2010 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Rockville, Maryland.

Comments: In 2010 Tansy Rayner Roberts won the WSFA Small Press Award with a story published by Australian publisher Twelfth Planet Press. In what was perhaps a sign of the strong interest in the still young award, Alisa Krasnostein, the owner of Twelfth Planet Press, traveled from Australia to the United States in part to accept the award on Roberts' behalf.

2010 also showed just how quickly WSFA Small Press Award had become a magnet for high quality stories when Eugie Foster's nominated story Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugo Award and the BSFA Award.

WSFA Small Press Award

Winner:

Siren Beat by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Other Nominees:

each thing i show you is a piece of my death by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer

Images of Anna by Nancy Kress
James and the Dark Grimoire by Kevin Lauderdale
Race to the Moon by Kyell Gold

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster

The Pirate Captain's Daughter by Yoon Ha Lee

The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram by Jeff Soesbe

Go to previous year's nominees: 2009
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2011

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Review - DragonQuest: A Novel by Donita K. Paul

Short review: Kale's slow-moving, tensionless, pseudo-Christian fantasy adventures continue.

Haiku
Kale's false new mother
And Risto's new meech dragon
Hey! Tea and daggarts!

Full review: It takes a certain amount of hubris or naivete for a fantasy author to name their book DragonQuest. After all, Anne McCaffrey more or less claimed that title with her 1971 Hugo-nominated Dragonriders of Pern novel Dragonquest. The name has also serves as the name for the SPI published DragonQuest fantasy role playing game, and a massively popular series of computer console games. In the case of Donita K. Paul and her Christian fantasy DragonQuest, the second book in The Dragonkeeper Chronicles following after DragonSpell (read review) and preceding DragonKnight (read review), I tend to think that the title choice probably springs from a lack of familiarity with the fantasy fiction genre. This assessment stems from the realization that DragonQuest is not really a work of fantasy fiction. It is, in fact, a fairly didactic work of Christian advocacy playing a pretty poor version of dress up in fantasy clothing.

The plot of the novel is fairly straightforward. Having been thwarted in his efforts to acquire a meech egg by the heroes in DragonSpell, the evil wizard Risto acquires another one and instead of carrying out his Earth-shattering plan to create a new "low" race from it, he abandons that idea and instead hatches it so he can train the meech to influence other dragons to join his side. In the meantime, an unknown force drops a bunch of "Creemore spiders" on Vendela (which is where Kale and Dar have been training as freshly inducted leecents in Paladin's army) who wreck havoc just as Kale, with two new characters named Bardon and Toopka, is set to head off to Fenworth's castle in order to help raise the brand new meech dragon that hatched from the egg Kale and her friends saved from Risto in the first book. Along the way, Kale is wounded and poisoned by a Creemore spider and we are told she is near death. Because the story is told entirely from Kale's perspective, the drama of her recovery takes place almost entirely outside the narrative of the book. Essentially, the reader gets told "Kale is near death and in dire straits" on one page, and "Kale has been healed by Fenworth and out of danger" on the next, removing any possibility of dramatic tension.

The fact that Kale's recovery takes place basically off-stage presages a recurring theme in the book: any big, dramatic developments almost all take place off-camera, with the reader only told about them as a fait accompli after the fact. The expedition to hunt down the Creemore spiders and discover who sent them to Vendela, the assembling of an army to defeat Risto, the trickery behind the defection and return of the "good" dragons, and even the climactic battle against Risto's forces all take place out of sight of the reader, primarily because Kale was not there to witness them. While this preserves the purity of Kale as a viewpoint character, it was the author's choice to have Kale not present for so many of these events. As a result, the book has far less actual drama and tension than it should have. This might be understandable if the narrative path that Kale and her companions take had its own drama, but instead the reader is mostly treated to a slow moving series of moral lessons in which the pseudo-Christian fantasy religion is imparted to the reader. To a certain extent, at points it seems like Mrs. Paul forgot she was writing a fantasy novel, instead of a Sunday school lesson plan, as it seems like it was far more important to her to have the characters repeatedly talk about how they are powerless and worthless without Wulder (who serves as the fantasy world version of God) to guide and protect them and Paladin (who is the fantasy stand-in for Jesus) to tell them the correct way to properly worship and exalt Wulder.

Once everyone reaches Fenworth's castle and the meech dragon, named Regidor, is introduced, they emphasize the urgency of the mission to investigate the Creemore spider attack and stop Risto's meech dragon from influencing the dragons of the world to rally to the side of evil by spending a lot of time drinking tea, eating daggarts and mullins, and waiting for an accidentally quickened minor dragon egg to hatch. This does allow for some character development for the young doneel Toopka and the rapidly growing meech dragon Regidor. It turns out that meech dragons are basically humanoid dragons, based on the description given they look more or less like a scaly person with sharp teeth, sharp claws, and a tail. Given that they are intelligent, capable of speech, and seem to basically be people with some lizard-like affinity, one has to wonder why they are not counted as one of the seven "high" races, or one of the seven "low" races. One might suppose their rarity prevents them from being counted, but the story chips away at the rarity argument when Dar casually makes reference to a "meech colony" that was attacked by Risto (which really is odd, given that we have been told that meech dragons are so unheard of that the existence of the meech egg from which Regidor hatched was considered to be a once in a lifetime occurrence). It also doesn't really make much sense that whether a particular race is counted as a race or not depends on how many of them there are given that Wulder (who we are told is the source of all knowledge in the fantasy land of Amara) is supposedly omniscient. I suspect that the reason may be that the seven high and low races may not actually be "fantasy races" in the sense that most people who read fantasy fiction would be familiar with. In the book, after she returns to the village where she was the village slave before discovering her first dragon egg and being set free, Kale begins to consider the "marione virtues" that grated on her when she lived among them, and how each race displays different virtues that must be combined together for a harmonious whole. Although she has not yet made the connection explicit, based upon the didactic nature of the book, my guess is that Mrs. Paul is setting up a correspondence between each of the seven high races and one of the seven cardinal virtues, and between the seven low races and the seven deadly sins. In short, the reason that there are seven high and seven low races seems to be to fill out a spiritually significant checklist rather than any organic purpose in the setting, and thus the meech dragons are superfluous to that goal and therefore are not counted.

So after piddling around for a few weeks of afternoon snacking, the new minor dragon is hatched - who turns out to be a "laughter dragon" capable of making people feel mirthful. This, we are told, is going to be important on the upcoming quest. But, as one might expect in a book that consistently brings up random and supposedly important details only to drop them without any real explanation, it turns out to have no actual value at all on the quest. Dar shows up with the riding dragons, and after a brief fight with some mordakleeps and blimmets (that, as with much of the action of the book, takes place mostly out of sight, with Kale and Regidor providing magical assistance from miles away) the group sets out question to find the source of the Creemore spiders by camping far away from where the Creemore spiders live and cooking oversize mushrooms like steaks and other tasty meals. Interrupting the cooking scenes, Cam, a lake wizard shows up, and a beautiful woman well-dressed appears to Kale and claims to be her mother Lyll and tells her to keep her visits a secret. This is intended to set up a conflict in Kale, as she is encouraged by the beautiful Lyll to abandon her companions and the urgent quest of preparing lots of breakfast foods and run away to Risto's castle. The problem is that Lyll is pretty unconvincing - and Mrs. Paul seems not to even really want to make her seem tempting other than to describe how pretty her clothes are and have Kale think about how much she wants to have a family. But the Lyll presented in these scenes turns nasty so quickly that any amount of real dramatic conflict dissipates almost immediately, leaving the reader to wonder about Kale's sanity as she continues to consider running off with a woman who berates and verbally abuses her.

