing Old the Mythic Way by Jane Yolen
Eight Episodes by Robert Reed
The Ninth Part of Desire by Matthew Johnson
The Analects of Decomprecius Translated by Wil McCarthy
The Edge of the Map by Ian Creasey
Chu and the Nants by Rudy Rucker
A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange by Beth Bernobich
Reiko by W. Gregory Stewart
On Books by Peter Heck
The Unified Field of Dreams Theory by Laurel Winter
SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss
Next Issue
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Editorial: The Yellow Pill—Or, Altered Perceptions
by Sheila Williams
“The Yellow Pill” in Rog Phillips's classic 1958 Astounding story, strengthens the user's perception of reality so that “reality practically shouts down any fantasy insertions.” Clearly, anyone under the influence of the yellow pill would have a hard time trying to read, understand, enjoy, and validate science fiction and fantasy.
The school year at my high school carried on for about a week past final exams and graduation. The underclass students’ work during that week wouldn't count for a grade so the school offered a number of mini pass/fail courses. One of the subjects offered my senior year was science fiction. The teacher responsible for the class invited me back after graduation to help him teach it. I found it fun and rewarding to be a “teacher” at my own school, but the experience was also enlightening.
Rog Phillips's story was included in the syllabus. To me it was a fairly traditional SF story, filled with third-class freighters and blue-scaled Venusian space pirates. To the students, it was something completely different. For all of them, and perhaps even the teacher, it was a story about a psychiatrist treating an unstable person who thought he was on a spaceship. When the psychiatrist began to think that he was on a spaceship, the class was convinced the doctor had gone insane, too. Admittedly, Phillips has fun playing with the reader's percep
tion of reality, but the story was first published in a science fiction magazine in the fifties and repeatedly anthologized in SF books. These are fairly strong clues that the story probably contains some straightforward science fiction concepts. As I recall, though, I failed to sway a single person in the room.
At the time, I assumed that the readers simply hadn't yet acquired their science-fiction “legs.” Like the kids I knew who'd moved north from Florida and who had had to learn how to walk on snow, I figured the students would get SF once they had a little more exposure to the subject. That may have been true for most of them. They must have appreciated some aspects of SF and/or fantasy or they wouldn't have signed up for the course. But I believed that, once exposed to the “good stuff,” everyone would be capable of appreciating fantastic literature. Alas, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
In a March 3, 1996, New York Times review of an Ursula K. Le Guin collection, Francine Prose lamented that some of the fiction in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was full of the tired ideas only a science fiction reader could love. She compared some of Ms. Le Guin's stories about aliens to the work of college freshmen, and suggested that perhaps the author would have been better served if her stories had been split into two books that would have appealed more to each of her separate audiences. Then, taking the flip side of my own position, she suggested that perhaps it was better that the book hadn't been divided up after all, because science fiction readers might accidentally stumble upon “the many-layered story ‘Ether, OR,'” and by encountering Ms. Le Guin's “deft tricks with narrative techniques,” “light-handed sureness,” and “genuinely intriguing ideas” those readers might start to take pleasure in the author's complex fiction as well. Interestingly, Ms. Prose did not seem to realize that “Ether, OR” was first published in the November 1995 issue of Asimov's. Noting this fact, though, might have undermined her apparent assumption that people who enjoy science fiction and fantasy have to be completely ignorant. If only we'd snap out of it, she seemed to imply, and take that yellow pill, it's possible we could actually be taught how to read English, too.
Well, that was years ago, you might say, and in a fuddy-duddy old newspaper, too. And even if Ms. Prose and her ilk haven't discovered the antidote to that pill, surely younger readers are more open to the wild subjects that pervade today's SF and fantasy. After all, 2005 brought broad recognition to authors whose work has also appeared in Asimov's. Jonathan Lethem won the MacArthur “genius grant.” Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters was nominated for The Story Prize. The 2005 Best American Short Stories anthology included stories by Cory Doctorow, Tim Pratt, and recent Hugo- and Nebula-award-winner, Kelly Link. Both Time and Salon. com chose Ms. Link's Magic for Beginners for their top-ten list of 2005 books. Yet a review of the same collection in the August/September 2005 issue of Bust, a magazine with a young feminist following, maintained that only those who could swallow an absurd premise would be taken with the book. Admitting her own strong preference for realistic fiction, the reviewer indicated that the author's stories had confused her and that only a writer guilty of a certain intellectual laziness would place “such absolutely human, flawed characters inside such baffling, uncanny plotlines."
So the Times reviewer and the supposedly hip Bust reviewer have had the chance to read SF and fantasy by some of the best writers of our day. Yet, they still haven't acquired their science fiction legs. They're still confused by zombies and fairies and aliens. They still don't have much tolerance for stories that veer far from everyday reality, and they can't imagine why anyone professing any level of intelligence does. Well, I'll continue to read Rog Phillips and other SF and fantasy writers for fun, and maybe even for their “light-handed sureness,” “intriguing ideas,” and absurd premises, but I intend to keep Rog's medicine cabinet nailed shut. My sense of reality is just fine, thank you, but I don't intend to let it interfere with my sense of the fantastic.
