Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (42 page)

In the quiet hour
we sit cross-legged
on the hardwood floor
in a soundproofed room
of white-walled plaster.

In the quiet hour
our Monitors turn off
the air conditioning
and it grows warmer.

In the quiet hour
we are never allowed
any distractions:
no videos, no music,
no games, no texts.

In the quiet hour
we are forbidden
to communicate with
others in any way.

In the quiet hour
we try to find marks
the trowel has left
on the plaster walls,
only to discover there
are no marks in their
blinding whiteness.

In the quiet hour
we search for flaws
in the polished floor,
only to realize that
each board has been
perfectly aligned.

In the quiet hour
we can look inside
the treacherous terrains
of interior landscapes,
knowing full well that
our Monitors, alien
telepaths one and all,
follow every twist and
turn of our thoughts.

In the quiet hour
those who violate rules
we have yet to understand
are taken from the room
by force and never return
for the next session.

In the quiet hour
we are not very safe
and it is seldom quiet for long.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

When Rick Wilber and I co-founded the Dell Magazines Award (then called the Asimov Award) in 1993 we hoped it would help us discover, encourage, and nurture new writers. The award, which is sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and Dell Magazines, recognizes the best science fiction or fantasy story by a fulltime undergraduate college student. This spring at the 35th International Conference for the Fantastic (ICFA) in Florida, Rick and I will celebrate with the winner and many of the finalists for the twentieth time.

To commemorate so many years of fine storytelling, I thought I'd find out where some of our past finalists are today. The very first award winner was Eric Choi, aerospace engineer, writer, and editor, living in Toronto, Canada. He worked on the meteorology payload on the 2008
Phoenix
Mars Lander. In the 2009, he was also one of the Canadian Space Agency's final forty candidates (out of 5,353 applicants) in their astronaut recruitment drive. This career path may come as no surprise to those who read "Dedication" (
Asimov's,
November 1994), his award-winning story about astronauts on Mars. Eric co-edited the Aurora Award winning anthology
The Dragon and the Stars
(DAW), and he has a story forthcoming from
Analog.

Although Eric's is the only story, so far, to be published in
Asimov's,
we have been able to run the winning tale online since about 2000.
Asimov's
has also published subsequent stories by Marissa Lingen (winner 1999) and Lena DeTar (winner 2002). A few of the finalists have also appeared in our pages. Well known science fiction author, Creative Commons expert, and Internet blogger Cory Doctorow (honorable mention 1994) has been published in
Asimov's
numerous times. Alice Sola Kim's (second runnerup 2005) beautiful tale about "The Other Graces" appeared in our July 2010 issue, and only after our February 2014 issue with Maurice Broaddus's engaging story about "Steppin' Razor" was delivered to our printer did I realize that this successful author had received an honorable mention from us in 1996.

Our finalists have collected some other impressive awards in the intervening years. E. Lily Yu was a finalist for the Dell Award in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Her 2011 story submission, "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" was published by
Clarkesworld
and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2012, Lily won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Matthew J. Kirby was the first runner-up in 2003. He is now the author of three middle grade novels. Among other honors, Matt has won the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery and the PEN Center USA award for Children's Literature. Cory Doctorow won his own Campbell Award for best new writer in 2000, and has since added to his trophy shelf several Locus and Sunburst Awards as well as the Prometheus and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

In addition to her
Asimov's
tale, Marissa Lingen has sold over ninety short stories. Bryn Neuenschwader, who won the award in 2003, has since become well known under her nom de plume. The latest of her eight novels as "Marie Brennan" is
A Natural History of Dragons.
Bryn has more than forty short stories in print as well. Amelia Beamer, who was our second runner up in 2004 has since written the best selling zombie novel,
The Loving Dead.

Many other finalists, such as Lara Donnelly (winner 2013), Rich Larson (second-runner-up 2013), Seth Dickinson (winner 2011), Rahul Kanakia (first runner-up 2007), Catherine Krahe (second runner-up 2006), Karina Sumner-Smith (honorable mention 2003), Thomas Seay (first runner-up 2002), Beth Adele Long (winner 2000), and David Barr Kirtley (winner 1997), have also amassed a number of impressive publications.

I hear from finalists all the time. Many have followed interesting career trajectories outside writing SF—Mark Jacobsen (winner 2001) is a C-17 air force pilot while his ICFA roommate Elan Ruskin (second runner-up 2001) works in the game industry as a senior engine programmer. Monica Eiland (first runner-up 1995) is a medical writer and Emily Thornbury (winner 1998) is an assistant professor of English at UC Berkeley. In addition to a flourishing writing career, Brit Mandelo (third runner-up 2012) is a senior fiction editor at
Strange Horizons.

Alas, there isn't room to cover all the accomplishments or to even mention all of our gifted finalists. I apologize to everyone for the omissions.

The penultimate word in this editorial belongs to my co-judge Rick Wilber.

The award has always been a labor of love for me. There's a great deal of organizational work that goes on behind the scenes, and every year there's some worrisome problem or another that has to be dealt with. Then, once the stories are in, there's that intense few weeks of reading the submissions and struggling to narrow down the many good stories to the shorter list of truly excellent ones. That's never an easy job.

