Analog Science Fiction and Fact 12/01/10 Read online

  The role of inner planets was investigated in two sets of runs by putting analogs of Venus and Earth with appropriate masses in orbits at 0.7 and 1.0 AU and observing the effects and orbit stability. It was found that while the presence of these inner planets had little effect on outer planet formation beyond the ice line, the effect of the outer planets on the inner ones was significant. In all 10 runs of one simulation, the “Earth” and “Venus” analogs collided after 15 to 70 million years, leaving a single planet of a few Earth-masses in an orbit around 0.8 AU. The conclusion from this is that in the most probable scenario, in which no gas giants form, planetary systems with multiple inner planets are unlikely. With no gas giants, you would get only one crack at having an Earth-like planet.

  The authors concluded by considering the future testability of their results. They considered the chances that existing planet-detection techniques and proposed space missions might detect planets of the masses and orbits predicted by their calculations. In particular, they consider ground-based Doppler and microlensing detection and the space missions Kepler and the space interferometry mission SIM-Lite. They concluded that the Doppler technique could detect none of the predicted planets. Microlensing studies at large ground-based telescopes might be able to detect the half of the predicted planets having orbits with a less than 6 AU. The Kepler and SIM-Lite missions are less sensitive, but might detect roughly a third of the predicted planets with a less than 2.5 AU. In other words, we can expect the predictions of the calculations to be tested in the next few years, primarily with ground-based microlensing techniques.

  From the point of view of science fiction, the message of these calculations is a bit dismaying. Our own Solar System is not a model that we expect to find repeated elsewhere in the galaxy. It is the unlikely product of gas giant formation followed by a resonant period of chaotic Late Heavy Bombardment that happened to place Jupiter at 5.2 AU. This was far enough out to leave the inner system relatively unperturbed, so that Venus, Earth, and Mars could form and have stable orbits in the inner region.

  The more likely scenario is that no gas giants form. Instead, a set of outer planets with masses less than that of Uranus form, the largest of which, with 10 or so Earth-masses, orbits at about 1.5 AU. This probably leaves room for only one inner planet, which may or may not have a mass, orbit, and water and heavy metal content appropriate to be Earth-like and to support life. The universe is a difficult and hostile place for life, and only a multiple series of lucky accidents prepared the Earth as a cradle for life.

  We would be well advised to take better care of our Cradle.

  AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 150 “The Alternate View” columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av.

  References:

  Detection of Extrasolar Planets:

  “The Keck Planet Search: Detectability and the Minimum Mass and Orbital Period Distribution of Extrasolar Planets,” A. Cumming, R.P. Butler, G.W. Marcy, S.S. Vogt, J.T. Wright, and D.A. Fischer, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 120, 531—554 (2008).

  See also The Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets, http://www.exoplanets.org

  Computer Simulations of Outer Planet Formation:

  “The Invisible Majority: Evolution and Detection of Outer Planetary Systems without Gas Giants,” A.W. Mann, E. Gaidos, and B.S. Gaudi; arXiv e-print: 1007.2881v1.

  Copyright © 2010 John G. Cramer

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  Reader's Departments

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  This being the December issue, it’s the time of year when everyone is thinking about gift giving. And for a lot of Analog readers, giving gifts means giving books and other stuff to read. Naturally, you want to give science fiction—what better way to spread good will?

  The single best gift for any SF reader is, of course, a subscription to Analog. If you want a book for someone who’s already an Analog subscriber, I’ve reviewed many fine titles over the past year. But suppose you have family or friends who aren’t exactly Analog-type readers? (Don’t be ashamed, so does everyone.) In that case, I have some good books here that you can give with confidence. And who knows? You might want to read some of them yourself.

  Unwind

  Neal Shusterman

  Simon & Schuster, 352 pages,

  $8.99 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-4169-1205-7

  Genre: Young Adult SF

  For the teen reader on your list, you can’t do much better than Unwind. In addition to being a great adventure story, this is science fiction in the best tradition. After a bitter civil war over the issue of abortion, a compromise was reached in the so-called “Bill of Life.” Life is sacred and abortion is strictly illegal. However, between the ages of 13 and 18, unwanted children can be retroactively aborted, at which time their organs are harvested to keep others alive. This process is called “unwinding.”

  The story introduces us to three teens who are due for unwinding. Risa is an orphan girl at an orphanage with budget problems; unwinding her is one way of reducing costs. Lev, son of strict religionists, has known all his life that he will be unwound. And Connor is a mischievous boy whose parents just want to be rid of the trouble.

  Fleeing their fate, these three kids find each other and set out to elude authorities and somehow survive until they turn 18 and escape unwinding.

  Shusterman is an old hand at young adult SF and fantasy; he is a great storyteller and his characters ring completely true. His exploration of the social implications of unwinding is worthy of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Unwind is gripping, disturbing, and thought-provoking. Smart teens will love it, and even adults can get a lot out of the book.

