Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (37 page)

John W. Campbell, Jr.
(1910-1971) has not one but two awards named after him:
The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
and the
John W. Campbell Memorial Award
for the best science fiction novel of the year. If Gernsback fathered our magazine culture, Campbell is generally credited for ushering in the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction." While he was also a writer of note—
The Thing From Another World
and its two remakes derive from his classic story "Who Goes There?"—Campbell's contributions as an editor far outstrip his literary reputation. During the thirty-four years he edited
Astounding,
and, for a time, its sister magazine
Unknown,
he stopped writing fiction. In those years, however, he discovered
Isaac Asimov
,
Lester del Rey
,
and
Robert A. Heinlein
among many, many others. By all accounts, he was an opinionated man full of story ideas that he would often assign to his stable of authors. Over time, however, his domineering nature drove many of them away. At the end of his life he became enamored with crackpot ideas and right wing ideology, turning his back on the trends that were remaking the genre. Campbell was a prolific correspondent, and you can see his agile mind at work in this handful of
his letters posted online
.

While
Anthony Boucher
is more commonly associated with the mystery genre, where
Bouchercon
is the equivalent of our WorldCon, he was nonetheless a major influence on science fiction as well. Boucher was actually the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-1968). Like Campbell, Boucher's editorial career overshadowed his writing; perhaps his best known science fiction story is
"The Quest for St. Aquin"
.
As a founding co-editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
,
along with J. Francis McComas, he helped bring a more literary sophistication to the genre. He discovered
Richard Matheson
and
Kit Reed
,
was a mentor to
Philip K. Dick
and was the first English translator of
Jorge Luis Borges
.

H.L. Gold
(1914-1996) was yet another sometime writer who is now best known for his editorial acumen. He founded
Galaxy Science Fiction
in 1950 and in a little more than a decade, changed the direction of science fiction by emphasizing "soft sciences" like psychology and sociology and by encouraging SF humor and satire. Among the enduring classics that first appeared in
Galaxy
are
Ray Bradbury's
"The Fireman," which was to become
Fahrenheit 451,
Damon Knight's
"To Serve Man," and the novels
The Demolished Man
by
Alfred Bester
and
The Space Merchants
by Frederik Pohl and
Cyril M. Kornbluth
.

Cele Goldsmith
(1933-2002) was the editor of
Amazing Stories
from 1958-1965. Although the magazine was in financial decline and trailed other markets in payments to writers, its literary quality soared under her guidance. In an interview with Barry Malzberg she said, "And all through that time we were paying a penny, a penny and a half a word, that was all. It was remarkable though what we got. I think one of the reasons for this was because I simply wanted good stories. I had no taboos, I just wanted the writers to do the best they could, to capture the imagination of the reader. When I got gooseflesh, I knew they had succeeded." Among the new writers who first published in Goldsmith's
Amazing
were
Thomas M. Disch
,
Roger Zelazny
,
and
Ursula K. Le Guin
.

Edward Ferman
was editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
from 1966-1991.
F&SF
won the Hugo for Best Magazine five years in succession (1969-1972) under Ferman and, after the category was dropped, Ferman himself then won Hugos for Best Editor from 1981-83. When I first discovered SF magazines, I found Ferman's
F&SF
to be the most consistent in quality with stories like "Ill Met in Lankhmar" by
Fritz Leiber
and "Born with the Dead" by
Robert Silverberg
.
Among the many beginning writers whom he pulled out of the slush pile were
Gregory Benford
,
Michael Bishop
and. . .
umm. . .
me
.