Of course, since the action is getting far too close to the pages, Paladin has to show up and direct Kale, Toopka, Bardon, Regidor and Dar to go find the renegade meech dragon and turn it away from Risto's service, leaving Fenworth and Cam to deal with the spiders. This also gives Paladin the opportunity to dispense some fairly offensive advice to the heroes as they head through the magical gate that will whisk them across the continent to where the evil meech dragon might be. Paladin stops each of the travelers to give them some personalized theological advice, and when he comes to Toopka, a child who has spent most of her life prior to meeting Kale as a homeless orphan living rough on the streets of Vendela, he chastises her for not being honest. There are times you want to reach inside a book and punch one of the characters in the mouth for being a complete dick. This was one of those times. The gall of taking a street urchin who had been forced by circumstances Wulder arranged to lie, cheat, and steal just to have food to eat and then chastising her for not learning a moral code that she clearly never had an opportunity to learn is simply staggering. And this callous, obnoxious, and distasteful figure is the Jesus analogue in Mrs. Paul's fantasy world. Paladin also requires Kale to set about hatching another egg, which he specifically selects as being particularly well-suited to help with the challenges that will face her in her quest. It turns out to be a light dragon but, as usual, despite this build up there is nothing particularly useful about having the dragon along.

One thing that makes Paladin's interlude with Toopka seem so odd is that through the rest of the book Mrs. Paul has the various characters espouse what can only be described as a theological doctrine of personal helplessness and worthlessness. The characters repeatedly assert that they are incapable of accomplishing anything without Wulder's help, and that they cannot take any actions without Wulder's power and authority. This further saps any actual tension from the book, since it results in a collection of characters who don't do much of anything, and when they do, they always end up succeeding because Wulder is on their side. The structure of the book, since the purpose is clearly to impart "correct" theological lessons rather than tell an actual story, violates the basic rule of storytelling, since there is no actual conflict in the book that has any meaning at all. Of course, other than personal interviews with Paladin, it isn't clear where anyone is supposed to learn the wisdom of Wulder. There is a passing reference to the books of Wulder, although they are apparently so rare that they never heard of them in the village Kale was raised in, and when imparting Wulder's knowledge to her, neither Granny Noon nor Fenworth's personal librarian Librettowit make any reference to them. A person identified as a parson crosses paths with the motley band of travelers when they stop at an inn, and is supposedly something of a religious authority, but he requires Dar to argue in favor of Wulder's service before the other patrons will accept him as anything other than a useless appendage. This particular scene also highlights yet another weakness of the book: Mrs. Paul often doesn't even bother to set up a straw man to have her characters argue against, she just has one of the characters say the "correct" version of Wulder's teachings, and those who had been indifferent or opposed to Wulder's message generally snap into line immediately. In short, Amara is the sort of fantasy world where one can do the equivalent of quoting John 3:16 to nonbelievers and have them immediately see the light with no further convincing necessary.

Of course, this sort of conversion only works on the indifferent or the misguided. The heroes, being on the side of Wulder, are immune to the temptations of the forces of evil. The designated villains, being written as essentially insane, seem to be immune to Wulder's message. Once the heroes catch up to the villainous meech dragon, a female named Gilda, who has been spreading discord among dragons, convincing them to leave their family farms and join Risto's cause, she is completely unconvinced by Regidor's arguments in favor of serving Wulder. From a certain perspective this is understandable, since Regidor's arguments are completely unconvincing (probably because neither he nor anyone else in the book has ever had to do more than mouth some platitudes about how great Wulder is and the listener immediately agrees with them), but I suspect that Mrs. Paul intended for the reader to be impressed with the theological arguments between the two meech dragons and come to understand just how right Regidor is. Despite this, the book ends with Gilda still unconvinced that Risto is a villain, but imprisoned in a bottle and thus helpless. I guess in a world in which village slavery is acceptable, imprisoning someone in a bottle until they see the light counts as "rescuing" them. The reunion between Kale and the real Lyll Alerion is similarly unconvincing. (You didn't really think the beautiful but nasty Lyll was really Kale's mother did you? That would have set up an actual conflict in the book, and that is apparently to be avoided like the plague). Lyll makes some very weak justifications for leaving her only child in a village full of meriones to be their slave as opposed to, say, asking one of her good friends like the Wizard Fenworth or the Wizard Cam to take care of her. Or leaving her in the care of Paladin's followers in Vendela, or any number of other choices that would seem far superior to a childhood of slavery. The real Lyll is, of course, sweet and loving, but not as beautiful as the false one (at first, a situation that is rectified quickly). Kale is kidnapped in a last gasp effort by the forces of evil, and a wholly unconvincing temptation sequence lays out in which the false Lyll tries to berate and insult Kale into choosing her. One of the fundamental problems with the book appears to be that Mrs. Paul cannot understand the thought process of a nonbeliever, and as a result resorts to unconvincing caricatures as opposition for her protagonists.

On the other hand, the problem may be that Mrs. Paul is simply not very good at drawing any more substantial than cardboard characters. Bardon, who is supposed to be difficult and unpleasant to work with, and whom Kale is required to take along with her when she sets out into the world, turns out to be so bland as a character that one frequently forgets that he is supposed to be a stiff-necked pain in the neck. The various wizards have what are supposed to be funny magical quirks - Fenworth changes into a tree if he sits still for a while, Cam drips water all the time, and Lyll gets older if she is sedentary and younger if she exercises - but they have little more than one-dimensional personalities. And this seems to extend to the setting itself. Most of the fantasy elements go little more than surface deep, and once the veneer wears thin, the fundamentally mundane nature of the world begins to peek through. The characters eat mullins and daggarts, but these seem to be little more than alternate words for doughnuts and muffins. Illustrating the skin deep nature of the fantasy element is the "beater frog", described in the obligatory glossary of fantasy terms as a "Tailless, semiaquatic amphibian having a smooth, moist skin, webbed feet, and long hind legs. Shades of green; no bigger than a child's fist; capable of making a loud, resounding boom". As an observant reader would note, this basically describes this animal as "a frog that can make a loud boom". Once you knock the thin coating of fantasy names off, there just isn't much left other than a bunch of badly presented lessons in pseudo-Christianity that make Risto and the Pretender look like a much better option than the callous Wulder and the dickish Paladin. This sort of superficial reskinning of the mundane in an effort to create a fantasy reality makes one think that Mrs. Paul is not particularly well-read in the field of fantasy fiction, and merely chose this genre because it would serve to draw younger readers in and let her beat them over the head and shoulders with her religious message. The actual lesson a reader will probably take away from the book is that it takes more than renaming a collection of mundane world elements to make an effective fantasy setting.

