Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (22 page)

incoming

Have you ever entertained the notion of writing for
Asimov's?
Maybe you thought that novella in the January issue needed a different ending. Perhaps you told yourself that even a zombie could write a better novelette than the one you just finished, and that it was up to you to show Sheila some
real
science fiction. Could be that you wondered why you had never seen a story about Mayan starships or intelligent alien marsupials and decided that you were just the one to give it a shot. (Sorry,
the marsupials have been done
.
) If you have ever had daydreams like these, know that you're not alone. Every one of the writers appearing on the table of contents in this issue has had similar feelings.

After all, how hard could it be to write a science fiction story? All you need is a beginning, middle, and an end, a cool idea, some shiny tech and a couple or three characters. Simple! And didn't you hear somewhere that the pay is pretty good? '
Mov's
is supposedly near the top of the food chain in SF's short fiction ecosystem. Why, you could quit your boring day job and step up to a glamorous career as a science fiction writer!

If you've actually gotten this far in your reverie, you probably have clicked over to our
manuscript guidelines
and read the following: "
Asimov's
pays 6-8 cents per word for short stories up to 7,500 words, and 6-6.5 cents per word for longer material." And this: "We pay $1 a line for poetry, which should not exceed 40 lines." So let's do some math. If you jump immediately to the top rate, you'll earn $600 for a 7500 word short story.

That means that if you publish a story in each and every issue of this magazine, you'll be knocking down a cool $6000 a year. Unfortunately nobody, not even my phenomenally prolific pal
Robert Reed
,
has managed to place fiction in every issue.

Okay then, so you'll start with the short stuff and then move on to novels. That's where the money is, right? In 2005,
Tobias Buckell
performed a generous public service on his blog by surveying his fellow science fiction and fantasy professionals in order to determine
what we earn from our books
.
His findings might induce a wobble in your plan for a meteoric writing career. Seventy-four writers responded to Toby's post. Their median advance was $5000 for a first novel. But wait—as you progress, your novels will make more money, right? Fifty-seven authors in the survey had sold more than one book. Their median advance? $12,500. Of course, this data set has some age on it and the economics of publishing have changed a lot with the rise of e-books and the attendant renaissance in self-publishing. Yet, median advances for second, third, and fifth novels have either held steady or gone down a bit since then—if word on the street is to be believed.

Here's another career planning data point to consider, courtesy of
John Scalzi
.
In addition to being the current president of the
Science Fiction Writers of America
,
John is another generous blogger and all-around Good Guy. You may have heard that he was discovered on the internet after serializing his novel
Old Man's War
on his website.
Patrick Neilsen Hayden
,
an editor at
Tor
,
read the book there and bought it. Prior to that happy accident, John had made an earlier "practice" novel,
Agent to the Stars
available as shareware on his site, with the request that readers who liked it send him $1. John's "bypassing-the-publishing-gatekeepers" origin story has inflamed the imaginations of every aspiring SF novelist who has heard it. (However, it is important to remember that he didn't exactly bypass the gatekeepers; rather, he impressed the hell out of one of the most astute of them.) Here's the story behind the story: In 2007, John reviewed
his earnings from the first eight years of his
SF
career
on his blog. In 1999, he raked in a whopping $400 in donations from
Agent
readers. Over the next three years he averaged about $1000 from
Agent
readers and made one short story sale. In 2003, he earned $6000, most of it from the first part of the advance from
Old Man's War.
The year after that, $5000, from
Agent
readers and an advance for another novel. By 2005 advances from three novels and a short story sale totaled $15,000. It wasn't until 2006, eight years into his SF career, that John saw any serious income.

As for myself, I was twenty-six when I quit my day job in public relations to become a "full time" science fiction writer. Alas, although I've had some writing successes, I have only rarely in the intervening years earned enough on which to live purely from SF writing. Perhaps I might have managed it had I been as productive as a John Scalzi or Toby Buckell, but I wasn't. So how did I get by? I took part for many years in the
non-monetary economy
.
Okay, okay—I was a stay-at-home dad and househusband. But some economists estimate that if household labor and civic volunteerism were reasonably valued, it would increase the gross domestic product by half. Think about that the next time you're washing dishes or helping the kids with homework or volunteering at the local SF convention. Lately, my income scramble hasn't been as frenzied as it was back in the day, but that's because I've got a side gig teaching at the
Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing
.

