Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (24 page)

In empty houses, faces
reflect in absent windows.

In downtown jungles, parrots repeat
conversations of the extinct.

In the valley of iron frames,
last-minute poems, handprints of rust
left by the children of industry.

Along highways of escape,
brute mothers lie
bashed and abandoned.

While in the ruined café
radios find songs of nothing
dissolved on their trip between stars.

EDITORIAL

My father believed that—no matter what the odds—one should always go down metaphorically swinging and never face the end with resignation. Where some living wills indicate "Do Not Resuscitate," his instructed us to extend his life by "all means possible." I don't think every situation lends itself to this philosophy, but I know I've been influenced by it. It's one reason Arthur C. Clarke's 1972 novel,
Rendezvous with Rama,
so quickly convinced me that humanity could do with an early warning system that would help Earth avoid disastrous collisions with objects from outer space. As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, "We are the first generations of humans who can do something about an asteroid or comet impact. We have learned enough about the cosmos and our place in space that we can understand the danger and make a plan."

Asteroids and comets as methods of mass destruction have been much on our minds lately. We've all seen the videos of the 11,000-ton meteor that blew up over the Chelyabinsk Oblast earlier this year. Although the atmosphere absorbed most of it, the meteor was packing a kinetic energy punch twenty to thirty times greater than the energy released by the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Almost directly on its heels came the awfully close flyby of Asteroid 2012 DA14. At four times the size of the Cheyabinsk meteor, this asteroid could do significant damage if it impacts the Earth at some point in its future travels. There are good reasons for why asteroids and their comet cousins are the nightmares of science fiction writers, readers, and editors.

But objects like asteroids have duel natures in science and in science fiction. We know one ended the reign of the dinosaur and one could as easily bring about our own demise. Lurking in my submissions system are numerous stories chronicling the Earth's fiery destruction, yet for every one of those there's another tale about the daring deeds of brave asteroid miners or the exploits of dodgy, and sometimes misunderstood, asteroid pirates. These ideas are so common in science fiction that they are often viewed as clichés. Still, they may become reality sometime in the not too distant future. A company called Planetary Resources Inc. hopes to mine near-Earth asteroids for water and platinum. NASA's proposed budget for 2014 "includes a plan to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it." Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel,
2312,
imagines us using asteroids as nature preserves and means of transportation.

My earliest encounter with an asteroid story may have been Isaac Asimov's "Marooned Off Vesta." I found the story in a collection called
Asimov's Mysteries
when I was in middle school. In this tale, three plucky characters must use their ingenuity to survive after their spaceship is wrecked by a meteroid. Last year, Jason Sanford's "Heaven's Touch" featured an equally competent character who desperately tries to save the Earth and herself from a close encounter with a comet.

In James Maxey's 2005, "To the East, a Bright Star," and Robert Reed's 2007, "Roxie," characters await the inevitable end of life on Earth as we know it with varying degrees of acceptance. These stories have their quiet beauty. Although fatalistic, they are powerful. They remind us of what we will lose if we don't take steps to protect ourselves. I know that just because we have a "can-do" attitude doesn't mean that we will succeed at everything we set our minds to. But inaction could certainly doom us. I'd rather throw my lot in with those who are trying to ward off these cosmic terrors than ignore the issue and convince myself that asteroids or comets aren't going to inflict massive destruction on the Earth during my lifetime.

Clarke called his fictional early warning system for detecting hazardous Near Earth Objects "SPACEGUARD." Today, there are numerous national and international associations working on the problem of detecting NEOs and avoiding a major impact event—some of these organizations even take their names from Clarke's novel. NASA lists many of the groups at
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/links.
The Planetary Society (
http://www.planetary.org
) is a nonprofit organization that funds "asteroid hunters" through their Shoemaker NEO Grants. One grant partially funded the La Sagra Sky Survey, at the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra. Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered during the course of this survey.

Although scientists have lots of promising ideas, it doesn't look like humanity is prepared to take on the redirection of a massive object anytime soon. Right now, the best defense seems to be an orderly evacuation of the endangered area. Evacuation won't be the answer if a planet-killer sized asteroid shows up, though. Many hope that the dramatic footage of the Chelyabinsk explosion, and its concurrence with the visit from Asteroid 2012 DA14, will encourage more research into methods for nudging treacherous NEOs out of our path.