In between didactic sessions of moral instruction, justifications for slavery, repeated protestations by the characters as to their own personal worthlessness, and dinners of renamed the story meanders along aimlessly until the big confrontation occurs. But Mrs. Paul puts limited effort into this aspect of the book. The big threat facing the heroes is the supposedly beguiling Gilda, and her enhanced ability to turn dragons away from working with the members of the "high" races and join Risto's army. This supposedly threatens the economy of Amara, as everyone supposedly depends upon their dragons for just about everything, but as with so many other fantasy elements of the setting, this is never really shown. Instead, the reader is told that the dragons are critical, without being given any real clear indication by example as to why this is so. And when Regidor and Kale confront Gilda, he does not seem to be swayed at all, and neither do Kale's minor dragons. The heroes raise an army of merione farmers to oppose Risto's forces with little effort, which is leavened by a collection of reinforcements. Once the heroes do go out to confront Risto's forces, their dragons seemingly defect to Risto's side, but this turns out to be little more than a ruse by the good guys to turn Risto's dragons back to the side of good (or, at least the side of Wulder, which I'm not sure is actually the side of good). But since we cannot have anything of importance happen "on-camera", Kale only finds out about the ruse after it is over and the good dragons have returned. The good guys also get the bulk of Risto's forces to desert by making the weather bad, although the desertion takes place, yet again, off-camera. Then, as the battle rages (off-camera again), Cam, Fenworth, the real Lyll, and Kale all go to confront Risto and the false Lyll (who turns out to be the evil sorceress Burner Stox). Cam and Lyll prove to be laughably ineffective, and Risto is eventually defeated almost by accident (but since there are no accidents in Wulder's world, it was all part of his design) in a fairly anticlimactic scene.

Overall, if one were looking for an interesting fantasy story, then DragonQuest, with its poorly worked out story and superficial fantasy setting is likely to be a major disappointment. Even if someone were specifically looking for a fantasy story with Christian overtones, picking up DragonQuest would probably turn out to be a disappointment since the story element is completely suborned to the didactic Christian lessons, and several of those lessons turn out to be fairly objectionable. The only people likely to actually enjoy this book are those who are already convinced of the rightness of the particular brand of Christianity that Mrs. Paul is promoting, and I suspect that those are not the people she intended to reach. In the end, the clumsy and pervasive preaching completely overwhelms a what little fantasy story there is and results in a book that is simply not a particularly enjoyable piece of fiction.

Previous book in the series: DragonSpell: A Novel
Subsequent book in the series: DragonKnight: A Novel

Donita K. Paul     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith

Short review: Wozniak is a weird guy, but he is weird in exactly the way that was probably necessary to make the personal computer a reality.

Haiku
Eccentric genius
Made the information age
And had lots of fun

Full review: Steve Wozniak is well known to tech savvy people as one of the two co founders of Apple Computer, and the driving force behind the development of the original Apple I and Apple II personal computers. More recently, he has achieved a slightly more kitschy kind of fame as Kathy Griffin's boyfriend on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List and a short-lived contestant on Dancing with the Stars, in which his slightly off-kilter personality came to the fore. In iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It it becomes apparent that while Wozniak is a very quirky individual, he is probably quirky in a way that we should all be thankful for, because without his ability to work out computer architecture on sheets of paper, program in binary in his head, and has an odd fondness for repeating numbers and other number patterns, then it is quite possible that the personal computer as we know it would not have been developed when it was, if ever.

Wozniak starts, logically enough, at the beginning and proceeds to tell his life story more or less in chronological order. One of the more interesting elements of his biography is the relatively scant amount of attention that is paid to Woziniak's time developing the original Apple computer and his time with the company. While this is obviously what he is most famous for, it is also obvious that it isn't of substantial consequence to him. His pride in the technical achievement of getting a machine with keyboard input and video output comes through clearly, as does the fact that using his designs Apple put a pair of high quality products on the market, but it is also clear that just about everything else about Apple wasn't that important in Wozaniak's eyes. He also makes clear that he did not leave Apple on bad terms, in fact, he never left the company at all, and is still listed as an employee on its payroll. This illustrates that loyalty is one of the key elements that Wozniak considers to be of high importance in a person, a fact that comes up over and over again.

Over and over in the book the striking thing is how nice, and yet truly odd Wozniak is. As a kid he was a Little League star (which is unsurprising as his father was a star quarterback in college) who loved to build technological toys like an improvised intercom system between all of the neighborhood kids' houses. He spends a decent chunk of the book discussing his involvement with the phone phreaks and building devices to work around the phone system to get free calls, but asserts ethical reasons for doing so. Wozniak developed the original Apple computer while working at Hewlett-Packard, and was loyal enough to offer the machine to them up front (they turned him down). He gave portions of his own stock in Apple to employees he didn't feel had gotten enough, and based upon a verbal commitment sold some of his stock to an outside investor for a ridiculously low price. He is the guy who ran a dial-a-joke line for years, just because he wanted to make people laugh. But this is the same guy who ran up huge computer fees in college running programs that spat out Fibonacci numbers or who was overjoyed to move into a house in which the address had all of the first five digits in its number. The person that comes through is one who is definitely an oddball, but a well-meaning, gentle, and kind one, and one who it seems, would be an intensely loyal and valuable friend.

Wozniak seems to be something of a utopian, not really caring about money in a way that only someone who has become truly rich can, but to be fair, he seems to have felt this way before Apple made him a multimillionaire. It seems that so long as he has someone to joke with, and a technical project that interests him, he's a happy guy, and everything else is just gravy to him. For anyone who wants the inside scoop on the doings at Apple in the early years, and the machinations of Steve Jobs jockeying for position in the industry this book will likely be a disappointment. But for anyone who is interested in a portrait of what gentle genius looks like (and Wozniak is so forgiving that it doesn't even bother him that Jobs cheated him when they developed Breakout for Atari), then this book will give a fascinating glimpse into that mind. Before I read this book I had tremendous respect for Wozniak's accomplishments, and thought of him as a bizarre genius. After having read the book, I have come to see him as much more, a truly rare kind of person who is not only genius, but who is full of humanity as well.

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Biased Opinion - Glen Beck Reaches for the Stupid, and Succeeds

All I have to say to Glenn Beck is are you kidding me? You cannot possibly be this stupid can you? You think that the fact that you've never seen a "half-monkey half-person" is all the evidence you need to discount a century and a half of science? The fact that all of the actual science that has been produced in the last 150 years years all points towards the truth of evolution - including the fossil record, the geologic record, radiometric dating, genetics, and literally dozens of other fields of inquiry - that is insufficient to demonstrate reality in the face of the fact that you've never seen a "half-monkey half-person"?

Why don't you try reading Science, Evolution, and Creationism (read review)? Or maybe Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (read review). Or go back to the beginning and read On the Origin of the Species. Perhaps you could pick up a high school biology textbook written by a practicing Catholic that is titled something difficult to parse like Biology. Maybe then you could figure out why your argument is so shockingly stupid. (In fact, the existence of a "half-monkey half-person" would actually disprove the theory evolution by natural selection, so if you find one, then your wacky creationist ideas would have more credence, not less).

Why do you even have a job? Do your bosses not realize what a complete moron you are? If so, you better keep it that way, because once they figure out just how stupid you really are, you'll probably get canned in favor of someone who is at least conversant with the science that was current as of a hundred years ago.

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Review - The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

Short review: Humans are much more irrational than standard economics assumes. This can be a good thing.