Since then I've had the privilege of knowing many of our short fiction editors, and, while I never met Campbell or Gold or Boucher, I believe that this generation is at least as astute as those who brought us the Golden Age. Certainly
Ellen Datlow
,
a celebrated veteran of print 'zines like
Omni,
digital 'zines like
Event Horizon
and
SciFiction,
and editor or co-editor of over seventy anthologies, has had an undeniable impact on the current scene, winning five Hugos and nine World Fantasy awards for her editorial work. Another editorial luminary is
Gordon Van Gelder
,
who became editor of
F&SF
in 1997, and bought the magazine from Ed Ferman in 2000. Throughout these turbulent times for print magazines, he has maintained the high standards set by his predecessors. For his efforts he has won two Hugos and two World Fantasy Awards. I would also argue for the importance of
Shawna McCarthy
,
Gardner's predecessor, who in her brief time at
Asimov's
changed the magazine's direction, won a Hugo as Best Editor, and put her stamp on science fiction in the eighties. After a stint in book publishing, she returned to short fiction as editor of
Realms of Fantasy
from 1994-2011.

Among those nominated for the Hugo this year along with Sheila were two of the most media saavy editors around:
John Joseph Adams
and
Neil Clarke
,
who are prospering in the changing landscape of fantastic short fiction. The entrepreneurial Clarke has, in just six short years, elevated
Clarkesworld
into a top tier market with a mixed strategy of print, digital, and audio publication. John Joseph Adams, a former assistant to Gordon Van Gelder at
F&SF,
struck out on his own in 2010 to edit
Lightspeed
and the brand new
Nightmare
,
along with a number of best selling anthologies. He is an editor to watch.
Jonathan Strahan
comes to us from Australia, where he co-founded
Eidolon.
In 1997 he started working for
Locus
and began his career as an anthologist. He is best known for his
Eclipse
anthologies of new fiction and his
Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year
volumes, as well as his influential
Coode Street Podcast
.
The
Eclipse
series, Strahan announced recently, will end its print incarnation and make the jump to the net, becoming
Eclipse
magazine
.
One bittersweet news item to come out of Chicon was the announcement that Best Editor nominee
Stanley Schmidt
was retiring from our sister magazine,
Analog.
Stan has kept the hard science flagship on course for some thirty-four years and had earned a Hugo nomination for his editing every year since 1980—implausibly without a single win. He will be missed. Longtime Managing Editor of both
Analog
and
Asimov's
Trevor Quachri will become just the fourth editor ever at
Analog;
he is ready for his shot at editorial immortality.

No doubt one of Trevor's least favorite parts of his old job was asking a certain
Asimov's
columnist to pay attention to his deadlines. So congratulations on being relieved of JPK duty, my friend, and best of luck in your new position. You're in great company!

The chill of spring may still be in your bones, but summer heats up fast with the thrills of the June 2013 issue. In
Robert Reed's
huge new Great Ship novella "Precious Mental," the far-future Universe may be populated by aliens and bioceramic brains and life may seem endless, but that won't mean that death from murder and accidents will be any less horrible, or, in some cases, final!

Another perspective on indefinitely extended lifetimes, vastly older civilizations, sacrifice, and other aspects of the far future can be found in
G. David Nordley's
tense novelette about "The Fountain";
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
introduces us to a captivating new character who must defy her destiny if she is to find her way through the "Skylight"; we find ourselves closer to our own time and ever "Hypervigilant" in
Eric Del Carlo's
tale of redemption; and
Megan Arkenberg
takes us to Mars and back again in her poignant short story, "A Love Song Concerning his Vineyard."

Robert Silverberg
provides us with a scathing Reflections column about thinking that's ". . . Not Even Wrong"; James Patrick Kelly's On the Net teaches us a lesson in "SF Economics 101";
Peter Heck's
On Books reviews afflictions, lost worlds, and scientific paradoxes; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our June issue on sale at newsstands on April 2, 2013. Or subscribe to
Asimov's
—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com.
We're also available individually or by subscription on
Amazon.com's
Kindle and Kindle Fire,
BarnesandNoble.com's
Nook,
ebookstore.sony.com's
eReader,
Zinio.com,
and from
magzter.com/magazines!

new stories by
Rudy Rucker & Paul Di Filippo, Gwendolyn Clare, Igor Teper, Ted Kosmatka, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Benjamin Crowell, Carrie Vaughn, Jack Skillingstead, Ian Watson, Gregory Norman Bossert,
and many others!

