Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11 Read online

  Reader's Departments

  Saturday, January 1, 2011

  EDITORIAL

  Stanley Schmidt

  It’s often been said (and not without reason) that there are probably as many definitions of science fiction as there are people defining it. The same can probably be said of other genres, too, such as alternate history. I bring that up now because recently I’ve seen quite a few submissions, some of...

  BIOLOG

  Richard A. Lovett

  Juliette Wade knows what it’s like to be an alien, trying to communicate. Partly that’s because she did a Ph.D. thesis studying cultural linguistics. But she’s also had personal experience. “A lot of...

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  Jeffery D. Kooistra

  For those of you who already understand electromagnetic retardation, you may skim the first few paragraphs. For those of you who “think maybe” you understand it, or know you don’t, read the first paragraphs carefully and bear with me—it’s worth the exercise. Consider a long, uniformly charged rod at...

  IN TIMES TO COME

  Our March issue features a mix of fiction and fact varied in all ways, from writers old and new, on scales from very large to very small, and in settings from very near to very far. Paul Carlson, who made his debut here a couple of years ago with “Shotgun Seat,” his quietly sneaky tale of robotic...

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  Science fiction is unusual among the genres because it routinely appears in all different lengths. This isn’t quite the case with other types of fiction. It’s rare to see romance stories shorter than novella-length; historical fiction and thrillers almost exclusively appear in novel length or...

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Stan, Well, this is a first. I haven’t even finished reading this month’s issue yet (September 2010), and I’m already dropping everything to write you and let you know that this one is the best ever. The “Leviathan” story (Eric James Stone) was a pure joy. Its simplicity and sincerity were just...

  2010 Index

  Here is the Index to 2010, Analog’s Volume CXXX. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author, with month and page. When the author’s name and/or part of the entry’s title is omitted, it is the same as that of the previous entry. Multiple entries by the same author are listed alphabetically...

  IT’S ANLAB TIME AGAIN

  Welcome to the year 2011! As usual, we’re asking you to choose your favorites via the Analytical Laboratory. Not only will your votes provide tangible awards for authors and artists, but your feedback...

  UPCOMING EVENTS

  Anthony Lewis

  4–6 March 2011 POTLATCH 20 (Non-profit, literary event for the readers and writers of speculative fiction; proceeds benefit Clarion West) at Domain Hotel, Sunnyvale CA. Book of Honor: Earth Abides by George Stewart. Membership: $55 until 30 November 2010 (check website for updates), Youth (7-17)...

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  EDITORIAL

  ALTERNATIVES PAST AND FUTURE

  Stanley Schmidt

  It’s often been said (and not without reason) that there are probably as many definitions of science fiction as there are people defining it. The same can probably be said of other genres, too, such as alternate history.

  I bring that up now because recently I’ve seen quite a few submissions, some of them of very high quality, that I consider alternate history but not science fiction. Many readers have made it clear, frequently and in no uncertain terms, that they consider Analog one of the few places where they can count on finding stories that fit a pretty stringent definition of science fiction—and they therefore consider its pages valuable turf that should be reserved for such stories and not opened to others, no matter how good, that don’t meet those criteria.

  As editor, I ultimately report to you, the readers. You’re the boss, and my job is to give you what you want a large percentage of the time. (I have no delusions that I, or anyone else, can realistically hope to do it all the time.) My decisions about what to buy or not buy are determined by what I think you’ll like. So it’s to our mutual benefit if I occasionally try to tell you plainly what criteria I’m using, and get a feel for how much you agree with them.

  Ideally, the science fiction I’m looking for here should meet these two tests: Some element of speculative science (or its applied offshoot, technology) should be so integral to the story that it can’t be removed without making the story collapse.

  The author should make a reasonable effort to make whatever science is in the story, including the speculative part, plausible. This may mean that it’s careful extrapolation based on science we already know, but it doesn’t have to. It can equally well be based on completely new science, postulated by the author, that hasn’t so far been discovered (and quite possibly never will) but conceivably could be in the future.

  Note carefully that the story may not be primarily about the new science or technology per se. Usually it won’t, though it can be if the speculation is extremely original and interesting. These days readers generally expect more, and want the story to explore not just the idea itself, but how it might affect human (or other) life. The primary focus of the story will be on the characters, even though what happens to them is inextricably wrapped up with some external change resulting from a new discovery or invention.

  Or, to put it another way, science fiction typically explores, in Harry Turtledove’s words, “the effect of ideas on human history.”

  So does alternate history.

  Therein lies the potential for differences of opinion about what is science fiction, alternate history, or both. And the answer, as I see it, is not trivially simple.