Haiku
Once again look at
How irrational we are
But there's an upside

Full review: The first thing to understand about Dan Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality and his related book Predictably Irrational (read review) is that by "irrational", Ariely is not describing actions that are insane, foolish, or stupid. Instead, irrationality is used in contrast to the "rational economic agent" model used in standard economics. In that model, people in the aggregate can be treated as rational beings who strive to maximize their benefit while avoiding decisions that are costly, time consuming, or require additional work if they can. As he pointed out in Predictably Irrational, experimental evidence shows that people make decisions that don't fit this model, but do so in predictable ways, calling into question the conclusions reached by standard economics in many areas. In this volume, Ariely expands upon the ideas in Predictably Irrational and explores the possible reasons behind this consistent irrationality and why it may actually be beneficial in many cases.

One might think that the primary difference between standard economics and behavioral economics is the abandonment of the rational economic actor standard. But the real difference seems to stem from the fact that a behavioral economist seeks to test their assumption and at least make an effort to evaluate whether they are justified, whereas most of the assumptions underlying standard economics are not only untested, but many are to a certain extent untestable. While many adherents to the standard economic models criticize behavioral economists conclusions that are at variance with the standard theories, one has to wonder on what basis they do this? It is certain that many experiments done by behavioral economists are crude at best, as the ones illustrated in The Upside of Irrationality will bear out, but since the standard economists have nothing similar on their side to put forward as evidence for their assumptions, it seems to me that they are infinitely outclassed in the support arena.

Each chapter more or less follows the same format. Ariely identifies an area of human behavior in which actions are taken based upon what seem to be reasonable assumptions, and then sets out to recount experiments he and others have created to test them, and analyse the resulting data. Ariely then connects the experimental data with real world practices, and evaluates why he believes they do or do not work. In this way, Ariely tackles questions including whether large bonuses spark better work (they don't), why people are often dissatisfied with their work, whether we can correctly evaluate our own work product (we can't), why people engage in revenge, even when it is costly to do so, whether we should do all of an unpleasant task at once or break it up into smaller sizes (break it up), why the modern dating market is a failure, and whether online dating sites are a solution (they aren't), why we feel the need to save a single person we can see, but are unwilling to spend less to save many people we cannot and whether we can correct the poor decisions we made while in an emotionally charged state and make better decisions on the same subject in the future (probably not). In each case, Ariely frames the question, describes the experiments, and recounts the results, all in an engaging and interesting way that allows the reader to absorb the large volumes of data without choking on it.

But the real beauty of the book comes when Ariely takes each case and explains why our irrational decisions often amount to a better result than "rational" ones would. For example, Ariely explores the question of charity, and why a person who would jump into a river ruining his thousand dollar suit to save a single six year old girl would not spend an equal amount of money and far less effort to save a thousand children in Africa (or some other faraway place). In short, why does Jessica McClure get outpourings of support while the victims of Rwandan genocide are ignored? And given that this is true, would we want to spur people to be more rational in their decision making? Like the other examples, Ariely conducts and reports on several experiments, and determines that in fact, we would not like the results if people were wholly rational, as rather than leading to more rational empathic decision, people would likely make less empathic decisions in general. Irrationality, it appears, makes us nicer to one another, even if our efforts are not directed in the most efficient manner.

For anyone who is interested in seeing concrete evidence concerning how humans actually behave, The Upside of Irrationality is an excellent resource while remaining eminently readable (despite Ariely's protestations concerning his lack of writing skill). The book is further enhanced by Ariely's injection of recollections from his own life, including the extreme trauma that got him interested in human behavior (while he was a teen, he suffered severe burns over most of his body, requiring prolonged hospitalization), which gives the book a personal touch that many economic texts lack. In the end, this follow-up to Predictably Irrational is just as good as the first book, and a book almost anyone would benefit from reading.

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Review - Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke

Short review: Arthur C. Clarke speculates about what the future might be like.

Haiku
In Arthur Clarke's eyes
Technology will make the
Future beautiful

Full review: Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible is a sort of hybrid science fiction and science book in which Arthur C. Clarke speculates upon possible future advances in technology. Originally published in 1962, this edition was updated and revised through 1984, and thus much of the original speculation has been replaced by concrete fact, and new speculation has been added that accounts for, among other things, the massive advances in communications and computing technology that took place in the interim. Clarke makes clear that he is not attempting to make (or limiting himself to) a prediction of what is likely to happen, but rather setting forth a wide ranging set of possible futures that might come about.

Clarke tackles a different general area of technology in each chapter, and speculates upon the future development of that technology with musings ranging from the relatively modest and highly possible, to some extremely outlandish ideas, some of which would require a violation of the currently known laws of physics to accomplish. Clarke is careful to distinguish between advances that would merely require an improvement in our engineering capabilities from advances that would require us to master entirely new technologies (but would not do violence to the laws of nature as we understand them today) from advances that would require a modification to our current understanding of the workings of the universe.

Using this metric, Clarke is able to distinguish between what he considers to be reasonably probable and what is purely speculative. In fact, in this revised edition, many of the near future advances that Clarke originally predicted in some areas had actually come to pass. The only caveat being that in many cases they transpired much more quickly than Clarke had anticipated, because, in my opinion, Clarke's somewhat utopian socialist leanings blinded him to the fact that commercial usefulness would drive some technologies to advance quickly. On the other hand, the advances in some areas, such as space flight and exploration, have proceeded much more slowly than Clarke believed, and once again it seems, for much the same reason - Clarke believed in a somewhat utopian vision of humanity that made him believe that we would develop technologies that would elevate and enhance what he saw as the better elements of human nature, rather than ones that would have purely crass commercial goals. In short, Clarke's speculations are too hesitant in some areas, and too optimistic in others due to his somewhat starry-eyed vision of humanity.

As an interesting side element, it is clear that the speculations about the future fueled Clarke's science fiction stories. Several of the technologies he speculated upon crop in in various forms in his books, a fact that he comments upon from time to time in this volume. Technologies that drive the plots of The City and the Stars, Imperial Earth, The Fountains of Paradise, and numerous other works by Clarke are highlighted in the pages of this book. In his fiction, of course, all of these technologies are used in ways that Clarke believed would exalt the human spirit, which makes his fiction substantially different from the more recent grittier Alien influenced material that has been produced since the 1980s, leaving Clarke's utopian vision behind in a world of dark corporate dominated science fiction laden with cyberpunk-style overtones. From a certain perspective, Clarke as a writer is the anti-Michael Crichton. Whereas in Crichton's books the technological advances always turn into nightmarish disasters that threaten to maim or kill the characters, in Clarke's books, technology is a helpful tool that aids humanity and provides endless benefits. I think I prefer Clarke's vision of the future, even if it is a little overoptimistic.

For a book originally written in the 1960s, and last updated in the early 1980s, Profiles of the Future holds up remarkably well. This is probably to be expected, as Clarke had a fundamentally sound grounding in the sciences, and thus was able to imagine fairly well what was possible, and connect those possibilities to the needs of humans. The only flaw in the book that that Clarke's vision of what humans want is probably more high-class than the actual wants displayed by our actions. Of course, Clarke does not pretend to be predicting the future, only speculating about what is possible, what is plausible, and what can be dreamed about. On this score, the book is quite good. Anyone looking for a guidebook to how technology will develop in the future is likely to be disappointed. On the other hand, anyone looking for a view into how Clarke viewed humanity, and what the future could look like if we become better people will find this book quite interesting.

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Random Thought - Did the Stimulus Package Work?

I'm a big fan of Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational (read review) and The Upside of Irrationality (read review), both of which are really great books. Here he is cited in a New York Times article about why economists can't agree on whether the stimulus package did or did not work.

