Analog Science Fiction and Fact 04/01/11 Read online

  2. The New York Times, in an article by Tara Parker-Pope (fortuitously dated just one day after the Time article I’ve mentioned), describes a University of Tennessee study in which students at low-income schools were simply given books at a spring fair, with the hope that they would read them. Note that I said given, not assigned. The books—600 titles—were made available, and each student was allowed to take any twelve. Being allowed to choose books they wanted to read, rather than what some stuffy adult told them was Good For Them, turned out to be a powerful—and ridiculously inexpensive—motivator. Even though their choices were seldom what teachers would have picked for them, they worked. The students who picked out free books, unlike a control group, showed a three-year improvement in reading skills equivalent to that produced by three years of summer school. And it was a lot cheaper—and, I suspect, a lot more likely to make those students want to keep reading for the rest of their lives.

  Does anybody really find that surprising? Sometimes good answers really are so simple that those who need to see them look right past them.

  Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt

  * I don’t think it’s necessarily and intrinsically terrible to have learning slow down, stop, or even backtrack for a little while. It strikes me as similar to finding an occasional level stretch or slight descent during a mountain climb. Most of us welcome the break, even though we know it will mean a little more total climbing. The problem with the educational analog is that those with lots of opportunities keep climbing inexorably, and those who don’t will eventually find themselves competing for jobs and other things with those who do. Personally, I suspect many of us could stand to learn that all of life doesn’t have to be a relentless uphill slog, but that’s a problem for another day.

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  BIOLOG

  Richard A. Lovett

  ADAM-TROY CASTRO

  In 2004, Adam-Troy Castro lost his job. As he describes it, it wasn’t much of a job: he was working customer service for a mail-order retailer. “There were some real horror stories involved in it,” he says. So, when he called his wife to tell her the news, her response was simple. “Good. You’re now a full-time writer.”

  Since then, Castro—with 19 books and 90+ short stories to his credit—has moved from an up-and-coming new writer to a genre fixture. His current novella, “Hiding Place,” is part of a three-novel series involving prickly-but-brilliant Andrea Cort of humanity’s Diplomatic Corps. It’s also his sixth appearance in Analog. His first, “The Astronaut from Wyoming” (July 1999, co-authored with Jerry Oltion), was a Hugo and Nebula nominee and, in translation, won the Seiun award, the Japanese equivalent of a Hugo.

  Like many science fiction writers, Castro started young. “I’ve been writing stories since age nine,” he says. In college, at Cornell University, he studied communication arts, with an eye to magazine layout and advertising, but didn’t make it a long-term career. In the process, he also wrote for his college humor magazine, the Cornell Lunatic, though the favorite paying job of his youth was a brief stint as a security guard in a “tunnel of love.” Mostly, that job involved being invisible and unobtrusive. But if he needed to take action, he often had to leap across the canal in the dark. “Frequently, you missed,” he says. On one memorable occasion, he came down with one foot in one boat and one foot in another . . . with the inevitable result.

  All of this got channeled into a humorous bent epitomized by a series of stories he did in the 1990s about a pair of “interstellar idiots” named Vossoff and Nimmitz who inhabit the same universe (more or less) as the much-more-serious Andrea Cort. He’s also done cartoons and nonprofessional standup comedy.

  What Castro prizes above all, however, is variety. “I’ve always liked to change styles,” he says. “I’ve written really crazy comedy; I’ve written dire horror. I have tried to avoid the existence of a ‘typical’ Adam-Troy Castro story.”

  The result: four Spider-man novelizations, horror stories and dark fantasy . . . and a nonfiction book called “My Ox is Broken” cataloging “great moments” from the TV reality show, “The Amazing Race.”

  Oddest of all, perhaps, is a collaborative novel called “Fake Alibis” about an (apparently real) Internet service that will fix you up with an alibi if you need one—so long as it’s not for criminal purposes. “If you want your wife to think you’ve gone to a business convention in Phoenix, but actually you’ve been shacked up with a girlfriend in Boston, they will provide you with a paper trail,” he says.