Cowboy Angels
by Paul McAuley, Pyr, $17.00

Planesrunner
by Ian McDonald, Pyr, $16.95

Railsea
by China Miéville, Del Rey, $18.00

Science Fiction has long inspired science. We all know that—the examples are endless, from Jules Verne's protosteampunk submarines and flying machines and cannon shots to the Moon to William Gibson's cyberspace. And of course, science has long inspired science fiction. We all know that too; without it, of course,
science
fiction couldn't even exist.

But while there certainly are exceptions, more often that not it is real world technology, the fruits of scientific advancement, or real world scientific discoveries, that have served to inspire science fiction, rather than new theoretical science. And the influence has been primarily on enabling settings, gizmos, and McGuffins, rather than choice of literary form or metaphysical angle of attack.

Lately, however, something more complex, a kind of (probably positive) feedback loop between science fiction and farthest out cosmological physics—what I've called quantum cosmology in
He Walked Among Us—
seems to be forming.

The concept of the "multiverse" is nothing new in science fiction, and, indeed, I've even titled a self-published ebook collection of these very columns
A Critic at Large in the Mulitiverse.
It's the convenient literary convention that one way or another the universe in which we find ourselves is not the only one that exists or can exist—be it a purely literary device like the "alternate history" or some sort of clade of alternate realities formed by literary fiat or quantum indeterminacy, or the ultimate Phil Dickian metaphysic that in the multiverse
all
realities are relative and virtual, that a "base reality" does not and cannot exist, or as I put it again in
He Walked Among Us
"what is, is real."

This, of course, is, if not quite Science Fiction For Dummies, Science Fiction 101. But now "quantum cosmology," inspired by it or not, seems to be catching up at least on a theoretical level.

A fairly dominant theory until recently of how our universe was born and will expire and whose death will generate the next iteration in thirty billion years or so is what has sometimes been called the Oscillating Universe or, better, Oscillating
Universes
theory. Some sort of anomaly in the quantum flux, the random emergence of an ordered attractor in the perfect chaos, generates the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, an Urexplosion that expands for several tens of billions of years. Until gravity overcomes the initial impetus, and sucks all those galaxies back into an enormous black hole, the Big Crunch, which is somehow the other side of a Big Bang out of which a new iteration, a new universe, is then born.

It's certainly metaphysically more satisfying to those who consider such things than the alternative, the Heat Death of the Universe. In this theory the initial force of the Big Bang is stronger than gravity, the universe, rather than being sucked back into a Big Crunch, continues to expand until all initial energy is expended, the stars burn out, nothing is left but nothing, and nothing further happens because nothing can.

Which will be the ultimate fate of our universe was an open question whose resolution seemed more likely to have been in favor of the Oscillating Universe. But quite recently it has been discovered,
or postulated, that so-called "dark matter" and/or "dark energy," whatever they may be, are somehow overcoming gravity. Recent measurements say that the expansion of the universe, far from decelerating toward an eventual Big Crunch, seems to be accelerating toward an eventual Heat Death.

Bummer.

But now current best cutting edge theoretical cosmological physics, perhaps psychologically propelled by this recent discovery, is sidling up to the next and bigger question. Namely, if our universe is destined to expire into nothingness rather than collapse into a Big Crunch generating the next Big Bang, then how could it or any other universe emerge into being from the nothingness to which it is doomed to return?

In non-time-bound terms, how can there then be something rather than nothing?

It doesn't seem possible, and yet we think, therefore we am.

There's a French intellectual put-down joke of excessive French intellectualism: "It works in practice all right, but will it work in theory?"

