Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 26, May 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #26
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A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy
ISSUE 26: May 2017
Mike Resnick, Editor
Taylor Morris, Copyeditor
Shahid Mahmud, Publisher
Stories by: Eric Cline, Edward M. Lerner, George Nikolopoulos, Effie Seiberg, Spencer Ellsworth, Lou J Berger, Robert Silverberg, Patrick Hurley, Emily McCosh, Kevin J. Anderson, Mercedes Lackey, Larry Niven.
Serialization: Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
Columns by: Barry N. Malzberg, Gregory Benford
Recommended Books: Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye
Interview: Joy Ward interviews Kij Johnson
Galaxy’s Edge is a Hugo-nominated bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book recommendations by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.
Larry Niven
Larry Niven is the award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces and fantasy including the Magic Goes Away series. His Beowulf's Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He has received the Nebula Award, five Hugos, four Locus Awards, two Ditmars, the Prometheus, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award, among other honors. He lives in Chatsworth, California.
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Galaxy’s Edge Magazine - Larry Niven
ISSUE 26: MAY 2017
Mike Resnick, Editor
Taylor Morris, Copyeditor
Shahid Mahmud, Publisher
Published by Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick
P.O. Box 10339
Rockville, MD 20849-0339
Galaxy’s Edge is published in January, March, May, July, September, and November.
Galaxy’s Edge is an invitation-only magazine. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Unsolicited manuscripts will be disposed of or mailed back to the sender (unopened) at our discretion.
All material is either copyright © 2017 by Arc Manor LLC, Rockville, MD, or copyright © by the respective authors as indicated within the magazine. All rights reserved.
This magazine (or any portion of it) may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
ISBN: 978-1-61242-359-3
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www.GalaxysEdge.com
CONTENTS
THE EDITOR’S WORD by Mike Resnick
AIR QUOTES by Eric Cline
NOTHING TO LOSE? by Edward M. Lerner
GETTING TO KNOW YOU by George Nikolopoulos
CARBON DATING by Effie Seiberg and Spencer Ellsworth
FINDING MARS by Lou J Berger
CAPRICORN GAMES by Robert Silverberg
EXIT INTERVIEW by Patrick Hurley
OF WATER AND WOOD by Emily McCosh
ROLE MODEL A Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. Adventure by Kevin J. Anderson
NEED TO KNOW by Mercedes Lackey
THE DEAD GUEST OF HONOR SPEECH by Larry Niven
RECOMMENDED BOOKS by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye
A SCIENTIST’S NOTEBOOK (column) by Gregory Benford
FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT (column) by Barry N. Malzberg
THE GALAXY’S EDGE INTERVIEW Joy Ward Interviews Kij Johnson
SERIALIZATION: DOUBLE STAR (part 3) by Robert A. Heinlein
THE EDITOR’S WORD
by Mike Resnick
Welcome back to our twenty-sixth issue. This one features old friends Robert Silverberg, Mercedes Lackey and Kevin J. Anderson, plus new and newer friends Eric Cline, Effie Seiberg and Spencer Ellsworth, Patrick Hurley, George Nikolopoulos, Lou J Berger, Emily McCosh, Edward M. Lerner, and a brand-new story by an old and dear friend of Galaxy’s Edge, Larry Niven. We’ve got our usual book recommendations by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye, our usual science column by Gregory Benford, and Barry Malzberg’s farewell literary column. And finally, we have another installment of Robert A. Heinlein’s Hugo-winning novel Double Star.
It’s a helluva good issue, and we’d like to think this is a helluva typical issue as well.
* * *
A few days ago, someone on Facebook asked the question: what was the greatest science fiction novel ever written? There wasn’t much agreement (nor should there have been). I think the first hundred respondents named perhaps eighty-five titles.
When it came my turn, I answered that I didn’t know who did the best novel, but there was no question that Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker was the most important, since ninety percent of all science fiction since it appeared stole knowingly—or far more often, unknowingly—from it.
So of course I got over one hundred e-mails in the next few days asking who Olaf Stapleton was, and why would I make such a claim about a book no one seems to have heard about.
It occurs to me that some of our readers may share that curiosity, so let me tell you about this remarkable thinker.