Sorry to rain on your parade, Ms. Aspiring Writer. Not only is it hard to write well, the pay isn't all that great. Few of us make a living wage. So why do we do it?

reputation

Of course, the answers for each of us are personal and subject to change. It is when those answers no longer satisfy that the discouraged novice gives up, or the frustrated pro falls silent. Suffice it to say that money isn't the only measure of value. If you believe that "whoever has the most toys when he dies, wins"—as the old bumper sticker had it—then you're probably not cut out to write SF. Our toys are largely imaginary.

But aside from the pleasure to be derived from the care and feeding of the muse, there are other intangible benefits to being a writer. I have been thinking recently about the various segments of the non-monetary economy.

We interrupt this column for a brief rant: Why is it that so few of our writers bother to include economics in their worldbuilding tool-kit? Is it because courses in economics were something that only business majors took in college? Is it because economics is so tangled with politics that they despair of separating well-documented research from passionately held belief? Why must hard science fiction obey the laws of physics and yet ignore the insights of our best economists? For instance, just how large must an economy be to sustain the construction of L5 colonies? Or to
terraform Mars
in the face of an uncertain return on investment? Or to
launch a fleet of expensive starships
~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf>
which might not make it back to Earth for decades or even centuries? And our fantasy writers are equally culpable. History teaches that the rise and fall of dynasties are primarily due to economic factors. The
king must raise taxes
in order to pay for his war against the Dark Lord. What is the value of labor in a world where magic works? What currency do dwarves accept in exchange for their armaments and do they care about their balance of trade? When I challenge my MFA students on these matters they often as not shrug and ask
What does it matter? Will anyone care?
I think Nobel Prize winner
Paul Krugman
just might. Revisit
his conversation about economics and SF
with
Charles Stross
at the 2009 World Science Fiction convention.

Whew! Where was I? Oh, right... segments of the non-monetary economy. A notion that has gotten some currency recently with the rise of social media is that there is a
reputation economy
.
If and when there are reliable metrics to measure online perceptions of you and your work—whatever that might be—polishing your reputation might actually translate into new dollars in your wallet. The pre-internet
Q Scores
,
first developed by Marketing Evaluations, Inc. in 1963, attempt to quantify the familiarity and appeal of celebrities and politicians, companies and products. This and other similar services help companies like General Mills decide which sports figures to put on Wheaties boxes and NBC to pick the stars for next season's sitcoms. More recently, thanks to the
social media apps of the web 2.0
,
the reputation economy is becoming a marketplace for the rest of us. It may be that someday
your online presence will replace your résumé
.
How might someone track her stock in the reputation economy?
Google
herself obsessively? Pay daily visits to
Addictomatic
?
Add the number of her
Twitter
followers to her
Facebook
friends and divide by the square root of her reviews in the
blogosphere
?

The company behind the
Klout
website says it has an answer, by purporting to score your influence across your entire social network.
For free!
But if you ask me, when their
methodology
gives the President of the United States a lower score than some technology blogger, it loses all credibility. As currently implemented, Klout exists more to market Klout than to provide useful information about your rep; if you credit their sketchy numbers, all it will get you is a
pernicious case of social anxiety
.

The fact is, while it seems clear social media is indeed creating a larger reputation economy, precision tools to measure our places in it are not yet at hand.

exit

Having typed that, I believe there are actions that writers—or anyone, for that matter—can take to protect their reputation and foster goodwill through social media. In the next installment we'll consider the gift economy and the role that the
Creative Commons license
has come to play in access to online science fiction.

In the meantime, why not take an economist to lunch and then go ahead and write that story!

The July 2013 issue swings from the crack of the bat to the cracks in the Universe as
Rick Wilber
returns with a new story about his Universe-hopping, ivy-league-educated baseball player, Moe Berg. Once again, physics and this boy of summer are all that stands between us and an unhappy outcome to World War II. Don't miss it!

