Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (43 page)

"I'm not,” she said, and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it."

All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.

"When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you."

A fo ben, bid bont.
To be a leader, be a bridge.

—Welsh proverb

Copyright © 2011 by Kij Johnson

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DECEMBER ISSUE

A special holiday issue sporting stories about the winter season has been a semi-annual tradition at Asimov's, and we're delighted that this year the holiday spirit returns to the magazine with a brand new novelette by
Connie Willis
. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll read this story on the edge of your seat as New York Theater comes alive and an aging Broadway star contends with a very unusual protogeé in “All About Emily."

ALSO IN DECEMBER

New author
Suzanne Palmer
makers her Asimov's entrance with a wild tale about a team of xenobiologists whose accademic voyage of exploration goes all-together differently from what (most) of them expected; new author
Ken Liu
offers us a heart-breaking mystery about a young boy making sense of the world in “The Countable";
Pamela Sagent
looks at a group of children growing up in the fifties and reveals the truth behind “Strawberry Birdies"; in his devestating new story,
Ferrett Steinmetz
shows us why it's a good idea to move quickly when “'Run,’ Bakri Says"; with his usual sardonic humor,
Tim McDaniel
demonstrates why a certain element would go to any length to get a hold of “The List"; and in a poignant visit to the future
Steve Rasnic Tem
discovers that there's more than one type of “Ephemera."

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

Robert Silverberg's
“Reflections” investigates “The Strange Case of the Patagonian Giants” and we'll have
Peter Heck's
“On Books” column, plus an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our December issue on sale at newsstands on October 4, 2011. Or you can 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, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebook store.sony.com's eReader and from Zinio.com!

COMING SOON

new stories by
Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley, Ken Liu, Kit Reed, Jack McDevitt, Rudy Rucker & Eileen Gunn, David Ira Cleary, Tom Purdom, Zachary Jernigan, C.W. Johnson, Bruce McAllister & Barry Malzberg
, and many others!

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ANATHEM,

by Neal Stephenson

$9.99, Harper Collins, $9.99

ISBN: 0061982482

—

THE ROAD,

by Cormac McCarthy

Knopf, $7.99

ISBN: 0307267458

—

THE LOST SYMBOL

by Dan Brown,

Doubleday, $9.99

ISBN: 0385533136

—

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY

by Gary Shtenygart

Random House, $9.99

ISBN: 067960359X

By the time J. Edgar Hoover reached mandatory Federal retirement age, it was well-known that the long-time FBI Director had become an ominous nutcase with the dirty goods on many people, including the political high and mighty. Lyndon Johnson was president, and it was assumed that he, like many of the denizens of Washington, would heave a sigh of relief as he handed Hoover the gold watch on his way out the door.

Instead, LBJ made a special exception and kept Hoover on as head of the Bureau. When asked why he had done such a thing, Johnson replied: “Better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, publishing, literature, and “SF” find themselves in revolutionary times, in part thrust there by technological developments—and how perfectly science fictional that would sound leading off a story in John W. Campbell's
Astounding.

But this really
is
the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the times they really
are
a-changing. Publishing is being changed by ebooks and ebook readers like Kindle, Nook, and the iPad, the literary content of the product can hardly be immune from bottom-line changes, and science fiction, by its very nature, cannot escape being up there on the line of scrimmage, for better or for worse, whether it likes it or not.

The four novels under consideration here are
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy,
The Lost Symbol
by Dan Brown,
Anathem
by Neal Stephenson, and
Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart, and that it itself tells a multiplex revolutionary tale. I read them all on my Nook.

I received none of them as review copies. I bought them all as ebooks with my own money.

For those of you for whose beer money we critics compete and who must be constrained to shell it out for your literary entertainment, will it really come as a shock when I say that we reviewers expect freebies to review from publishers competing for our attention?

I have upon rare occasion bought books because their publishers did not grace me with copies or galleys, but I wanted to review them anyway. But I had never ever written one of these columns entirely about books I had to pay for. Which, of course, I hope will never happen again. Which, of course, I know damn well will.

And until now, I've never before reviewed a novel I read as an ebook, and in this essay I'm doing nothing but. And this is something I think I'm going to be doing a lot of in the future, and I won't be complaining about that at all.

As a reader of literature outside the commercial SF genre, I do have to pay my own way, and have always been parsimonious about buying hardcover copies of what I wanted to read for my own personal enjoyment and/or edification for twenty-five dollars and up. This Scroogy attitude is probably exacerbated by all the free copies I'm inundated with of stuff that goes for the same prices, but which just isn't the sort of stuff I want to read.

But epublishing and retailing, by fits and starts, here doing it right, there being exploitatively and foolishly greedy against enlightened self-interest, are changing my attitude, and I believe are in the process of changing the attitude of readers in general with finite budgets who have to balance wanting to read what they want to read
right now
with how many right-now editions they can afford to buy.

All of that is gone into at far greater length than I can burden you with here in
The Publishing Death Spiral
and
The Future of eBooks Is Now
on my blogsite Norman Spinrad At Large
(normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/)
. For present purposes, the point is that all the novels under consideration here were launched as hardcovers for twenty-five dollars or more, yet all of the ebook editions sell for the same price as the trade paperback reprints and sometimes a lot less, and are out there just as fast. Meaning at any time in the publication cycle readers of ebook editions are going to get more titles to read for the same money.

Three electronic cheers for that!