The theoretical answer, unproven, and seemingly inherently unproveable or disprovable, is more or less the cosmological quantum physical version of the science fictional concept of the multiverse. Please don't ask me for the math. The best I can manage is the Quantum Cosmology for Dummies version, which goes something like this:

Picture a bottle of seltzer. Bubbles form, exist for a few moments, pop, burst, or fade away. Picture the quantum flux multiverse as the soda water and each bubble as a universe like or unlike our own. There you have it, if not in a nutshell, at least in a soda bottle. For present purposes, let's leave the next question—namely, what's outside the cosmic soda bottle—for another day.

That's the macrocosmic multiverse. For the writers of science fiction it's a kind of literary ally, and for the readers thereof more or less of a familiar old friend. But thanks to quantum indeterminism (and don't even expect the Dummies version of the math of this one from me!), there's now a theoretical scientific microcosmic version of the multiverse, too.

Most of the readers here are probably familiar with the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment in which the cat in the box exists in an indeterminate state, neither alive nor dead, until the box is opened, and the cat is observed, and the probabilities collapse into one state or the other. And most of the readers here are probably familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that the momentum and position of a particle cannot be known at the same time, so that quantum mechanics must deal with probabilities rather than certainties.

Combine these theories together and you get a scientific theory of the multiverse in which another "reality" or "universe" or "brane" or "sheaf" or "plane" is branched off within the "multiverse" by every event taking place within it.

If this gives you a metaphysical headache, if the seeming logical contradictions to explore leave your brain reeling, welcome to the club. But there is literary advantage to be gleaned from this, and it has been.

And it is quite formidable. Namely if you accept the quantum scientific notion as your extrapolative postulate, any reality that can be imagined is not only possible but
"has"
happened or
"will"
happen in the multiverse, whatever temporal terms can mean in this context. And so it allows you to write just about anything and still be writing true science fiction, and not what Gregory Benford calls "playing tennis with the net down."

It opens the doors to anywhere.

And here we have two novels,
Planesrunner,
by Ian McDonald and
Cowboy Angels,
by Paul McAuley, which walk right through them into the multiverse with attempted more or less hard science fictional rigor according to this quantum version of multiverse theory. And another,
Railsea,
by China Miéville, which ignores
it in a quantum multiplexity sense, but adheres to a kind of literary version thereof in another mode. This Miéville has called the "New Weird," but this time around it at least is
not
quite fantasy.

Curiously enough two of these novels,
Planesrunner
and
Railsea,
are proclaimed "Young Adult" hardcovers, with teenage protagonists and prices below twenty dollars, at a time when "Adult" hardcovers of the same page counts are going for at least twenty-five dollars or more. Both would seem to be the opening volumes of potential series, and forthrightly declared as such in the case of the McDonald.

Cowboy Angels,
on the other hand, is about as "Adult" as it gets. It is politically, cynically, and morally sophisticated, with a viewpoint character who is anything but an innocent teenager, and an ending that would seem to have slammed the door to an ongoing series. It's a trade paperback original selling for about the same price as the
Railsea
and
Planesrunner
Young Adult hardcovers, and, in the case of the McDonald, published by the same imprint, Pyr.

Ian McDonald and China Miéville have emerged as two of the leading literary lights of serious adult science fiction in the twenty-first century, in terms of extrapolative vision, world-building detail and sophistication, subtle and deep character creation, colorful and intricate descriptive detail, and prose styles that go far beyond mere serviceable transparency. True, Paul McAuley has yet to rack up an equivalent oeuvre on their productive level, but
Cowboy Angels
itself is up there on the same literary level as
Railsea
or
Planesrunner,
and arguably then some.

¿Que pasa?

Well, I've been told that the royalty rate for Young Adult science fiction novels is a lower percentage of the cover price than the industry standard for "Adult" science fiction novels. What is more, or rather less, the advances are mingier, too, which would explain how the publishers can sell them for about a third less a copy and still turn a profit. Not because Adult hardcovers are necessarily overpriced, but rather (what else?) by short-changing the writers of the Young Adult titles.