I hope it does. I'd prefer that we not face extinction from the skies as helplessly as the dinosaurs did. I want humanity raging effectively at the blinding light of a catastrophic Near Earth Object and finding ways to destroy or deflect the planet killer before it gets us. Neither I nor my children nor my children's children should have to go gently.

REFLECTIONS

The January 1987 issue of
Asimov's Science Fiction
featured a novella of mine called "The Secret Sharer," the title of which I had borrowed from a story by Joseph Conrad. In an introduction to my "Secret Sharer" written for a collection of my stories soon afterward I said that I had "translated" the famous Conrad story into science fictional terms. In one basic sense that was true: Conrad's story is about a ship captain who quite improperly provides sanctuary in his cabin for a stowaway who has hidden himself aboard his ship, and so is mine. But I was uncomfortable with that word "translated" all the same, for I felt that it was not quite the appropriate term for what I had done. What I believed I had done was to find a purely science fictional
equivalent
of Conrad's basic story situation and produce something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story and insofar as completely original ideas in fiction are ever actually possible. (More about that latter point later on!)

The term "translation" in the sense I've used it here first showed up as a derogatory word in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic. They defined a "translation" as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into SF by the simple one-for-one substitution of science fictiony noises for the artifacts of a mundane story. Blish, in a famous essay eviscerating a story of Robert Sheckley's—and Blish specialized in eviscerations—wrote, in 1955, "As usual, the problem is 'solved' by pulling three rabbits out of the author's hat, though of course he doesn't call them rabbits—they look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction." To this day, "calling a rabbit a smeerp" is a phrase used by critics to describe this kind of lazy science fiction.

Blish and Knight weren't the first to denounce the technique. In the fall of 1950 an impressive new science fiction magazine called
Galaxy
commenced publication, and on the back cover of the first issue, under the heading, YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY, were these two paragraphs printed in parallel format, the work of
Galaxy's
brilliant, tough-minded editor, Horace L. Gold:

"Sound alike?" Gold asked, below. "They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it. YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY."

Gold, who had served his literary apprenticeship writing for the pulp magazines of the 1930s, knew all about such stuff. Change "Colt.44" to "laser pistol" and "horse" to "greeznak" and "Comanche" to "Sloogl" and you could easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you didn't get real science fiction; you didn't get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change "Los Angeles Police Department" to "Drylands Patrol" and "crack dealer" to "canal-dust dealer" and you've got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change "the canals of Venice" to "the marshy streets of Venusburg" and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you've got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it's still a James Bond story.

I don't think that that's what I did in my version of "The Secret Sharer." The particular way in which my stowaway Vox hides herself aboard the
Sword of Orion
is nothing that Joseph Conrad could have understood, and arises, I think, purely out of the science fictional inventions at the heart of the story. The way she ultimately departs from the ship is very different from anything depicted in Conrad's maritime fiction. The starwalk scene, in which Vox and the captain take a virtual stroll into interstellar space, provides visionary possibilities quite unlike those afforded by a long stare into the vastness of the trackless Pacific. "Together we walked the stars," I wrote. "Not only walked but plunged and swooped and soared, traveling among them like gods. Their hot breath singed us. Their throbbing brightness thundered at us. Their serene movements boomed a mighty music at us. On and on we went, hand in hand, Vox leading, I letting her draw me, deeper and deeper into the shining abyss that was the universe. Until at last we halted, floating in mid-cosmos, the ship nowhere to be seen, only the two of us surrounded by a shield of suns." And so on. "The Secret Sharer" by Robert Silverberg is, or so I believe, a new and unique science fiction story set, for reasons of the author's private amusement, within the framework of a well-known century-old masterpiece of the sea by Joseph Conrad.

As for calling rabbits smeerps and horses greeznaks, that is not only lazy conceptualizing but can be irritating and distracting to the reader, and I had my own say on that in the introductory note I wrote for the novel
Nightfall
(1990) on which I collaborated with Isaac Asimov: "Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms.... So when the people of Kalgash speak of 'miles,' or 'hands,' or 'cars,' or 'computers,' they mean
their own
units of distance,
their own
grasping-organs,
their own
ground-transportation devices,
their own
information-processing machines, etc....

"We could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with...."