  Castro may be an author who defies pigeonholing, but he does have one consistent characteristic: he likes character-driven stories. “I enjoy when the character just takes over and says, ‘No, the story’s not going to go this way; it’s going to go that way,’” he says.

  “Hiding Place” is a case in point. “I thought it was going to be a straightforward whodunit,” he says. “Then the character took over.”

  Copyright © 2011 Richard A. Lovett

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  IN TIMES TO COME

  We’re all born into a world in which everything is new and confusing, and we have to try to figure out how it all fits together and how it works and how it affects us. Most of us have help: as Alfred Korzybski said, man is a time-binding animal, and we can build on the accumulated experience and knowledge of all our forebears. For some, though, it’s not nearly so simple. Consider, for example, Erik Acharius Bateson, the young man at the heart of “Tower of Worlds,” Rajnar Vajra’s lead novella (with cover by John Allemand) in our May issue. His world is complex—far more complex than he ever imagined—and full of challenges. He has only a short time to figure out what it is, with few resources but his own, but first he has a more immediate problem: to survive. But then, he, too, is more complex than he ever imagined. . . .

  We’ll also have stories by Ron Collins, Bond Elam, Bud Sparhawk, Walter L. Kleine, and Jerry Oltion, and a fact article that’s a sequel of sorts. A couple of years ago psychiatrist Nick Kanas caught your attention with an article on the psychological problems of space travel, but then he was just talking about travel to “nearby” planets. Next month he looks farther out, to trips whose sheer duration will pose problems on a far more daunting scale, with “To the Outer Solar System and Beyond.”

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  Jeffery D. Kooistra

  AUTHOR FALLS IN LOVE WITH E-READER

  Call me old-fashioned, but until recently I never thought I would get an e-reader. You see, I love books, not just for the content, but in the feeling of sensation. I like the smell of a new book and the way new pages feel to my fingers. I love the aroma of an old book, the way aged and yellowed pages flip easily, the way it opens effortlessly, luring you to read. I like the heft of a heavy book, and delight in the near weightlessness of an old SF paperback novel, printed on cheap paper, when 160 pages or so was enough. (A few weeks ago I finished reading Space Prison by Tom Godwin. It’s an old paperback from 1958 I picked up used a few years ago—158 pages long, and every one of them leaving me anxious to read the next. That’s the kind of book I have in mind.) Also, I’ve never forgotten something Asimov pointed out a long time ago in an essay or editorial, which was simply that books do very well what it is they are supposed to do—present their content in an easy to use way, cheaply, and with complete random access.

  But you can’t fit 3,500 of them between one set of covers.

  Another issue I had was that most of the books I still want to own are very old. As some of you know, I collect old physics textbooks. I don’t collect them for their rarity, nor as artifacts, nor do I much care about their condition so long as I can read them. It is entirely a matter of content, for as time goes b
y, topics once covered in great detail are dropped or abbreviated. This doesn’t usually happen because theories change or because new data has supplanted old, or because an earlier understanding was shown to be incorrect. Rather, topics disappear to make room for new topics, more relevant to the current era. When I began collecting these books, I did not for one second think anyone would go to the trouble of digitizing many of them, and even in cases where they did, not every edition.

  I was wrong about that. It is very likely, perhaps certain, that eventually every book ever written in every edition and language will find its way into digital form, available to anyone anywhere at any time, forever and ever, amen. Not only that, but also every issue of every magazine, newspaper, scientific journal, every photograph, movie, and TV show. In short, anything that can be usefully converted into electronic form will be. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then I would be remiss if I did not come to terms with the modern era and make my peace with e-readers.