  The War That Came Early: West and East

  Harry Turtledove

  Del Rey, 436 pages, $27.00 (Hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-345-49184-8

  Genre: Alternate History

  Series: War That Came Early 2

  For the military history buff (or even the straight history fan), Harry Turtledove is a sure bet. Here, the emperor of alternate history returns to territory he’s mined before: World War II. In Hitler’s War, the first book in this series, Hitler started the war in 1938 with an attack on Czechoslovakia, rather than in 1939 attacking Poland. In fact, as the German army conquers Holland, Belgium, and northern France, Poland becomes a German ally—as does Spain, under a different leader than Franco.

  West and East takes up the story where the previous volume left off, with Allied forces successfully defending Paris and German-Polish forces bogged down in Russia. In his usual style, Turtledove shows us the unfolding of his alternate history through a variety of sympathetic and well-drawn characters: American soldier Pete McGill in Japanese-controlled Singapore, American Peggy Druce marooned in Germany, the German Jewish family the Goldmans, and a host of combatants on both sides. Throughout the book, the main question becomes: when will America enter the war?

  For someone who hasn’t read the first book, East and West stands on its own. Turtledove is a master at making each book in a series readable without familiarity with earlier volumes; you can trust him.

  Just as the best SF can be enjoyed even by a reader not familiar with all the details of cutting-edge science, East and West is a book that one can enjoy without knowing Chamberlain from Khrushchev or Byelorussia from Belgium. At the same time, a history buff with an encyclopedic knowledge of the war will be delighted at all the references and speculations.

  The Passage

  Justin Cronin

  Ballantine, 786 pages, $27.00 (Hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-345-50496-8

  Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Literary

  If you have a friend or family member who is of a literary bent, do I have a book for you!

  In literary circles, the hot buzzword is “post-apocalyptic.” Post-Apocalyptic
literary fiction traces its lineage back to George Stewart’s 1949 book Earth Abides, but only became respectable and popular when Cormac McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for The Road. (What’s that? You say science fiction was there decades before, that we had pretty much mined out the post-apocalyptic story by the mid-1980s? Yeah, but those books and stories weren’t Serious, you see. Literary fiction is Serious and Meaningful, don’tcha know?)

  The Passage is Serious and Meaningful enough to please any literary fiction reader, yet a good enough story for even Analog’s more experienced readers to get a kick out of. The book is set in the standard Century After the Disaster, in this case, with a vampire-creating plague developed by scientists working in a secret government lab (oh, when will they ever learn?). All that’s left of normal humanity is a small, walled colony off in the woods.

  Then, walking out of the woods as if nothing is wrong, comes a teenage girl. Does she bring salvation, or the end of everything?

  Okay, it’s fun to have a good laugh at the literary folks getting excited over stories that were old news in SF last century, but the fact is that The Passage is a good story, well-written and filled with believable characters and plenty of well-imagined detail—over 750 pages of it! Give it to your literary friends, and maybe in the ensuing dialogue you can slip in the fact that Theodore Sturgeon was already there 60 (gasp) years ago.

  After America

  John Birmingham

  Del Rey, 480 pages, $26.00

  ISBN: 978-0-345-50291-9

  Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Techno-Thriller

  Series: Without Warning 2

  Another post-apocalyptic, this one aimed at the techno-thriller crowd who made Tom Clancy and Dale Brown household names. Birmingham has fused SF and techno-thrillers before, in his Axis of Time series (in which a U.S. Navy ship from 2021 time-travels back to 1942 and settles that whole World War II unpleasantness with great dispatch), so he’s no stranger to this territory.

  In the first book, Without Warning, a mysterious energy wave devastates nearly the entire continental United States in March 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. The rest of the book is a rather fun romp through a world in which the U.S. no longer exists as a superpower, the resettlement of America, and the rise of engineer James Kipper to the post of U.S. President.

  After America continues the fun. President Kipper has his plate full with pirates, carpet-baggers, an incomprehensible military, and a Texas despot who has gone and seceded from the Union. Meanwhile, a cast of characters across the world deals with rogue agents, international criminals, and other lowlifes.

  Neither Without Warning or After America are too heavy on the military acronym-speak that occurs in most techno-thrillers (although an occasional M249 SAW gunner or MPAT round does sneak in), so they’re pretty accessible. Birmingham is Australian, and there’s enough wry Aussie tongue-in-cheek to keep any reader amused, even if the politics of post-apocalyptic survival aren’t quite enough.

  The Ocean Dark

  Jack Rogan

  Ballantine, 368 pages, $7.99 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-345-52072-2

  Genre: SF/Horror

  Just a couple of decades ago, horror fiction was considered to be (no pun intended) a dying field. Things got so bad that Stephen King was about the only writer making money in horror, and even he was telling people that he didn’t write horror anymore. Fortunately there has been a resurgence, and nowadays horror fiction is quite healthy.

  The line dividing SF from horror has always been a porous one; take out the supernatural element, throw in a mad scientist or two, and you’ve got a horror story that’s borderline SF. But recently there’s been more than the usual amount of cross-fertilization between the two fields; readers on both sides are getting more accustomed to having horror and SF interpenetrate.

  If you have a horror reader on your shopping list, do them a favor and give them The Ocean Dark.