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Realms of Fantasy Is Dead, Alas

Having been saved from imminent death and resurrected last year, the magazine Realms of Fantasy is dead once again. Despite some fairly desperate measures to prop up circulation, the new ownership simply could not make the zombie version of the magazine profitable.

With Fantasy & Science Fiction having been forced by the increasing cost of delivery to shift to a bimonthly format in 2009, both Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact suffering decreased readership, and Realms of Fantasy now headed for the graveyard, things look grim in the field of print science fiction and fantasy magazines. I, personally, love getting my issues in the mail every month, and hope this trend reverses, but I fear that I am simply hoping that if I wish hard enough the tide won't come in.

Biased Opinion - Watching Sister Wives and Wondering

So I've been watching the TLC series Sister Wives about Kody Brown and his three wives Meri, Janelle, and Christine. The primary story of the season has been Kody's pursuit of and marriage to his brand new fourth wife Robyn. (A process that Kody describes using the quaint term "courting", a word he uses in about every other sentence, which gets very annoying). The show itself is somewhat interesting, especially when the somewhat wacky fundamentalist Mormon beliefs that underpin their polygamous lifestyle surface despite their best efforts to downplay them. Kody clearly sees himself as a sort of real life Bill Henrickson (played by Bill Paxton) from Big Love putting a face on "normal" polygamy to counter the negative image that the practice has acquired as a result of mixing it with statutory rape.

As a side note, I'll point out that lots of Mormon theology, fundamentalist or otherwise, can only be described as fairly wacky. The primary difference between "fundamentalist" Mormon sects and "regular" Mormons seems to be that the fundamentalists adhere to the idea that polygamous marriage is a religious obligation (via an entirely male-biased doctrine called "Celestial Marriage"), whereas mainstream Mormons adhere to a political compromise in which their prophet changed his interpretation on this point in order to allow Utah to join the United States.

But the content of the show itself is, to me, secondary to the vast amount of consternation that it seems to have aroused. Not only is Utah investigating Kody with an eye towards possibly prosecuting him for bigamy, but, anecdotally, many people I am acquainted with have had reactions ranging from shock to dismay or outrage. But other than the fact that they are polygamists, they seem fairly normal. The thing that I find fairly interesting about this is that in the United States we already basically accept a form of serial polygamy. Bastions of "moral" virtue who would doubtless condemn the Brown family for their immoral practices such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich have been married to four women and three women respectively. The only real difference is that Kody is married to his four wives all at the same time, whereas the acceptable route is to marry your multiple spouses one after another. And the acceptable way of handling this sort of thing requires divorces with all the acrimony and financial disaster that entails and custody arrangements for children in which they are uprooted and shuttled between two households. I'm not sure that this is a better option than allowing multiple wives. Even for people who only actually get married once, it is quite common to engage in one or more long term sexual relationships prior to getting married, in some cases having children with one's partner. One only has to spend an afternoon or two watching the various small claims court television shows like Judge Judy or The People's Court before one realizes just how many people engage in the functional equivalent of marriage by moving in together, buying property together, merging their bank accounts and so on before they split up (and of course, have to untangle their lives via the small claims court system). In short, it is difficult to describe the socially acceptable landscape of modern marriage as anything other than fully accepting of sequential polygamy.

One has to wonder exactly why Utah would bother investigating Kody. Unlike some of the creepy fringe FLDS cults that compel underage girls to marry older men, when Kody married Meri, Janelle, and Christine they were all fully grown adults capable of making their own choices. Robyn, of course, was thirty-one when she became Kody's fourth wife. Unlike some unscrupulous polygamists, Kody and his wives don't appear to be engaged in welfare or medicare fraud. Their only offense, it seems, is asserting that they are married. (Note that other than Meri, none of the women are legally married to Kody, although they are married insofar as their faith is concerned). If a group of consenting adults wants to arrange their lives in a particular way, and no one is being harmed as a result, exactly why is the state intervening to try to prevent this? Isn't there a more useful way for the state of Utah to spend the taxpayer's money?

Science fiction authors have been including polygamy (among other unconventional sexual arrangements) for some time now as most fans of the genre who have read anything from the latter half of Robert A. Heinlein's career are no doubt well aware. From the group marriage of the s-family in works like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Friday to the open relationships depicted in Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, just to name a few. Samuel R. Delany also explored a fair amount of alternative sexual arrangements in works like Dhalgren, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and Triton. And the list goes on. It is, of course, in the nature of science fiction authors to speculate about social changes that might come to pass, and of course, many of their speculations are not based on what the author thinks will actually happen, but rather what will make a good story, or make a point about the present that the author wants to make. But in the case of polygamy, or at least group relationships, I think that we may see this practice become acceptable in the future.

Now I don't practice polygamy, or advocate that anyone go out and take it up, and I am also not suggesting that fundamentalist Mormonism is going to sweep the nation and everyone will jump on the Celestial Marriage bandwagon, or that Muslims will take over and impose their Sharia version of polygamy. I'm saying that I think demographic and economic forces will push people towards accepting the idea that being married, or at least committed, to more than one person at once is desirable. And I think that the demographics will result in more men with multiple wives, rather than women with multiple husbands (although I think this will become acceptable, it just won't be as prevalent). This will, of course, entail a fairly substantial social shift, but I don't think it is so outrageous to expect it in a world in which we have seen homosexuality go from being a criminal act thirty years ago to homosexual marriage being an openly debated political issue.

The demographic trend is a pure numbers game. There are more women than men in the United States. Through most of history, this was not the case. Even though there are more boys born every year than girls, boys (partially because we are the stupider sex and thus inclined to do risky things like ride motorcycles without helmets and show off by trying to slide down stair railings on our skateboards), don't survive to adulthood in the same numbers girls do. Historically this didn't result in more women than men, because once they reached adulthood, the ranks of living women were winnowed by the arduous and dangerous process of bearing and delivering children, which weakened and often killed women. When medical technology made this less of an ordeal, women began to outnumber men, a trend that doesn't seem to be in any real danger of reversing. The result is that there are about five to six million more women in the United States than men.

Every so often, a newspaper or magazine will run an article about how a woman who has reached something like thirty or thirty five who has not gotten married is extremely unlikely to ever do so. This gender disparity is, in my opinion, in large part why this is so. Men who want to get married generally have the option to do so, and thus you have a surplus of women basically chasing an ever shrinking population of available men, until you end up with a lot of available women competing for the attention of a handful of available men - many of whom simply don't want to get married. And why should they? Since they are now a rare commodity, they are more or less in the driver seat as far as relationship parameters go. The result is competition among women for the attentions of those few available men, an often quixotic quest to get one of these men to settle down and get married.

So what is the solution to this demographic crunch? Well, some other places in the world, such as China, have the opposite problem, with far more men than women, so we could import a bunch of single men. I don't think that changing our immigration policies to allow an influx of men to marry American women would be a politically viable option though. We could continue with current policies, and just resign ourselves to the fact that five or six million women will have no prospect of getting married or having a long term relationship. That doesn't seem like a very attractive option either. In my experience, most men in their mid to late thirties who want to be married or in a long term relationship are, while most men of the same age who do not want to be married or in a long term relationship aren't. In effect, the men who want to get married, get married, and in the current system, are effectively off the market.