It means that even a critic who in fact not only gets freebies inside the genre tent but gets
paid
for reading them will look around more freely at what may be relevant to larger literary matters outside the genre tent, the boundaries of which are swiftly eroding.

None of the four novels under consideration are what we think of as genre “science fiction,” which is why they never came in over my transom as review copies. But all of them are not only literarily speculative fiction, not only even arguably science fiction, but perhaps, taken together, a clade of speciating literary vectors that arguably may replace “science fiction” entirely.

Or vice versa?

None of these four novels are mimetic contemporary tales; none of them are fantasies, since they do at least attempt to more or less stay within the known laws of mass and energy—or in the case of
Anathem,
argue its way around them and through them with geeky rubber cosmology. So if one reverses figure and ground to define science fiction by what everything else is not, they have to be SF because there's nothing else for them to be.

I bought an ebook edition of
The Road
with no thought of wanting to review it because Cormac McCarthy is an establishment literary lion, the novel is set in a post-apocalypse future, and it received such laudatory attention in what's left of the establishment literary press as a novelist in my existential position would sell at least a collateralized debt obligation on his soul for. I had previously bought the ebook of
Super Sad True Love Story
because the coverage in the more or less same PR environment promised a fun read, and because this non-genre SF novel was set in some sort of gonzo near-future.

Only after having read both the Shteyngart and McCarthy did I realize that both of them were science fiction, and not even merely speculative fiction, by any coherent literary definition. And that from a proprietary genre point of view, these guys were standing outside the genre tent.

But were they pissing in or knocking on the door, to flagrantly mix two metaphors in a single sentence? The only thing that seemed clear was that something mutationally general was going on.

Only then was my curiosity drawn to
The Lost Symbol
, a sort of sequel by the author of the monstrous best-seller
The Da Vinci Code
, which I had read for lack of anything else in English to be found in an apartment in Paris where Dona and I were staying. This is what one could only call the kind of contemporary paranoid present tense historical thriller that insists that it's realistic by shoehorning itself inside the physical laws of mass and energy, however loosely it plays with everything else.

And is this not another functional definition of science fiction if ever there was one? And has not Dan Brown gotten filthy rich writing it? And does it not make sense for those of us writing science fiction without attaining his lofty commercial eminence to try to figure out why? Particularly since
The Lost Symbol
is, in literary terms, a real stinker, much more so than
The Da Vinci Code
.

In
The Da Vinci Code
, it was the Catholic Church getting the expose the machinations of the Illuminati of the Month treatment, via a search to crack the secret encoded in the Mona Lisa that exfoliates into a derring-do thriller via an academic expert forced by fictional necessity to do the derring, a la a reluctant Indiana Jones.

Unless you've just returned from the ex-planet Pluto, you don't need me to tell you that it was an enormous commercial success, but maybe you do need me to confess, if that is the proper word, that I rather enjoyed it. Hey, Leonardo, Opus Dei, a homicidal albino monk, the Holy Grail, the hidden secret life of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the Roman Catholic Church fighting for its life well outside the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry—pretty hard to not be gripped by such material, and Dan Brown writes proficiently if not with high literary ambition.

But did Brown really believe this stuff ? Could it really be
true?
Was that why some Church officials expressed their displeasure? Was not putting these thoughts bouncing around the heads of readers and paranoid pop culture part of its appeal?

Whatever, Dan, any agent worth his commission would have told Brown, since
The Da Vinci Code
earned out so much above the advance we got on it, your publisher is slavering to lay out much more for the advance on a sequel.

Voila,
The Lost Symbol!
Same lead hero, but this time it's the Freemasons, particularly the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, the CIA, and Noetics, a science fictional science of consciousness reminiscent of Scientology presented without the sardonic wink of an L. Ron Hubbard.

And the venue in which the action—and there is plenty of that—takes place is not millennial Rome or Paris with the atmospheres that implies, but the mythical cityscape secretly created as Washington, D.C.

Washington's architecture and decor as the creation of the Freemason Conspiracy of the Founding Fathers? George Washington as Prometheus? Human thought manipulating and creating reality because collectively it has some cockeyed quantum mass?

Come on, Dan!

Do you really believe this stuff ?

But hey, there really
is
a pyramid with an all-seeing eye atop it on the dollar bill, the Founding Fathers really
were
mostly Masons, as was George Washington, and some of this stuff seems well-researched and credible. There are probably as many or more people who believe in this incarnation of the Secret Masters of the world's reality as believe in the Men in Black and the alien corpses in Hangar 51 and Timothy Leary's
Curse of the Oval Office
combined.

Could it really be true?

Well, there's the nature of Dan Brown's secret formula, and an utterly science fictional technique it is, as I should know quite well, having myself applied it to both the historical past and, like Brown, what might be called the speculative present. What you do is use the gaps, contradict nothing that is verifiably true, which lets you play freely with everything else.

It's a most useful literary technique. You can't write immediate-future speculative fiction ("anticipation” as the French call it to distinguish it from “science fiction” because the speculative element need not involve science or technology at all) or historical fiction or hard science fiction without employing it. Dan Brown has it down cold in the speculative present, and in
The Da Vinci Code
it worked well for him.

He uses it to good effect again in
The Lost Symbol,
but there he also employs a coldly cynical story-telling technique to keep the reader turning the pages without finding a good stopping point to place a bookmark and reading at warp speed to create the illusion of a breathlessly thrilling lead.