Rudy Rucker,
in collaboration with our very own book reviewer
Paul Di Filippo,
brings us a riveting tale of gonzo transrealism—will Cammi and her boyfriend Bengt escape the clutches of the "Yubba Vines"? New York
Times
bestselling author
Carrie Vaughn
reveals why the hardest skill for a negotiator to master is "The Art of Homecoming"; in his hard-hitting new novelette,
Gray Rinehart
asks "What Is a Warrior Without His Wounds";
Ted Kosmatka
takes a haunting look at genetics and the results of a virulent epidemic in "Haplotype 1402";
Ian Watson's
"Blair's War" speculates about an alternate timeline where a well-known rebellion does not receive the same attention that it did in our corner of the multiverse; and
David J. Schwartz
marks his first appearance in
Asimov's
with a traumatic depiction of life after the alien invasion and suggests that it might not be wise to trust "Today's Friends."

Robert Silverberg's
Reflections on the Cargo Cult, "John Frum, He Come," contemplates the effect an outside civilization can have on an insular society;
Paul Di Filippo's
On Books fills us in on graphic novels, short story collections, and Ray Bradbury's film script for
Little Nemo in Slumberland;
plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our July issue on sale at newsstands on May 7, 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
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gwendolyn Clare, Igor Teper, Benjamin Crowell, Jack Skillingstead, Gregory Norman Bossert, Leah Thomas, Gregory Frost, Ian Creasey, Jim Sallis, Jay O'Connell, Dominica Phetteplace, Ian R. MacLeod, Sheila Finch, Alan DeNiro, Tom Purdom,
and many others!

By T. Aaron Payton

Night Shade, $26.99

ISBN: 978-1-59780-400-4

Payton combines steampunk and classic mystery in this Victorian London whodunit. Along the way, he pays homage to a number of his predecessors, including Mary Shelley, A. Conan Doyle, and Virginia Woolf.

The novel takes its name from a mysterious plague that has hit England, killing a fair proportion of its victims; those who survive are somehow converted to the opposite sex. It is generally accepted that the affliction is a venereal disease, and its effects on a society like Victorian England, where sex roles and sexual morality are far more rigid than in our day, are considerable. In particular, one of its victims is Prince Albert, who has been imprisoned in disgrace. Another effect has been the emergence of clockwork brothels, where men can partake in sex for pay without risking the affliction.

It has two major protagonists: Lord Pembroke Halliday (better known as Pimm), a moderately dissolute minor noble who, as we learn in the beginning pages, has married Freddy, one of his old school friends who fell victim to the affliction. He has also established a reputation as an amateur sleuth, having assisted the police in solving a number of crimes. In the first chapters, he is visited by a notorious criminal, Abel Value, who wants him to investigate a series of murders—prostitutes working for Value. Pimm is at first reluctant, but Value persuades him to take the case by threatening to reveal Freddy's true nature.

His opposite number is Ellie Slye, a young journalist who specializes in investigating sensational stories. As the novel begins, she has determined to investigate the clockwork brothels, disguised as a man—in spite of her editor's protests that the subject is unsuitable for a woman. Her disguise gets her in the front door, and into a room with one of the automata. After a few minutes, she realizes she needs more material, and goes to see if she can find one of the brochures with pictures of the "women" that the madam had shown her. Instead, she finds a well-known scientist, Sir Bertram Oswald, in the act of repairing one of the automata. He makes an unmistakable threat, she flees, and the adventure is on.

Meanwhile, Pimm has been introduced to "Mr. Adams," who as astute readers will have recognized, is actually Frankenstein's monster, now a scientist in his own right. The monster tells Pimm he can recover the mind of a recently killed corpse, and Pimm decides to take him up on the offer—assuming they can't catch the killer before that becomes necessary. And this is just the setup: Payton brings in complications upon complications, building up a remarkable plot that carries the reader along in open-mouthed amazement.