So, from a certain point of view, the solution to the demographic problem seems more or less obvious: let people marry more than one person. I'm sure that there are a fair number of people in the United States who already informally have this sort of relationship, but it biases the relationship in favor of the "actual" spouse over the "virtual" spouse. It would make sense from a fairness perspective to allow people to formalize these relationships and have access to all the legal benefits and protections that being married provides. I think that this would actually result in fewer polygamous marriages than one might expect, since it would remove the privileged position of single men vis a vis thirty-something and older women, and I suspect this would drive more of them to make a commitment. But I think we would see some, and so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult who enters into this arrangement with their eyes open, it seems to me like it would be a good thing, rather than something that should be treated as a crime.

But demographics is not the only reason I think that we will see an acceptance of relationships with multiple partners in the future. The rise of the two-income family, in my opinion, presages the multiple partner relationship. The defining characteristic of most two-income families is stress resulting from a lack of time to accomplish everything that needs to be done, and a lack of time to spend with one's spouse and children. Since both spouses work, they effectively have two jobs: one for which they are paid, the other that involves all the chores that have to be done - cooking dinner, doing laundry, shuttling kids to soccer practice and scouting events, buying groceries, taking the car to get it repaired, and so on and so forth. There have been many articles lamenting the fact that kids in the modern era are over scheduled, but this seems to me to merely be an outgrowth of the fact that their parents are over scheduled. And most families simply cannot afford to live without the second income (even if much of the second income is consumed in child care costs). From a financial perspective, it seems to make sense to add a third adult to the relationship. Some people do something akin to this already by hiring an au pair, but that is a purely financial transaction, and most families cannot afford that sort of arrangement. Bringing in a third spouse, especially one who desired to be a stay-at-home homemaker, on the other hand, would permit the family to retain its double income, and at the same time relieve the stress of having to accomplish three people’s worth of worth with only two people. Paradoxically, even though they would have to share time with another person, it would probably permit each spouse to spend more actual time with one another, since they would not be trying to catch up on all of their responsibilities rather than enjoying each other’s company.

From a certain perspective, polygamy makes too much sense not to become socially acceptable. Does polygamy entail a substantial shift in social values? That much is certain. It also will probably be something that is not for everyone. Even those religiously committed to the idea, like Meri, struggle with jealousy issues in this sort of relationship. Obviously people will have to reassess the nature of relationship fidelity before this becomes a mainstream option, but given how many people are willing to have "open" relationships, I don't think this will be as big a hurdle as some might think. While I think that Kody Brown is a dork, and his religion is built upon completely silly ideas, I also think that fifty years from now the idea of a poly-relationship will probably be so normal that people will be looking back at the controversy surrounding the Sister Wives show and wondering what the hoopla was all about.

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Musical Monday - Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury by Rachel Bloom

So this is a little late, but I figured the internet needed yet another posting of Rachel Bloom's incredibly funny and endearingly lewd tribute video to science fiction author Ray Bradbury titled Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury. The reason I couldn't let this song and video pass without posting it is that the song incorporates so many great Ray Bradbury titles into its lyrics. In order of their appearance, the song makes references to: The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Halloween Tree, The Martian Chronicles, S Is for Space, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Somehow Bloom manages to incorporate a parody of Brittney Spears into the video as well, and it doesn't seem out of place at all. In just a few minutes, Bloom manages to extol the virtues of a not inconsequential chunk of Bradbury's career in a way that is both respectful and funny. Or at least as respectful as a song that talks about giving the author a blowjob in the singer's car can be.

Rachel Bloom meets Ray Bradbury.
Oddly, they don't appear to be having sex.

What makes this video so great, other than the fact that it involves a beautiful young woman lusting after a science fiction author, is that Rachel Bloom appears to be a serious fan of Bradbury. After making the video, Rachel was able to meet with Ray Bradbury, as seen in the picture to the right.

For all you aspiring speculative fiction writers out there, the idea that someday a really funny, smart, and attractive person will make a video extolling your virtues and proposing to have sex with you in their car should serve as a little added incentive to keep pounding away on the keyboard during those long hours.

Previous Musical Monday: The Unbroken Thread by Symphony of Science

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Case for Mars by Symphony of Science

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Review - The Far Side Gallery 4 by Gary Larson

Short review: Gary Larson's strips are still really funny. Robin Williams' foreword is surprisingly bland.

Haiku
Fish on land are screwed
And Robin Williams is boring
The Far Side: still great!

Full review: The Far Side Gallery 4 is, naturally enough, the fourth compilation of Far Side comic strips put out by Gary Larson. This compilation includes strips from the previously released collections Wildlife Preserves, Wiener Dog Art, and Unnatural Selections. Unlike some other Far Side collections, the only bit of extra content included is a fairly brief foreword written by comedian Robin Williams.

The primary difficulty in reviewing a book that consists of a series of single panel comic strips is that there is both too much and too little material. Since all of the strips are unrelated single shot jokes, there is no theme, no plot, and no ongoing characters to provide the meat for a review. One could, on the other hand, try to review every individual strip, which would lead to a ridiculously long and not very readable piece of work. The only truly overarching things that can be said about the book are that the strips contained in it are from the heart of Larson's comic writing career, they are almost all weird and funny in the way that only Far Side comics are, and that the usual cast of cows, dogs, insects, dorks, cowboys, scientists, and snakes all make their appearance. As a further bonus, several full color strips are included interspersed with the black and white ones, and several strips (both color and otherwise) are presented in a full-page format.

The only unfunny thing about the entire book is, oddly, Robin Williams' surprisingly bland foreword that reads like Williams was trying to maniacally funny in his writing, but simply comes off as manic. Based upon this, it seems clear to me why Williams never became a writer. But Larson is always bitingly funny, even when he is trying to subtly convey a serious message. As one might expect of a man whose output includes so many animals, more than a few of the strips in this collection have an environmentalist message, such as the strip in which two bears create a pipeline into a human home to get rid of animal waste. But these strips are still funny, and the added implied message just makes them even better. But there are plenty of straight up bizarre bits of humors included, such as a family of goldfish escaped from their burning bowl only to observe that they are still screwed, or Leon Redbone hosting a workout video, or the infamous strip (which caused a minor controversy, amicably resolved, with the Jane Goodall Foundation) involving a female ape grooming her companion and finding blond hair. To sum up, nearly every page has at least one really funny strip, and most have several.

This is, in short, a truly funny collection of the strange and bizarre humor that is Gary Larson's unique genius. From start to finish, the comics give an odd, off-kilter view of the world that is so out of the ordinary that even the mundane becomes hilarious. The collection even includes my favorite strip (which my horseback riding wife and daughter hate) with rifle toting doctors at the horse hospital, which is a personal added bonus for me. If you like the Far Side, then this is a collection you should love.

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Review - Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome by Steven Saylor

Short review: The history of Rome from pre-foundation to the end of the Republic, told via a series of loosely connected short stories.

Haiku
Rome's long history
As a vibrant republic
Told by citizens

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: For all the people who are disappointed that James Michener never wrote a novel about ancient Rome can now rejoice, because Steven Saylor has provided them with a perfect substitute in the form of Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome. Roma begins before Rome has even been founded, when the site is nothing more than the crossroads of a pair of trading routes and follows the fortunes of the Pinarii and the Potitii, a pair of Patrician families, through to the ascension of Augustus Ceasar and the end of the Republic. The book is a series of interconnected short stories featuring various members of these families as they live through some of the defining events of the history of the Roman Republic, with some member of the family almost always having a pivotal role in the events, or at least a front row seat, which of course gives the reader the same close up view of history.