This editorial was inspired by theED SF Project—edsf project.blogspot.com—, a homage to the late Scifiction. At press time, "The Yellow Pill” was still archived online at www.scifi.com/sci fiction/classics/classicsarchive/ phillips/index.html.
Copyright © 2006 Sheila Williams
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Reflections: Sixtus The Sixth by
by Robert Silverberg
Even in the high-tech twenty-first century, putting out magazines like this is a complicated affair, still involving a lot of low-tech stuff like editing and proofreading and printing and binding and stapling and shipping, and so I have to write these columns many months in advance. For you, down there in 2006, the story of the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor is old news, and the world's attention is focused somewhere else. But for me, back here in the previous year like a stranded time traveler, the fascinating story out of the Vatican is still making the big headlines. In my time-line, the new pope—Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Ratzinger—was elected just a few days ago.
Why, you may wonder, does this matter to me, and why should I think that it does to you? Does the election of a pope have anything to do with science fiction? Well, no, not usually. But I did actually write a science fiction story about just such an event ("Good News from the Vatican") back in 1971. That story is definitely science fiction, since the new pope turns out to be a robot, and I won a Nebula for it. So I myself provide a link of sorts between the papacy and science fiction. And not just for that story, as you'll discover in a moment.
Am I, then, a devout Roman Catholic? Nope. I'm not a devout Catholic nor a lapsed one nor even a Christian at all. Like Isaac Asimov, who wrote these columns before me, I was born into the Jewish faith. As it was with Isaac also, my Judaism has always been entirely a matter of cultural background rather than religious observance, but Jewish is what I call myself whenever I'm asked about my religious affiliations.
It will, then, seem quite odd to you—and it certainly ought to—that I have often been heard to say, over the past four decades or so, that it's my ambition to become pope. I've even picked out a papal name for myself: Sixtus the Sixth. (The first pope of that name attained the post in 115 AD, and was, by a curious coincidence, the sixth pope to follow St. Peter, who was the first holder of the title. Fourteen centuries later, Sixtus the Fourth was responsible for the construction of the Sistine Chapel, which is named for him. But no pope has called himself Sixtus since Sixtus the Fifth chose the name in 1585, and there is something about being called Sixtus the Sixth that I find irresistible.)
What gave me the notion of becoming pope in the first place was, in fact, a remarkable if obscure fantasy novel—ah, the relevance to this magazine's readership surfaces!—by the eccentric English novelist Frederick Rolfe: Hadrian the Seventh, first published in 1904, still in print, and well worth the attention of the curious.
Rolfe (1860-1913), who liked to call himself “Baron Corvo” without any genealogical justification, was a prickly, difficult, brilliant man, surely afflicted with a touch of paranoia, who, as a twenty-six-year-old schoolmaster, converted to Catholicism, sought to enter the priesthood, was rejected, and spent the rest of his life as an impoverished, embittered recluse. He was, however, a gifted novelist, and his masterpiece, Hadrian the Seventh, is perhaps the ultimate in wish-fulfillment fantasies, for it concerns one George Arthur Rose, a convert to Catholicism who is thwarted in his attempt to become a priest, lives for years as an impoverished, embittered recluse, and then gains the sympathetic ear of an English member of the College of Cardinals, who agrees that a great injustice has been done to him. Just then the pope dies, and Rose accompanies his new friend, the cardinal, to Rome for the election of a successor. The electoral conclave is deadlocked for days—and then, abruptly, an astounding compromise is reached in which George Arthur Rose, the rejected priest, is chosen as the new pope at the English cardinal's suggestion.
It is a surprising moment, though Rolfe manages somehow to make it seem almos
t plausible. Rose himself is flabbergasted. But he rises quickly to the occasion, for he is, of course, not only deeply religious but a man of almost superhuman genius. His first papal act is to choose his regnal name: because the last pope of English birth was Hadrian the Fourth, he will call himself Hadrian as well, Hadrian the Seventh, as he grandly announces: “It pleases Us, and so, by Our Own impulse, We command."
He commands a great deal after that. Frederick Rolfe plainly had been pondering the imperfections of the world for many years, and Pope Hadrian briskly goes about remedying those imperfections according to his creator's wishes.
He begins by appointing half a dozen old friends to the College of Cardinals; then he lets it be known that the Church will henceforth hew more closely to the teachings of Jesus, and to that end he sells off the vast art treasures of the Vatican and has the money used for charitable purposes; he redesigns the crucifix; and, finally, declaring that the pope is in fact the absolute ruler of the whole world, he resurrects the Roman Empire, appoints Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany as Emperor of the North and King Victor Emanuel of Italy as Emperor of the South, merges all of northern Europe from France to Russia into the northern empire, and awards the other European nations, apart from England, to the southern one. By a similar process he bestows all of Latin America on the United States and gives England control of Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and all of Asia except Siberia, which goes to Japan. “Thus,” Rolfe writes, “the Supreme Arbitrator provided the human race with scope and opportunity for energy.” An international treaty is drawn up confirming these papal decrees and the nations of the world, obligingly falling in line, sign it in St. Peter's Square. And so it goes, until a Socialist crackpot assassinates Hadrian and he is wafted off to heaven in an aura of sanctity.