But Payton isn't just a compelling plotter; Pimm and Ellie are a thoroughly likeable team, and they clearly have the potential for lots of future adventures. There are several minor characters who show potential as continuing extras, as well. Payton also has a nice turn of phrase; several of the chapter titles show a dry wit that fits well with the steampunk atmosphere. And he has a good grasp of the period, not only its history but also its popular fiction and lore—as evidenced by numerous allusions, echoes, and borrowings. There's an awful lot to like here.

So it's somewhat disappointing to have to say that the ending seems to be straining for effect. The problem isn't that Payton doesn't make it work; it's that the world of the novel, already radically altered by the affliction, is even more altered by the events of the last couple of chapters. It's as if he set out to write one kind of book and let the plot run away from him to the extent it almost changes genre from steampunk to Lovecraftian weird fiction.

Still, I'm going to be waiting with considerable interest for Payton's next book. If he can maintain the level he's reached in this one, it'll be well worth the wait.

By A. Conan Doyle

Piggy Toes Press $5.95 (hc)

ISBN: 1-40370-985-8

Doyle is of course best known for the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but he was, like many of his contemporaries, willing to take a shot at anything that promised a payday.
The Lost World,
first published in 1912, is perhaps his best-known "science fiction" novel—the phrase hadn't been invented yet, of course, but it certainly fits this adventure, which in many ways prefigures Michael Crichton's
Jurassic Park.
It also serves as an interesting comparison to Payton's
Constantine Affliction,
which shows Doyle's influence in several details—including a character clearly modeled on Professor Challenger, the iconic figure at the center of this novel and several sequels.

The book begins with the narrator, Edward Malone, a young journalist, deciding to impress his fickle fiancée by taking on an assignment that shows his adventurous spirit and courage. His editor points him at Challenger, a maverick naturalist who has made outrageous claims about his discoveries in South America, claims that the scientific establishment has dismissed as impossible. Malone goes to visit the scientist, and after a contentious interview, ends up believing him.

After some additional brouhaha, an expedition is mounted. Malone and Challenger are joined by two others: Professor Summerlee, an establishment scientist only slightly less eccentric than Challenger himself, and Lord John Roxton, a well-known hunter/adventurer with considerable experience of South America, and a willingness to take chances. Their goal is an isolated plateau where Challenger claims to have found living dinosaurs. Needless to say, after several adventures, they reach the plateau, find proof that Challenger was right, and undergo still more adventures, culminating in a return to London to present their findings to the skeptical world.

The book shows signs of its age, unsurprisingly. Doyle was a man of his time, and the novel's attitudes toward women and non-English peoples are likely to leave a modern era reader shaking her head. The science is sometimes badly dated, if not outright wrong to begin with; the dinosaurs especially are relics of a time before their physiology was better understood. And some readers will be impatient with the pacing, the holes in the plot, and the languorous prose style. Still, this is the real thing: Doyle's strengths as a storyteller are enough to carry us along, and there's a good deal of pleasure to be had for those who let themselves be enticed into the mood.

NOTE: This novel is available in a number of editions; the novel I read happens to be one I found in a chain book-store. According to a note on the copyright page, it has been "lightly updated and annotated," although not to the extent that any changes jumped out at me; the annotations are almost entirely definitions of words that may be unfamiliar to younger readers.

By Ben Aaronovitch

Del Rey, $7.99 (mm)

ISBN: 978-0-345-52461-4

Here's a third in Aaronovitch's series of police procedurals, featuring occult detective Peter Grant. Aaronovitch, whose previous credits include work as a screenwriter for
Dr. Who,
has effectively combined humor, magic, and London lore in equal measures—in this case, modern London, although there's plenty of history underlying the events of the story.

Grant's latest case begins when he's called to assist with a murder investigation, a young man found stabbed on the tracks of an underground station—one of the busiest in the system. Worse yet, it's the peak of the Christmas shopping season, and one of the heaviest snows in years has decided to fall on London—resulting in frustration and undue haste for everyone involved. The pressure is on the police to solve the crime quickly, especially after it turns out the victim is an American—worse yet, the son of a U.S. Senator. But the victim was an art student, with a somewhat disorderly lifestyle and an even more disorderly roommate, which involves Grant almost instantly in a wide-ranging investigation that touches on the art world. And the murder weapon—a shard of pottery—is unusual enough to merit investigation in its own right, especially since Grant's magical sense tells him it's the product of some powerful magic-making.