  It starts out so innocently, as they always do. Tori Austin, a woman on the run, takes a job with a shipping company and ships out of Miami on board the container ship Antoinette. The ship is a rusty old bucket filled with mysterious containers and unsettling crewmen. Gradually it dawns on Tori that things are not as they seem: there’s gun-smuggling going on. Tori finds FBI agent Rachel Voss working undercover on the ship, trying to track down the bad guys.

  When the Antoinette makes an unscheduled stop at an uncharted Caribbean island, Tori and Rachel expect a latter-day Tortuga, but the story takes a more dramatic turn. There are these creatures, you see ... ocean-dwelling vampiric creatures, the source of the legends of sirens.

  Enter scientist Alena Boudreau and her grandson David, the only people to have survived an encounter with the sirens. They join up with Tori and Rachel and suddenly the four of them are on the run, hunted by these critters and desperate to survive.

  The three things that make horror stories good are unusual threats, interesting locales, and good characters. The Ocean Dark has all three in abundance. It’s refreshing to see a horror novel with so many strong women as main characters; gone are the days when the woman’s job was to scream and faint in the monster’s clutches (and good riddance!). There’s enough science to give the sirens a justification, and the resolution is nicely satisfying. To top it off, The Ocean Dark succeeds in the one indispensable job of any horror story: it’s scary.

  Blood Law

  Jeannie Holmes

  Dell, 400 pages, $7.99

  ISBN: 978-0-553-59267-2

  Genre: Paranormal Romance

  It’s possible that you might want a gift for a romance reader. I don’t think I’m off base in assuming that romances are a bit outside the comfort range of the average Analog reader. If you’re picturing Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steel, and lurid Harlequin paperbacks, don’t worry—this isn’t going to hurt anywhere near as much as you fear.

  So far we’ve had viral vampires in The Passage and aquatic vampires in The Ocean Dark; now you’re going to have to bear with me as we take a cautious step into paranormal romance territory. It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been watching popular culture that vampires are big these days. We’ve been fairly insulated inside the safe confines of the SF/fantasy fields, but the fact is that international treaties now mandate that 7 out of 10 books published must contain at least one vampire. Paranormal romance authors have been doing more than their part so that SF writers don’t have to.

  Truth is, there are many different ways to write vampires, and some of them are much more palatable than others.

  Take Alexandra (“Alex”) Sabian, for example. She’s a vampire ... but she’s also an enforcer with the FBPI (the Federal Bureau of Preternatural Investigators). To escape the pressures of the big-city preternatural crime scene, she transfers to a quiet Mississippi town where half the 6,000-odd population are vampires. Things aren’t as bucolic as she hopes, though: the local sheriff is a vampire-hating bigot, and there are a lot of tensions between the humans and the vampires.

  When those tensions begin to erupt in a series of gruesome murders of innocent vampires, Alex calls the home office for backup. They send the worst person possible: Varik Baudelaire, who just happens to be Alex’s ex-boyfriend. In the course of catching the vampire-killers, typical romantic difficulties ensue between Alex and Varik.

  There’s enough of a love story here to interest any romance reader, but there’s much more. Jeannie Holmes does a masterful job of imagining and depicting the implications of a society in which vampires are another group in the multicultural stew. She uses many of the same tools and techniques as an SF writer exploring a premise (as Shusterman did in Unwind, for example). Alex Sabian is a great character, and she’s slated to return next year in a sequel.

  Spread the love: Give Blood Law to your favorite romance reader. You will be thanked.

  Nights of Villjamur

  Mark Charan Newton

  Spectra, 438 pages, $26.00

  ISBN: 978-0-345-52084-5

>   Genre: Dying Earth

  Series: Legends of the Red Sun 1

  From H.G. Wells to Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock to Arthur C. Clarke, many writers have set stories at the End of Time, when a dying red sun hangs in the sky, the world is crumbling to an end, and the boundaries between science and magic are blurred. It’s always interesting to argue whether these stories are SF or fantasy.

  For our purposes right now, it doesn’t matter. If you know any fantasy fans and you want to give them a good book, Nights of Villjamur fits the bill perfectly.

  Villjamur is a city on an alien world, a world that is slowly dying in an all-encompassing ice age. The city is inhabited by a number of different species: humans, the long-lived rumel, the avian garuda, and banshees (who are just disturbing). Conditions outside the city are worsening, to the point that refugees surround the city while more continue to pour into the area. Villjamur, once the capital of Empire, is now the last city in the world.

  The Emperor’s oldest daughter, Jamur Rika, becomes Queen and, with the help of her younger sister Jamur Eir, struggles to deal with the rising chaos. There is corruption, and conspiracies, and hidden identities. There are murders and investigations. There are military threats from outside the city’s walls—possibly even from beyond the planet. It’s all a delicious, decadent mess.

  Newton is a superb guide to this intricate, absorbing world. Villjamur is one of those imagined places that very quickly becomes real. The characters are varied and interesting, especially the rumel investigator Rumex Jeryd. The politics and personal relationships are fascinating, and the story doesn’t get bogged down in them the way so many epic fantasies do. A dozen pages in and the reader is caught; 437 pages in and the reader is wondering why there isn’t any more. (Relax, this one is the first in a series. There’s more coming.)