But the payoff comes after Sheila and I discuss the finalists and pick the winner, runners-up, and honorable mentions. It's my happy task to email or call those talented writers and let them know they're invited to ICFA where they'll meet many of the finest professionals in the field. Hearing the excitement on the other end of the line, or seeing all the exclamation points in their emails makes all the work absolutely worth the labor. And, heck, following the careers of the finalists as they go on to find their own professional success is a wonderful capstone on the whole process.

Rick and I set out to nurture a bunch of new writers and ended up enriching our own lives because of the wonderful people we've met along the way.

BORGES, LEINSTER, GOOGLE

Today I mean to sing the praises of Google, which I think is the most important single component of the phenomenon that is the Internet. That is no small statement, and, lest I be thought to be in the pay of that vast search-engine organization, I will quickly offer some disclaimers. I am not a Google stockholder. I am not a Google executive or a Google employee. (I have never been anybody's employee since the day, fifty-eight years ago, when I graduated from college.) I don't even
know
any Google executives or employees, even though I live just a hop and a skip from Silicon Valley. What I am, just as most of you are, is a Google user, day in, day out. I understand that some of Google's expansionist ways as a corporation have drawn criticism. But my concern here is with Google as a search engine, not as a corporation. That search engine is essential to modern life. Without it, we might very well drown in our own data. It has rescued us from that dire fate, and, in so doing, I believe it has changed the world.

Isaac Asimov outlined the problem of information retrieval in an essay, "The Sound of Panting,"
Astounding Science Fiction,
June 1955. He tells of the difficulties that biochemists had, even back then, in keeping up with the scientific literature of their own field. He was then a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, writing science fiction on the side. "There are literally thousands of journals printed. The aristocrat of biochemical journals is the
Journal of Biological Chemistry.
It comes out once a month.... The September 1954 issue contains 480 pages and 45 articles." Coping with it was a major chore. Then, also, there were the
Journal of the American Chemical Society, Science,
its British equivalent
Nature,
the British
Biochemical Journal,
and.... He lists another column and a half of English-language scientific periodicals before he gets to the French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese journals, all of which the biochemists of that day needed to follow in order to stay in touch with current research. These were summarized twice monthly in
Chemical Abstracts,
a bulky tome printed in microscopic type. Its annual index alone occupied three big volumes totaling more than a thousand pages. "There is now a whole branch of human effort devoted to attempting to coordinate the accumulating data of the physical sciences at a rate roughly equivalent to that at which it is accumulating," Asimov said. "This includes the formulation of special types of indices and codes, the use of screening programs, the preparation of special punched cards, micro-card files, and so on."

Special punched cards! Micro-card files! And yet it was all hopeless. No one could stay current. If you were to go past his lab at the university, he said, you would hear "the sound of panting.... It is just I. Asimov trying to keep up with the literature."

The great fantasist Jorge Luis Borges, who for many years was director of the National Library of Argentina, gave us in his story "The Library of Babel" a depiction of the universe as a library made up of an infinite number of hexagonal galleries on whose shelves all books that had ever been written or ever
would
be written were stored. "Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogs... a version of each book in all languages, the interpretation of every book in all books...."

And how does one find one's way around in an infinite library? With difficulty, and only if one has an infinite amount of time at one's disposal: "In order to locate book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of book A. In order to locate Book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum.... I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type."

Murray Leinster, that early master of science fiction, offered a solution to the information-retrieval problem so vividly depicted by Asimov and Borges in a brilliant 1946 short story called "A Logic Named Joe." Leinster conjured up a future in which everyone was linked to an interconnected network of home computers—"logics," he called them—capable of instantaneously serving up any information one might require if one merely punched a few keys. In one glorious swoop he had imagined the PC, the Internet, and the omniscient search engine, decades ahead of their actual existence.

By the late twentieth century the Internet was here, and with it came the first search engines, replacing Asimov's punched cards and other prehistoric scanning methods. The earliest, it seems, was a Canadian entity called Archie (for "archive") in 1990, followed by Gopher in 1991, Aliweb in 1993, WebCrawler and Lycos in 1994, and then many more—AltaVista, Inktomi, Infoseek, HotBot, etc., some of which are still active.

But the arrival of Google around the year 2000 swept them all into relative obscurity. Like the rest, Google sent web-crawlers everywhere in the Internet to slurp up the nearly infinite amount of information it provided; but the key difference was a Google algorithm, PageRank, which classed web sites according to the number of other web sites linked to them, on the theory that the most useful Web pages were those with the most links to other sites. Thus—within seconds— Google could deliver a huge bundle of links to whatever subject you were asking about and arrange them in their most probable order of usefulness. At once Google became everybody's favorite search engine, and still is, though others now, like Bing, do pretty much the same thing. Its name itself has become a generic verb meaning "to search," just as such brand names as "kleenex," "xerox," "band-aid," and "zipper" have passed into generic use.