Lower advances and reduced percentages of lower cover prices for the same amount of work! Is this really an offer that writers can't refuse?

This might explain why Paul McAuley has thus far not chosen to write such stuff, but hardly why Ian McDonald and China Miéville, both of whom at worst could surely command regular royalty rates and better advances for their Adult novels, have.

But then, short-term economic determinism isn't necessarily everything. Way back in the dim dark 1950s, library sales dominated the decisions about what hardcover science fiction books were published, and most of these books ended up in the Young Adult section whether they belonged there or not. And many were the young readers introduced to novel-length science fiction by the Robert Heinlein "juveniles" who graduated to Heinlein's central adult fiction when they grew up.

So maybe McDonald is looking a decade or so forward to grow a "fan base," or at least has been persuaded by his publisher that this is a good career strategy. Maybe there is also a certain pedagogic idealism involved, though Miéville's reasons for writing
Railsea
may be something else again, which we will get to later.

The setting for
Planesrunner
is present-day or near-past London, or rather Londons. For the McGuffin of this novel, the declared "first part of the Everness series," is the Heisenberg Gate, a piece of science fictional technology based squarely on the quantum cosmological multiverse theory previously elucidated. As the cover copy puts it: "There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one among billions of parallel Earths."

As the story begins, the Heisenberg Gates are primarily the doors to the so-called Ten Known Worlds, though they are known only to various secretive cabals. Stepping through one can be something of a crap shoot, unless the connection
has been previously established, since the Heisenberg Gates are potentially doorways to anywhere and everywhere in the infinite "planes" of the multiverse.

The teenage hero of the tale is Everett Singh, son of Tejendra Singh, a computer scientist working on the clandestine Heisenberg Gate technology who is kidnapped before Everett's eyes in the very first pages. The father is taken to a London in a different multiverse plane by forces of the sinister Order led by Charlotte Villiers. The Order is after a device called the Infundibulum, which Everett's dad has secretly left in his hands.

Everett is a kind of scientific and cyber whiz and also a top-notch soccer goalie and a terrific cook besides. His two-fold quest is to learn the secret of the Infundibulum and use the device, which turns out to be a kind of map-cum-key to all the infinite planes in the multiverse, to rescue his father from the Order in the London of the plane in which he is being held.

If this seems like a perfect format for an open-ended Young Adult science fiction novel series, it sure is. At the end of
Planesrunner
it is revealed as even more so, when Tejendra Singh disappears through a Heisenberg Gate into an unknown plane of the multiverse, leaving Everett, empowered by the Infundibulum, to quest after his father through plane after plane as the Planesrunner of the multiverse for as long as McDonald chooses to write episodes and the ratings hold.

But while these comments may sound rather cynical,
Planesrunner
is also a genuine and genuinely sincere Ian McDonald novel with all or at least most of his formidable literary skills and talents deployed, and you don't have to be a Young Adult to fully enjoy it.

For one thing, McDonald is very, very good at fictional world building, not only on geological, ecological, technological, and cultural levels, but on the pop cultural levels that arise from and color them, and
Planesrunner
is no watered-down exception. The London of more or less our "plane" is rendered in intimate and even loving detail as seen through the eyes and consciousness of Everett Singh, even though McDonald is no Londoner.

McDonald has a genius for this, and the London of the alternate plane in which Everett finds himself for the majority of the story is quite a fascinating and even enticing creation, a kind of pseudo-Victorian London in feel and street-level life, like steampunk. Except it doesn't run on steam, it runs on
electricity,
created by any means possible, windmills, tidal generation, augmented by coal to the extent necessary, for this London exists in an alternate Earth where oil is quite rare.

And the main aircraft and mode of long distance air travel therefore is the electric-powered dirigible, whose technology and flyboy and flygirl culture McDonald explores and renders in detail sure to charm retro-technophilic boys and girls of all ages.