  What made me finally accept that I would eventually get one was an advertisement for the latest Kindle e-reader. One thing (actually, the only thing) that really struck me was the size of the unit. In length and width it’s barely bigger than an ordinary paperback, significantly thinner, and weighs only eight ounces or so. I’ve tried reading e-books on a netbook, but I hate it—I spend too much time thinking about what I’m reading with, rather than losing myself in the book. Like most people, I have a favorite place to read at home. In my case it’s an old rocker-recliner not far from the fireplace. Try as I might, I could never get comfortable reading in it with a netbook in my lap. But I had a hunch that this little Kindle might be just the ticket.

  This column isn’t a review of the new Kindle. I’m not interested in pushing one kind of e-reader over another. I like what I like, and I’m sure a different e-reader—or no e-reader at all—would serve others just as well. Indeed, some of you have had an e-reader for years. Now that I own one, I find myself having some of the most optimistic thoughts I’ve had in years about the future of publishing, and of reading, and of the possibility that one day each of us will have access to the sum of all human knowledge.

  I admit, I didn’t need an e-reader right now. I have more than enough books stacked up, yet to be read—more than I’ll get to before I die. I wish I could say that, like a wise and prudent consumer, I looked into all the available options, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each particular kind of e-reader, but I didn’t. A few days after seeing that ad, I took another look at the size of the Kindle, the price of the Kindle ($139 at the time), noted that my birthday was a week away, and bought it online.

  So what is it like? Is it as easy as reading a book? I can’t speak to how well other e-readers work, but my little Kindle is easier to read than a book, and I’m not kidding. The screen of my device uses electronic paper, which means that like a book page, it uses ink and room light to see it. The ink pixels are simply reoriented every time you advance a page into new letters or back into white space. But unlike with a book, with my Kindle I can change the contrast, the size of the characters, the orientation of the page, the line spacing, and even the typeface. For a bifocal-wearing dude like me, the ability to turn any book into a large print edition with the flick of a finger is nearly miraculous.

  Another nice thing about electronic paper is that it uses very little power. The only time any electricity is needed is when the page is changed. Once the pixels are in place, no more power is consumed, unlike with the display on a netbook or cell phone. This means you only need to charge the thing about once a month, unless you use the Wi-Fi a lot to stay connected to the Internet. In that case (the instructions say; I use the Wi-Fi sparingly), you may have to charge it every three weeks. I don’t mind that the display is monochrome. I’d be happy with it forever. But it is inevitable that future e-readers, while remaining low power devices, will have full color capability and be able to show you everything a laptop can now. [Slightly before this issue went to press, the NookColor from Barnes & Noble became available. Ed.]

  I transferred some e-books into the Kindle as soon as it arrived, but the first recent book I bought in Kindle format was the outstanding biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. I’d had my eye on it for months, and when my friends gave me an Amazon ten-dollar gift e-card for my birthday, I used it and ordered the Kindle edition of the book from Amazon. Though I completed the transaction with my laptop, a few seconds later I watched as my Kindle lit up and told me the book was incoming. Seconds later, there it was. I’m used to it now, but that first time was definitely an “I’m in the future now” moment. Over the next few days I read the book and found it engrossing. It certainly lives up to its rave reviews. As for the e-reading experience, it turned out I enjoyed reading it electronically more than I would have had it been an ordinary book. I not only looked forward to reading the book itself, but I actually looked forward to the experience of reading it on an e-reader!

  Interestingly enough, the Kindle came preloaded with a friendly letter from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In the letter he said, “Our top design objective was for Kindle to disappear in your hands—to get out of the way—so you can enjoy your reading. We hope you’ll quickly forget you’re reading on an advanced wireless device and instead be transported into that mental realm readers love . . .” Why, thank you, Mr. Bezos. Mission accomplished!

  E-readers come with financial dangers I found out quite quickly while sitting there in my easy chair and trying out the wireless feature. It said it would take me to the Kindle store, so why not? Off I went and there found a category for SF books. I clicked on over to it and one of the first books I found (without even trying) available in a Kindle edition, was Space Prison. I don’t know if my jaw actually dropped open, but it should have.