  Some would say that any alternate history is a subtype of science fiction because they both postulate some change in our world—either the way it might be in the future because of some change that hasn’t happened, or a change in what our present world might be if something had gone differently in the past. Some would say that the difference is just that in science fiction the pivotal change lies in our future and in alternate history it lies in the past.

  I don’t think it’s that simple. I can’t offhand think of anything I’d call alternate history that isn’t set in the past or present, because since the future isn’t yet defined, there’s nothing for a future story to be “alternate to.” But while most science fiction is set in a potential future, I can easily think of examples that aren’t. Michael F. Flynn, early in his career, seemed to be specializing in stories that were very clearly science fiction yet were set in the past, present, or very near future. Some of them I wouldn’t call alternate history at all, because they don’t necessarily require the world to be any different than it is, but rather show one possible version of how we may have got where we are when the real details aren’t known. “Ashes” (Analog, December 1986) shows a very early technological turning point that conceivably actually happened, but left no record that we can read directly. “Eifelheim” (November 1986, later expanded to the impressive novel of the same name [Tor, 2006]) deals with a settlement of marooned extraterrestrials that, for all we can know at present, could actually have existed in medieval Germany.

  Some other science fiction set in the past clearly is alternate history. One of my favorite examples is A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove, generally regarded as the foremost practitioner of alternate history (and to whom I am grateful for thought-provoking discussions leading in part to today’s musings). Now best known as a 1988 novel from Congdon & Weed or a 1994 reissue by Baen, this origina
ted as a series of shorter stories here and in Asimov’s exploring a past in which the first Europeans to colonize the Americas found that things had gone a little differently than in our world. Their New World was already occupied not by Amerindians, but by “sims,” or Homo erectus (and assorted surviving megafauna). That’s quintessentially alternate history, because it traces the evolution of an Earth that developed quite differently from the one we live in. It’s also quintessentially science fiction, because it postulates a big, fundamental, yet plausible change in the facts of anthropology and paleontology, and asks, “What if?”

  As those examples suggest, I consider science fiction and alternate history to be separate but overlapping fields. A given story can be either, neither, or both. The defining difference, as I see it, is not whether the event that separates the speculative world from our world occurs in the past or the future, but the nature of the splitting event. A Different Flesh is clearly and admirably not only alternate history but science fiction because it imagines the large and small changes in our world that might have resulted if certain massive extinctions had not occurred—which was a real possibility.

  Many other alternate histories are just as clearly not science fiction because they involve no significant changes in the laws of nature or how they play out in the large-scale development of the world. Examples include stories in which Hitler is killed before coming to power, the American Revolution is squashed by the British, or Napoleon returns triumphant from Waterloo. In any of these cases, human history would diverge so drastically from the course it took that our lives would be dramatically different—but the essential nature of the world would not. The details of who won a battle or an election just aren’t that important in the cosmic scheme of things.

  On the other hand . . .

  It’s not hard to imagine cases in which the border doesn’t look so clear. If the reversal of a battle that went one way in our world started a chain of events that led to a different kind of science developing in our world—say, someone’s making discoveries that wouldn’t happen in our world because cultural biases keep a particular kind of research from being done—the resulting story would have a strong claim on science-fictional territory.

  How about an alternate history in which the change in the past didn’t alter what kind of science was known, or how the physical world developed, but simply who did a particular kind of work first? Such a story, by virtue of exploring how science and technology develop and what makes revolutions in them happen, could certainly make a case for being considered science fiction. But it wouldn’t convince everybody, if the content of the science is not significantly different from ours.

  That fuzzy borderland is the area that gives me problems in choosing stories for Analog. My sense from extensive comments from you, the readers, is that most, but not all, of you will balk at our publishing stories don’t involve a significant change in the science itself—what it says or what happens as a result of it, not just who discovers it or when. But some of you do like some stories, even here, that postulate alternate histories of science, even if the science itself is unchanged. We’ve published some such stories that were warmly received, such as Harry Turtledove’s “But It Does Move” (June 2009), in which a thinly disguised Sigmund Freud convinces Galileo he’s actually wrong.

  But that was a novelette, a relatively short story that developed an intriguing idea enough to tickle readers’ imaginations, but well within the confines of a single issue. The longer the story is, the harder it is to hold the readers’ fascination unless it can continue to build with more ideas of comparable originality and power. And the longer a story is, the more essential it is to keep a large percentage of readers thoroughly engaged.

  One of the things that make editing a magazine fun is that, since we have several stories in an issue, we can take an occasional chance on something that some readers will consider perfect for the magazine and others will consider unsuitable. That’s a luxury that book publishers, with an entire package riding on a single story, don’t have. But when stories get very long, and especially when they occupy large parts of several consecutive issues as a serial, we have to start thinking more like book publishers. A story based on a single idea that fascinates readers at 10,000 words may dangerously annoy them if it runs to 80,000 over four issues.