A reader should be warned, however, that the book has a rather generous interpretation of what history means. In the case of the book, it means that many of the foundational myths of Rome are taken to be essentially true: Hercules slaying the monster Cacus, Romulus killing Remus as they fight over the city walls, the overthrow of Tarquinius following the rape of Lutetia, and so on. Obviously the early history would be entirely speculative no matter what Saylor wrote about that era, but his versions basically hew close to the legendary versions with very little variation. Perhaps it is because I am used to Bernard Cornwell's very imaginative versions of history that Saylor's seems to be a little too close to the mythical version that has been handed down to us. Perhaps a better description of the early section of the book would be "the history of Rome as Romans told it" as opposed to "an attempt to tell actual history". That said, Saylor does make some stabs at having supposed historical events be misinterpreted or forgotten by later generations, such as the origins of the Lupercalia, or the legend that Romulus and Remus were raised by a she-wolf, but by and large, the self-made pseudo-history of the Romans is relayed to the reader intact. For anyone who comes to the book looking for a version of these stories that differs from the standard legends will be disappointed, but this is a minor point, as the stories are all well told regardless.

The primary framing element that connects the various stories is a fictional amulet of the deity Fascinus which is handed down from family member to family member from the first story to the last, which is somewhat improbable, but does serve to place a common element in each story. There are only two substantial weaknesses of the book. The first is the fact that despite its constant presence, the Fascinus amulet is nothing more than a MacGuffin, serving no purpose in any of the stories other than a strange keepsake to be handed down the generations. The second is that by presenting the story of Rome over several hundred years via a series of short stories, there is limited continuity of characters from one story to the other, so once a character is established, he or she usually disappears from the book relatively quickly. This constantly changing cast of characters is made even more confusing by the Roman practice of naming people after their ancestors, so there are several instances of two different characters in two different stories who share the same name, which can get confusing, especially as there are a few characters in the book who cross from one story to another. One lesser problem is Saylor's tendency to shift from a character driven narrative to a textbook like accounting of historical events from time to time, which serves to pull the reader out of the story.

These issues aside, the individual stories and the overall narrative are a fast flowing and enjoyable presentation of the history of the rise and disintegration of the Roman Republic. Each of the individual short stories is well-crafted, reflecting critical events in Roman history using strong characters and a writing style that makes them flow almost effortlessly. Despite being 555 pages long, the book flies by because it is so easy to pick up one of the short stories, finish it, and then say "I'll just read one more", and before you know it, you are 200 pages further in the book. The stories all work well together, adding up to a narrative in which the city of Rome takes shape, grows into maturity, and then becomes a creaking ramshackle structure constantly on the verge of collapse. In the stories, Rome's origins are violent, and grow progressively bloodier as time goes by, with a level of casual violence that will probably be shocking to readers unfamiliar with Rome's actual history. One of the best elements of the book is the way that Saylor presents those attributes that Romans considered virtues in a way that makes perfect sense, and yet highlights just how alien Roman culture was when compared to the virtues familiar to the modern Western mind. As an aside, it should be noted that all of the action in the book takes place within (or just on the border of) the city of Rome itself, so even though the events are set against the backdrop of the wars against King Pyrrus of Macedon, the Punic Wars against Carthage, and other large scale events in the outside world, these events are only related second hand and after the fact by characters going about their daily lives inside the city. People hoping to find stories about Julius Ceasar's campaigns in Gaul and Britain will not find those stories here, but rather will be regaled with the political machinations surrounding his attempt to be declared King, and the plot to assassinate him, and then the plot to avenge his death. This serves to focus the narrative somewhat, which is probably necessary in a book that attempts to encapsulate more than a half-dozen centuries in its pages, and it gives a somewhat unique perspective on Roman history to only hear of events such as the disaster of Cannae related as a confused swirl of rumors.

For anyone looking to get an in depth treatment of Roman history, this is probably not a work that will serve their purposes. On the other hand, anyone who wants to read a version of Roman history that reflects to a certain extent how its inhabitants might have experienced life in the city over the course of its life, this book probably comes as close as one can hope to find. The vast scope of the story that Saylor is attempting to tell hampers the effectiveness of the book to a certain extent, but Saylor has done an admirable job of pulling off this very difficult task and making it accessible and readable.

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXX, No. 11 (November 2010) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
Phantom Sense by Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross
Howl of the Seismologist by Carl Frederick
Outbound by Brad R. Torgersen
Zoo Team by Allen M. Steele
Contamination by Jay Werkheiser
The Deadliest Moop by Michael A. Armstrong

Science fact articles included:

Phantom Science: The Facts Behind "Phantom Sense" by Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross

Full review: The November 2010 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is a strong issue with a collection of well-written space stories, including an apocalyptic tale that is probably the strongest story in the issue, plus an interconnected story and science fact article and a decent Scooby Doo style story involving an earthquake sniffing dog. Overall, this is a strong issue, filled with good to very good stories.

The best story in the issue, and the last in placement is Outbound by Brad R. Torgerson, a story that begins with humanity's suicide and a desperate flight from Earth. Torgerson pulls no punches in establishing a mood of despair, surrounding the protagonist with characters that in a lesser story would become his companions in his flight to presumed safety, but in this story they are stripped away until the our hero must contend with complete isolation in a quixotic quest for a refuge that may not even exist. The story is at turns terribly tragic and powerfully inspirational as one might expect of a tale in which the deeply rooted flaws of humanity manifest in frightening ways, and individuals struggle against the consequences, refusing to yield without fighting against the night. In short, it is a very good story.

A slightly unusual feature of this issue is that the science fact article is essentially a commentary on the science that forms the basis for the lead story in the issue. The story and the science fact article are Phantom Sense and Phantom Science: The Facts Behind "Phantom Sense" both by Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross, and deal with the idea of using insects with electronic implants to serve as scouts to gather military intelligence. The story is pretty good: in a near future world in which the military has adopted the technology with serious human consequences to those who use it a father suffering from the psychological problems associated with retiring from having the "sense" must repair the damage his service has done to his family and save his daughter. The story focuses on the very real human costs that the posited technology imposes upon those who use it, with a central character who is at turns supremely confident and pathetically debilitated and for whom the reader always feels sympathetic. The science fact article examines all the various technologies that would be necessary to equip someone with the "sense" that is described in the story, and evaluates how close we are to actually having that technology.

Featuring an earthquake sensitive dog, Howl of the Seismologist by Carl Frederick is an almost not science fiction story involving a group of postdocs working at the Tevatron. By a happy coincidence, a physicist, a neurobiologist, and a seismologist all meet up and their individual quirky theories about reality add up to a startling discovery just in time to avert a worldwide catastrophe. The plucky heroes circumvent bureaucratic obstinacy to save the day and the bad guy even gets his comeuppance. On the whole, the theory the heroes stumble across is kind of silly, and the plot is pretty basic, but it is a serviceable effort nonetheless.

Zoo Team by Allen M. Steele is a fairly standard space emergency story that takes the form of a moderately interesting engineering puzzle layered with an examination of the effects of long term space flight on the human psyche, and a modestly interesting take on what sorts of people might be best suited to live under such conditions. There's nothing really noteworthy about the story, but it is well-written and the characters are likable and funny. Contamination by Jay Werkheiser is also a space exploration story, but set in a more distant future in which two very different ideas about how to go about human colonization on other worlds clash, with potentially deadly results. Once again, there is a minor engineering puzzle to be solved, but the primary theme of the story is the conflict between two very different approaches to an alien ecology.

