At the beginning of the year, a postal computer error led to a whole
bunch of my mail getting lost. (There are a lot of streets in Brooklyn,
many of them with the same name, and some brilliant pre-Singularity
machine decided that I lived on "L---- Place" instead of "L---- Avenue"
and redirected my mail accordingly. But not all of it, mind you. Only
about a third, so it took me some time to notice). Among the victims of
the error were my subscriptions to both
Analog and
Asimov's. The lovely
folks at Dell Magazines were very understanding and sent replacements
of all the missing issues, but by the time I had gotten them all I was
a month or two behind, and have only just now caught up. So, without
further ado, here are my thoughts on the last seven months of both,
beginning with...
Asimov's, April/May 2009. I wrote earlier about what is probably the most important piece of writing in this issue: Norman Spinrad's
essay "What Killed Tom Disch?" It's available online, so if you didn't
take my advice before, read it now.
Also worthy of note is Brian
Stableford's "The Great Armada," the latest in a series of
alternate-history novellas. In this one, Francis Bacon (among others)
attempts to fend off an invasion from the moon. I mention it here
because the nonhuman players, which include golems (read: androids) and
interplanetary "Ethereals," view their conflict in theological terms.
The Ethereals consider themselves "intermediaries" between the material
and spiritual worlds, and the golems are programmed for faith:
"We are unable to doubt the existence of God... but we cannot pretend
to understand His nature, or know His purpose... Whether or not you and
I need faith to sustain our belief in God, we both need trust to
sustain our conviction that He has our bes interests at heart."
It's a nice ingredient, but the stew is a bit overcomplicated,
particularly if one doesn't recall the earlier installments in the
series. Perhaps if the various parts were to be collected into a novel,
the story of this universe would fare a bit better.
Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick's "The Armies of Elfland" is one of
the more disturbing fantasy stories I've ever read. These elves aren't
cute or wise, they're a malicious group of interdimensional invaders
that torture, maim, and kill in a manner that's at turns malicious and
arbitrarily indifferent. I don't have much to say about its religious
outlook, but it's really, really good, if you can stomach it.
The final story in this issue is "The Spires of Denon" by Kristine
Kathryn Rusch, who is very rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors
of the moment. This story, set in her "Diving Into the Wreck" universe,
is a mystery of alien archeology with
sensawunda galore. The eponymous
structures are an enormous, extremely fragile construction built by a
mysterious alien race on the top of a mountain range. There are a
number of theories as to what they are and why they're there, including
the hypothesis that they're some kind of temple, even though "there was
no evidence that the Denonites had been particularly religious." I'm a
sucker for a good
Big Dumb Object story...
Analog, May 2009. There's a lot to enjoy about Alexis Glynn
Latner's "Quickfeathers," in which colonists on an alien world struggle
to understand the culture that inhabited the planet before them. Much
of the information comes from an ancient myth written on the walls of a
tomb. It bears some surface resemblances to Robert R. Chase's recent
story "Five Thousand Light Years From Birdland," which also posited a
linguistic puzzle in the mythology of some bird-aliens. But Latner's
story has a one-liner that deserves some sort of prize: "Occams' Razor
says you shouldn't multiply bird gods without a good reason."
Also of note in this issue is Steven Gould's "A Story, With Beans," a
short-short about a world transformed by what seem to be metal-eating
nanobots. There's a story-within-the-story about "The City of God,
where the People of the Book reside," which reflects not too kindly on
the role religion plays in this dystopian future. A letter published in
response in the September issue points out a big Biblical citation
error, as "the Book" in question includes a story of ten plagues... in
its first chapter. The letter-writer wonders if "the sectarians'
version of the Bible discards Genesis, discards the first six chapters
of Exodus, and conflates the next five chapters of Exodus into one—or
(more probably) Mr. Gould has committed the authorial sin of not
actually checking a source before citing it." Gould's one-line
response: "All perfectly possible interpretations." That seems a bit
cavalier to me. If the story is going to paint religion in an
unpleasant light, doesn't the author owe it to the Bible to at least
consult it briefly before publication? But the story's pretty good
nonetheless, so Gould gets a pass... this time.
Asimov's,
June 2009. The standout here (for this blog's purposes, at least) is
"Sails the Morne" by Chris Willrich, a nice little space opera about
interstellar diplomacy and the Book of Kells. The starship
Eight Ball
is transporting some alien envoys and the famous illuminated manuscript
to an offworld conference, only to be attacked by space pirates (let's
hear it for space pirates!) who are members of the almost-Lovecraftian
sect known as "Evangelists of Entropy." These cultists hope to wipe out
sentient species so that their Old God-ish masters, known as Logovores,
can take back the universe—and, to that end, they destroy "the
vessels of memory," seeking to eliminate the information that allows
sentience to thrive. "They like to scrag important texts," one
character explains. "Kind of like a sacrifice. They burn them, shred
them, or literally eat them." In opposition to the Evangelists are the
Night Readers, flippantly described as an insane but generally nice
sect. "They want only to protect the astral essences of literature from
monsters from Beyond. Or something. All harmless mystical crap.