  So when considering an alternate history that some readers will consider science fiction and some won’t, I must weigh very carefully how many I think will welcome it for how long. That means I must think long and hard about where to draw the line; and the longer the story is, the harder I must think.

  I’ve tried to give you a feel for where I think the line should be drawn. Both alternate history and science fiction explore the consequences of a change in our world, either past or future. But for alternate history to be science fiction, the change must have something directly to do with science (and, with few exceptions, not just the history of science).

  What do you think?

  Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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  BIOLOG

  JULIETTE WADE

  Richard A. Lovett

  Juliette Wade knows what it’s like to be an alien, trying to communicate. Partly that’s because she did a Ph.D. thesis studying cultural linguistics. But she’s also had personal experience. “A lot of my inspiration comes from [living] in Japan or visiting France,” she says. “I’ve been put into ‘Here, you’re a visiting alien’ situations quite a few times.”

  In her Ph.D. work (technically in education) she got to observe the process from a neutral perspective, sitting in on classes where Japanese teachers taught American students. Her research involved observing the frequency with which students and teachers used formal versus informal words. “In Japanese, there is no neutral form,” she says. “It’s either formal or casual. You really can’t say anything without committing yourself to either a formal or casual stance.”

  The result is a language full of traps for outsiders. “It doesn’t just reflect on your ability to speak the language,” she says. “It reflects on your character. People don’t say, ‘She’s speaking overly casually because she’s a learner.’ They say, ‘She’s speaking overly casually because she’s rude.’”

  Wade never set out to be a science fiction writer, but she can’t remember a time when she didn’t love the genre. “I wrote lots of stories as a kid.” By high school, however, she’d switched to science, planning to major in biology—a plan that faltered in college. “I couldn’t stand organic chemistry,” she says. Still, she thinks the background helps her writing. “At least I am familiar with the scientific mindset.”

  From biology, she switched to her second love, linguistics, and from there to linguistic anthropology so she could focus on the interplay of language and culture.

  But soon enough, she shifted back to her childhood love of writing. “Once I started, it was like I’d opened a spigot,” she says. “It was actually quite frightening. Here I was two years into a Ph.D. program, and all I wanted to do was write!”

  Like many beginners, she started with a novel. Or more like a trilogy: 350,000 words of fantasy she hopes someday to beat into marketable form. Then, after a few efforts at short fantasy, she wrote a science fiction story and showed it to a well-known author, who advised her to send it to Analog editor Stanley Schmidt. “I had researched fantasy magazines,” she says, “[but] I had to ask, ‘Who’s Stan Schmidt?’ I was so embarrassed!” The story, “Let the Word Take Me” (July/August 2008) became her first sale.

  Given her background, it’s no surprise she likes linguistics-related stories of how culture can make aliens alien. “I’m not so interested in code cracking,” she says. “What I’m interested in is what happens after the code cracking, when you think you have the answer but you really don’t.”

  She also likes stories that shed light on our own humanity. The science ficti
onal milieu, she says, frees you to think about things that would otherwise be either too “normal,” or too uncomfortable. And that, she says, is what makes such stories powerful.

  Copyright © 2010 Richard A. Lovett

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  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  JEFIMENKO’S LAST WORD ON GRAVITY

  Jeffery D. Kooistra

  For those of you who already understand electromagnetic retardation, you may skim the first few paragraphs. For those of you who “think maybe” you understand it, or know you don’t, read the first paragraphs carefully and bear with me—it’s worth the exercise.

  Consider a long, uniformly charged rod at rest in “thought experiment space” (I’m picturing something the size and shape of a spear handle). At a point P many rod lengths away from the rod and near, but not on, an imaginary line drawn through the long axis of the rod, we place a charge detector. The detector tells us the magnitude and direction of the electric force due to the rod at the point P at a time t. Looking more closely at the rod itself, we realize that the portion of the rod closest to point P (let’s call it the front)—because electromagnetic interactions take place at the speed of light—posted (or sent out) its contribution to the measurement taken at P a tiny bit later than the portion contributed from the very back end, just late enough so that both contributions arrived at P at exactly the time t.

  Indeed, every portion of the rod, from back to front, sent out its contribution slightly in advance of the portion in front of it. Also, given where we picked P to be, even though the rod is uniformly charged, the back is farther away than the front, so though the signal starts sooner at the back, it is weaker when it gets there.

  That little time delay is retardation, but as long as the situation is static (no relative motion) the details about exactly when each portion sent out its contribution don’t matter. Since the measured value is independent of time, the speed of electromagnetic propagation could just as well be instantaneous, or three rods per fortnight—it won’t make any difference.