The investigation drags out, with Grant visiting galleries, trailing a black market grocery supplier, and eventually discovering a hidden set of galleries underneath the underground—which has its own population of previously unsuspected Londoners. The key to the murder turns out to lie in the history of the city. This turn of events fits nicely with the author's obvious love of the history and topography of London, which this novel serves up in generous portions.

Perhaps the one complaint I have about this installment in the series is the reduced role of Grant's boss, Detective Inspector Nightingale, an older detective/wizard who has been a large part of the charm of the earlier volumes. On the other hand, Lesley, Grant's girlfriend until a spell gone wrong disfigured her, has begun to take a more active role in the plot again. Aaronovitch is clearly working on a long-range story, and that promises more in this excellent series.

By Jim Al-Khalili

Broadway, $15.00 (tp)

ISBN: 978-0-307-98879-5

A British physicist looks at some of the enigmatic propositions created by his colleagues over the ages.

Al-Khalili, who teaches quantum physics at the University of Surrey, begins with the well-known stumper involving a game show host—usually Monty Hall—who confronts the contestant with three doors, one of which conceals a prize. After the contestant chooses one, the host then opens another door that proves not to be the winner, and asks the contestant if she would like to change her choice. In defiance of common sense, it is advantageous to do so; Al-Khalili summarizes the probabilities behind the puzzle, noting the important provision that the host has to know which door is the actual winner.

He then turns to the logical puzzles invented by the Greek philosopher Zeno, who seemingly proved that motion is impossible. The most famous is "Achilles and the Tortoise," in which the mythical hero gives the reptile a head start that he then finds he can never make up, since in the time he makes up the original head start, the tortoise has moved ahead. The demonstration, while contrary to all practical experience, seemed annoyingly irrefutable until the development of mathematical tools, such as calculus, for describing change over time.

Olbers' paradox, on the other hand, revealed deep truths about the universe by asking why, if there are an infinite number of stars, the sky is dark at night. Various answers were posed over the ages; for example, interstellar dust that blocks light, which however would be heated by the stars until it too glowed. The modern answer depends on the perception that light has a finite speed and the universe a definite age.

Maxwell's demon, an imaginary creature that can control individual molecules to overthrow entropy, raises similarly deep issues of fundamental physics. Granting the premise that such a being could exist, and that it can control the molecules without any expenditure of energy (which would reestablish the primacy of entropy), the creation of a perpetual motion machine becomes possible. How to explain away this problem?

Possibly the most familiar paradox of quantum theory—if only to watchers of "The Big Bang Theory"—is Schrödinger's Cat, whose life or death depends on whether a radioactive atom decays in a given stretch of time. Al-Khalili appropriately notes that nobody really understands quantum theory, other than using its mathematical formulations to arrive at useful predictions about the behavior of matter on the subatomic scale. The cat paradox was an effort by Schrödinger—a leading physicist in his own right—to look at whether events on the atomic scale, which are subject to the laws of quantum physics, can be made to affect the scale of everyday experience. You may or may not agree with Al-Khalili's explanation of the paradox, but it will certainly get you thinking about the science involved.

Fermi's Paradox is another that raises questions about the larger universe: if technologically advanced civilizations are common in the universe, why haven't they visited us? Al-Khalili gives detailed answers to each of these problems, plus several that grow out of Einstein's theory of relativity and the possibility of time travel. The latter, notably the famous paradox of the time traveler to the past who kills his own direct ancestor, has of course been the meat of numerous SF stories.

The book concludes with a list of unsolved problems of science—not all of them paradoxes—and a look at the recent question of whether neutrinos have been found to travel faster than light, a possibility that raises rich issues touching the very foundations of science.

This one's a good read for those who like to stretch their minds around a tough problem; thus I've avoided giving away the answers. It's also an entertaining look into the history of science, to boot.