Honorable fanatics." "Sails the Morne" is a fun adventure story, and
the religious angle gives it a bit more depth than you might expect
from a story with space pirates. (
Space pirates!)
Analog, June 2009. There's much to like in this issue. The opening
story, "But it Does Move" by Harry Turtledove, is a clever alternate
history story that has Galileo subjected, not to the interrogations of
an inquisitor, but to... psychoanalysis on the couch of Cardinal
Sigismondo Gioioso, i.e. Sigmund Freud (a few centuries early). The
Cardinal approaches Galileo's writings not so much as heresy as an act
of sublimated aggression intended to "pay back all the doubters," among
them Galileo's own father (who wanted him to be a musician). Historical
mashups like this don't always work, but this one is a success—though
I can't help but feel that Turtledove "gets" Galileo a bit more than he
does Freud.
Stephen L. Burns' "The Chain" is a story of near-future ethics
involving a sort of religion that's programmed into humankind's robotic
servants. Robots have been emancipated after decades of slavery, but are still subservient to
humans, and they earn status points when they suffer at the hands of
their organic masters. If they earn enough points, they're told,
they'll climb up the ranks of "the Perfection" until they reach
"Diamond" status, a sort of mechanized heaven. The only problem is that
the constant abuse that earns them those points leaves them deactivated
on a junk heap long before they reach that point. The Perfection was
programmed into the machines to keep them from rising up to demand
their rights, and it's a secret that only a handful of humans know
about. The story describes the turning point when the robotic religion
is revealed, to human and machine alike, as a fraud. Clearly the story
rejects the notion of redemptive suffering, but it also hints at a new
kind of religion, the embrace of a truth that sets the robots free.
James van Pelt's "Solace" is pretty complex for a nine-pager. It's the
story of Meghan, a crewmember on a generation starship who spends 99
out of every 100 years cryogenically frozen. The story explores some of
the psychological difficulties of this kind of travel, in part by
intercutting the seemingly-incongruous story of a nineteenth-century
monk-turned-miner trapped in a cabin after a vicious snowstorm. Without
giving too much away, Meghan gains the "solace" of the title from this
miner, and his religious faith is a central part of that solace. Van
Pelt's story hints at the ongoing importance of religious faith in a
technological future, the need for the solace (among other things) that
religion can provide in times of need.
Asimov's, July 2009. Michael Cassutt hasn't written very much—
ISFDB lists five novels and 26 short stories in the last 35 years. But
his name still stands out for me, because he co-edited (with Andrew
Greeley)
Sacred Visions, an anthology of SF on Catholic themes. That anthology is notable for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that it was the first publication of Jack McDevitt's "Gus," which is my pick for the
best SF story about religion. So when
I saw the title of his short story in the July issue of
Asimov's—"The
Last Apostle"—I was intrigued. And, indeed, the story is intriguing—an alternate-present sort of story about the twelve men who have walked
on the moon. (Not the real ones, mind you, but inhabitants of a
fictional universe an awful lot like ours.) An insightful journalist
latched on to the significance of that number and published a popular
besteller entitled
The Apostles. In the book, she boils each of the
twelve down to a single-word type: there's the Politician, the Good Old
Boy, the Mystic. The central character of the story is Joe Liquori, the
last man to set foot on the moon. Dubbed Omega, he is contrasted, in
all ways, with the recently-deceased Alpha, who was the first. A reinvigorated
space program has set up a base on the moon, and Liquori is to be given
the opportunity to return there—and, as we learn, to wrap up some
unfinished business from his previous trip. Cassutt's story is a nice
look at the mysticism and mythology that grew up around the space
program, and in that regard it reminded me a bit of Robert Silverberg's
excellent "Feast of St. Dionysius" (my pick for the
second-best SF story about religion, incidentally). Of course, that mythology has died
down since the end of the Apollo program, but—as this story, and the
recent spate of lunar landing nostalgia, suggest—it can still
resonate.
Analog, July/August 2009. A while back I wrote about Tom Ligon's
"El Dorado," a story in which some nasty alien religious fanatics
launch a very, very fast-moving projectile toward Earth in an effort to
wipe out the human race. I liked the story, but I thought the treatment of the aliens and their religion was a bit too sparse. This issue of
Analog features "Payback," the
sequel to that story, which examines the motivations of those aliens a
bit further, and shows that their purpose was quite a bit more
complicated than their standard "kill-the-infidels" communication
suggested. Despite the efforts of reductionists to claim otherwise,
so-called
"religious violence" is generally the result of a wide range
of factors, and one character in "Payback" concludes that the aliens
"have a secular leadership who used a commonly held feeling to justify
an attack"—he cites the Crusades as a terrestrial example. At the end
of the day, it's still a story of revenge, but I loved getting some
insight into the culture that launched the missile in "El Dorado"—particularly since I thought that kind of insight was the one factor
lacking in that story.
Asimov's, August 2009. From Odd John to Ender's Game, stories of
preternaturally-brilliant children are a long-standing tradition in SF.