  Space Prison. This obscure book I picked up at a library used book sale. Never heard of it before, and only knew the author from “The Cold Equations.” But if Space Prison was available—

  The Metaxas book I’d bought the old fashioned way with my laptop. But now I didn’t need my laptop, and the Kindle was already logged into the store. Next stop, religion, G. K. Chesterton, the Father Brown stories. There they were, all of them, for a buck or two. Zap! Mine! Chesterton’s Orthodoxy? Yes! Zap! The Everlasting Man? Zap!

  I went on like that for a while. Two versions of the Bible, John Calvin’s commentaries on Genesis and Daniel (four volumes, all mine for a couple of dollars, and I had wanted those for years). I tried out science and without even looking, found Lorentz’s book, The Einstein Theory of Relativity, for $0.99. Zap! Of course I searched on “aether.” Bingo. Aether and Gravitation by a fella named William George Hooper. Never heard of it, but it was over 100 years old and it cost a dollar.

  (About that Hooper book—I’m not sure it was worth the dollar.)

  In my zest to acquire, finally and in any form, books I had long sought, I lost my head for a bit that night. It ultimately dawned on me that maybe I didn’t actually need to buy these books. Not now, anyway. Many of them I could get online, for free, any time I actually needed them, though perhaps not (yet) in Kindle format. The Internet is rapidly becoming just one big library, isn’t it? Did I really need to have my own copies of the books stored on my e-reader?

  Come to think of it, weren’t we rapidly approaching the point where there would no longer be much reason to actually buy a book? Alas, the thorny question of how the writer makes any money (or the singer or the movie star) if everything is infinitely reproducible and available immediately for free (or nearly so).

  I don’t know how it will all work out, but somehow or other it will. The sum of all human knowledge, available on demand instantly from the comfort of your favorite chair, will not be spurned. It’s too useful and it’s too valuable, and it’s just too darn entertaining for that not to happen, and soon. But as I found with the Hooper book, not all of that knowledge is worth knowing, or even looking at; still, I’m not in favor of letting any of it disappear.
Even Hooper has his moments.

  The old saying is true: “Knowledge is power.” Having all of it available in the palm of your hand is an unprecedented gift. But only for those with the wisdom to appreciate it.

  Copyright © 2011 Jeffery D. Kooistra

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  Perhaps the most overused phrase in science fiction publishing (besides “space opera”) is “eagerly awaited.” It’s not a claim that’s easily disproved—after all, every book is eagerly awaited by someone, if only its author. But that’s not how the marketers want you to see it. They want to give the impression that hordes of rabid fans are lined up for blocks in front of bookstores, in the fashion of Harry Potter or Twilight, counting the seconds until they get the new title in their hot little hands. In this way they hope to build excitement, which leads to more sales.

  And we really can’t blame the marketers; it’s their job to sell books. But let’s be honest for a moment . . . very few books are actually “eagerly awaited” by more than a comparative handful of readers. If that phrase is to mean anything useful, there ought to be some ground rules. Let’s count the ways that science fiction can legitimately be “eagerly awaited.”

  First, consider the science fiction magazines. As far back as the pulp era of the 1930s, readers impatiently anticipated each new issue. Isaac Asimov told of filling school notebooks with calculations of how many seconds remained until the next issue of Astounding hit the stands. To judge from the message boards, modern subscribers to Analog know exactly how he felt. Here, then, is our first category of “eagerly awaited”: magazines—or, indeed, anything that’s published periodically on a more-or-less regular schedule (and now you know why librarian-types often call magazines “periodicals.”) Periodic anthologies also count, like the various “best of the year” reprint volumes or well-regarded original anthologies like George Mann’s Solaris Book of New Science Fiction or Roby James’ Warrior Wisewoman.