The Deadliest Moop by Michael A. Armstrong is a story that more or less imagines that the crews featured on the reality show The Deadliest Catch, instead of fishing for Alaskan king crab in the Bering Sea, were cleaning up satellite debris (or moop, for "material out of place') in Earth orbit. The crew of the Anna Marie (a name suspiciously similar to the actual crab boat Cornelia Marie) pull in a mysterious object that seems suspiciously unmarked, which turns out to be more trouble than the crew expects. Outside of the parallels the story draws between present day crab fisherman and the debris fishermen of the story, there's nothing particularly original here, but the story is still pretty good.

With no weak stories, and a couple of quite good ones, this is a strong issue of Analog. All of the stories fall squarely into the reasonably hard science fiction vein, which is what one should expect from this publication, so the typical reader will probably be quite pleased with this selection of stories. To sum up, this is exactly what one should expect of an issue of Analog, providing consistently high quality science fiction stories coupled with some good science fact writing.

Previous issue reviewed: October 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: December 2010

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Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 34, Nos. 10 & 11 (October/November 2010) by Sheila Williams (editor)

Stories included:
Becoming One With the Ghosts by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Several Items of Interest by Rick Wilber
Torhec the Sculptor by Tanith Lee
Frankenstein, Frankenstein by Will McIntosh
Names for Water by Kij Johnson
The Incarceration of Captain Nebula by Mike Resnick
No Distance Too Great by Don D'Ammassa
The Termite Queen of Tallulah County by Felicity Shoulders
Dummy Tricks by R. Neube
Changing the World by Kate Wilhelm
Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol by Ferrett Steinmetz

Poems included:
Roadside Stand by Mark Rich
Foxwife by Jane Yolen
Welcome Home by Janis Ian
All That Matters by Roger Dutcher

Full review: I have often said that the double issues put out by the various genre magazines seem to suffer in terms of quality, presumably due to the double count of pages that they must fill. The October/November 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is another example of this recurring problem. Though it has several quite good stories, it is leavened out with some fairly mediocre ones as well as a turgid lead story that makes the issue start off with a hobble.

Leading off the issue is Becoming One With the Ghosts by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of the two stories featured on the cover. This gets the issue off to a very slow start, as the story is a very slow moving mystery revolving around the crew of a starship that discovers things are not all in order when they return to what they had assumed would be a safe haven. The glacial pace of the story only serves to highlight that the "mystery" is only a mystery because the reader doesn't know the full capabilities of the ship, and because it turns out that the crew do, their perplexed reaction to the problem that presents itself makes the story unbelievable. Overall, the story is just not all that good.

In the other cover feature in the issue, Several Items of Interest, author Rick Wilber returns to the same universe that he created in With Twoclicks Watching in which Earth has been conquered by a mostly benevolent, but definitely Machiavellian race of aliens. The protagonist has journeyed to the alien's home world to act as a sort of Quisling reporter, while his brother has turned against the invaders, attempting to drive them from Earth. The main action of the story involves the narrator's repeated journeys to Earth in order to try to dissuade his brother from continuing his insurgent campaign that threatens to provoke retaliation that will result in the loss of vast numbers of human lives. The story twists and turns until the full devious nature of the plot is revealed. over all, this is the best story in the issue.

Torhec the Sculptor by Tanith Lee is an interesting tale that focuses on Torhec, an eccentric artist whose personal philosophy concerning the nature of art leads him to always destroy his creations. His paths intersect with an incredibly wealthy man whose fondest desire is to own one of Torhec's undestroyed pieces, which is an anathema to the artist. The two end up negotiating a satisfactory exchange, but the final resolution of the story is will probably catch most readers by surprise, although it is the perfectly natural logical consequence of the personalities established for the characters in the story. Another story dealing with loss and impermanence is No Distance Too Great by Don D'Ammassa, in which a bereaved spouse signs on to travel to a distant world in honor of his dead wife. However, the story establishes that the method of traversing interstellar space is affected by the emotional state of those travelling through it. The protagonist's ambivalence manifests itself in a dangerous way, threatening to strand the entire ship and its crew forever in hyperspace. As the title implies, the story is a science fiction love story, but it is also a tragically bittersweet one.

Frankenstein, Frankenstein by Will McIntosh is a gaslamp fantasy style story in which a charlatan posing as the famous monster discovers competition, and then ends up biting off more than he can chew as his con job ends up becoming a little too real for his liking. The story is a nice riff on the classic Mary Shelly story, including enough of the fantastic and yet always hovering close enough to the edge of realism to drive home the horror that is revealed. Taking the Frankenstein monster type story from a different angle is Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol by Ferrett Steinmetz, which posits an alternate reality in which the nerdy smart kids run the social scene in high school, and jocks are picked on outcasts. Some of the "neurals" as the geeky popular kids are known, trick the jock protagonist into a trap in which he must fight their genetically engineered creations. His solution to the problem is a pretty decent one that displays the benefits of compassion. The story isn't particularly deep, but as a classic morality play, it works fairly well.

The Termite Queen of Tallulah County by Felicity Shoulders combines the exterminator business with time travel technology, featuring a woman who uses the ability to travel in time to go back and stop insect infestations before they start. She discovers an unexpected secret about her father, but manages to set things right by the end. There is nothing particularly new concerning time travel here, but the story is a fairly heartwarming tale about saving a loved one from their own folly. Another story that revolves around family relation, Dummy Tricks by R. Neube, takes the issue on from a completely different angle. Set on a hellish ice world, a hired family member, despised by his supposed family members runs across a pirate ice prospector. After destroying the intruders, he discovers that his antagonists are not exactly what he thought they were. The entire story is violent and tragic, with the characters reflecting the harsh conditions that surround them. Anyone reading it should be warned that although the story is good, unlike Termite Queen it is not a happy one.

Names for Water by Kij Johnson is a short little story about a strange telephone call a college student gets, and the strange cosmic connection that results. More fantasy than science fiction, it is interesting, but not anything more than that.

The Incarceration of Captain Nebula by Mike Resnick is a seemingly silly story about a seemingly insane patient being treated for the delusion that he is a galactic hero in the mould of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen. The story has a final twist that isn't all that unpredictable, but transforms the story from silly humor to over the top space opera, but in a good way.

Most issues seem to have a non-genre story, and this one is no exception. While Changing the World by Kate Wilhelm is not technically a science fiction or fantasy story, set in basically the modern world with a healthy dash of paranoia thrown in, it does, however, deal with a something every science fiction fan has certainly been assaulted with: UFO conspiracy theories and the kinds of people who believe in them. The whole story is basically an exploration of the question "what if everyone bought UFO conspiracy theories", with some rather unsettling results.

While many of the stories in the issue are quite good, several others are merely average. The real problem with the issue is that Becoming One with the Ghosts starts the issue off with such a slow and unexciting story one has to slog through before getting to the good stuff. Despite generally good stories such as Several Items of Interest and The Termite Queen of Tallulah County and several other decent ones, the lead story is simply so flat and dull that it drags the whole issue down to a merely average rating.

Previous issue reviewed: September 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: December 2010

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