Damien Broderick's "The Qualia Engine" is a strong entry in the
subgenre—it's the story of the "Atom Kids," a group of
genetically-engineered geniuses, and (more importantly) their
even-more-brilliant children. There's rich characterization here, and a
big part of it is the contempt that Saul, the narrator, has for his
mother's religious faith. Saul speaks of "Father Paul," the first of
the Atom Kids, who went on to become a priest, and brought his mother
into the faith as well:
"In the joint foolishiness and longing for absolutes of the Patriarch's
medievalism, he and L.C., my mother, had cultivated their immense minds
into a shared folie, but hardly a radical one, an architecture of
beleif and worship shared, after all, by many of the finest minds in
Western history, and even today by a large percentage of the planet.
I'd confronted or avoided their faith for years, in a mutinous but
largely unspoken resistance. Not hostility; how can you turn against
the woman who gave you birth? But they both knew the antagonism I
nurtured toward their beliefs."
Saul goes on to express some doubts the authenticity of their faith,
for somewhat spoiler-ish reasons, but I don't think the readers are
supposed to share those doubts. It would be easy to conclude that the
story itself shares Saul's antagonism, but the mere fact that it
presents Father Paul and Saul's mother as brilliant minds and also
people of faith speaks volumes.
Also of interest is Mary Robinette Kowal's "The Consciousness Problem,"
a story about the ethics of cloning and the nature of the self. The
conundrum to which the title refers is the fact that a cloned body
doesn't share the memories, mind, or personality of its original, and
(of course) it's a problem that's overcome by the story's scientists. A
scientist named Myung successfully clones both his body and his mind--
but the clone doesn't like being isolated in a lab, and longs to
escape. There's a particularly interesting scene in which Myung's wife
is brought in to test the success of the experiment—she's to try to
guess which of the two is the clone. She guesses correctly—not
because the clone is imperfect, but because she senses how much he
misses her after months of isolation. It's a great exploration of the
ethical and spiritual issues of sentience, with some moving
characterization to boot.
Analog, October 2009. Michael F. Flynn doesn't want us to forget
that not all religion is anti-science, and though that's not the theme
of "Where the Winds Are All Asleep," it's a point that's simply and
subtly demonstrated early in the story. After reading Eric Brown's
Kéthani, I'm a bit over the "group-of-friends-hanging-out-in-a-pub"
motif, but the ensemble in Flynn's framing device includes an
interesting pair of characters: creationist Danny Mulloney and Jesuit
scholar James McGinnity. It's clear where Flynn's sympathies lie from
the instant Mulloney appears on the scene:
"You see, Danny had forsaken Holy Mother Church a few years back for
one of those sects that worship a text rather than a God, and
'evil-ution' was the pea under his personal mattress."
They're
both caricatures, sure, but it's a nice way of summing up Flynn's
point: the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that so irks the new
atheists (for example) is a rather recent development, and, globally
speaking, a minority position among Christians. For Flynn, conservative
Protestants are upstart kids who will eventually, hopefully, learn the
greater wisdom of their Holy Mother—symbolized here by a Jesuit,
natch. The rest of the story isn't about that, but rather about
underground rock monsters, and is pretty darned cool.
Jesse L. Watson's "Shallow Copy" covers similar ground to "The
Consciousness Problem," but with AI instead of clones. A genius kid
named Will programs a computerized copy of his best friend Max on his
laptop, but then has to face the Frankensteinian ethical dilemma of his
creation's moral status. Both Will and the real Max are concerned about
AI-Max's happiness, but they may not have the skills to program an
artificial world that can keep him content. They conclude that they're
"smart enough to make an artificial person inside a computer, but not
smart enough to understand the consequences." But the deed is done—to
delete the AI would be murder. Like "The Consciousness Problem," it's a
nice ethical exploration.
Asimov's, September 2009. Speaking of AIs and ethics, Mike Resnick
and Lezli Robyn's "Soulmates" contains some similar explorations, this
time with a robot who befriends a human. MOZ-512—"Mose"—is a
troubleshooting robot, and one of his duties is to deactivate robots
who are no longer useful. He meets an employee at his factory named
Gary who's months into a deep depression after pulling the life support
plug on his wife. Mose sees more than a few parallels between his
duties and the act that has driven Gary to drink, and it leads him to
question the morality of his own duties. Before long Mose is refusing
to deactivate any robot that can be repaired—which puts him on the
fast track to deactivation himself.
Similar moral questions arise in Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Day Before the
Day Before," a story about an agent for a time-travel service that
makes minute adjustments in the past to bring about unspecified greater
good in the future. At times these adjustments are ridiculously small,
as in the story of one agent who was assigned to remove a gum wrapper
from the ground. But the agents aren't told what the consequences of
their changes will be. When the narrator is asked to do something that
he considers morally reprehensible, he has difficulty weighing an
unknown good against a known evil. And, like Mose, this makes him a
liability to his employers.
We now return to our regularly-scheduled review schedule (Singularity willing).