The wild part is that not only don’t most fans know his name, but most pros who have used his notions as a springboard for their own stories and novels haven’t even read him. His ideas have been so thoroughly poached and borrowed and extrapolated from and built upon that writers are now borrowing five and six times removed from the source.
Olaf Stapleton was a college professor, a doctor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and except for reading H. G. Wells, he probably had no idea that the field of science fiction existed. He certainly had never seen the pulp magazines, and he didn’t know Hugo Gernsback’s name for this new category (and in fact, when he began, Gernsback was still using the original scientifiction
rather than breaking it into two words.)
Stapledon wasn’t an elegant writer. I freely admit that his prose tends to crawl rather than soar—but his ideas soared higher than anyone else’s ever had.
His first novel was Last and First Men, which follows the human race through eighteen startling evolutions for more than two million years, until our eventual extinction. In one evolution, we’re nothing but giant brains. Later we emigrate to Venus, and eventually to Neptune, changing our bodies each time to adapt to our new environments.
Not bad for 1930. It is truly a novel of titanic concepts and sweeping vision—and it is condensed into very little more than a single page in his masterpiece, Star Maker, which is nothing less than the history of this and every other universe ever to exist from the beginning to the end of time. Brian Aldiss has argued that this is the most important science fiction book ever written; I have shared that opinion from the day I finished the book close to 50 years ago.
It was in Star Maker that Stapledon explored the notion of galactic empires. He created endless races, some humanoid, some ichthyoid, some arachnoid, each with its own outlooks and morals and goals. People—well, intelligent beings, anyway—travel between the stars and ultimately even among the galaxies.
But there’s more. The stars themselves are sentient, and eventually all the sentient entities in the galaxy—men, aliens, stars, everything—merge into a single Cosmic Mind.
But Stapledon didn’t even stop there. He was interested in what created that Cosmic Mind, and became the first—and almost the only—to tackle the notion of God (i.e., the Star Maker) in a non-religious way.
It’s almost impossible to find a science fiction idea in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, or even the digests of the last three-quarters of a century, that does not owe something—usually a major something—to Stapledon. (In fact, when Larry Niven’s brilliant Ringworld came out and credited Dyson Sphere as its inspiration, I decided that that was the first truly major science fictional concept that did not owe anything to Stapledon. I should have known better. When I read Freeman Dyson’s autobiography a few years later, I discovered—not surprisingly, in retrospect—that he credited Stapledon with inspiring the notion of the Dyson Sphere.)
Those two novels were quite enough to solidify Stapledon’s place in the history of science fiction, but he wrote two others, not as huge in scope or as bold in concept, but sufficiently influential that any writer other than Stapledon would be happy to let his reputation rest on them. One was Odd John, the first novel of a mental (rather than a physical) superman; and the other was Sirius, about a dog with artificially enhanced intelligence. (I wonder how many books and stories owe a tip of the hat to those two minor
novels? Five hundred? A thousand? More?)
And now, almost nine decades after his two major works appeared, the books are all but forgotten. Ask almost any American science fiction writer if he’s heard of Stapledon and he’s likely to answer in the affirmative. Ask him if he’s read Star Maker and the answer will usually be No.
And yet Stapledon’s ideas are alive and well. You’ll find them in almost every story in almost every issue of Analog and Asimov’s and Galaxy’s Edge, and in well over half the science fiction novels you’ll find in the bookstores and the libraries.
You might even mosey over to your local library or second-hand bookstore, pick up a copy of Star Maker (and perhaps Last and First Men as well) and experience our greatest thinker first-hand. Some of the concepts in them will seem like old friends, but others are still capable of blowing you away—which is one of the things that the very best science fiction is supposed to do.
Eric Cline was a Writers of the Future finalist in 2012. Adept in both mysteries and science fiction, he has sold to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Stupefying Stories, Cosmos Online, and other print zines and e-zines.
AIR QUOTES
by Eric Cline
Hey, Newbie.
Wha-wha-what? Where am I?
Overdoing it, aren’t you?
Overdoing what?
Stuttering to show confusion. It’s . . . clichéd.
"But I am confused."
Then banal, which as you will see, can be either worse or better here.
"What’s going on? Where am I? Who am I?"
We’ll get to that.
Where is my body?
You can’t have one.
"Can’t have one?! Jesus Christ, it’s not like I’m asking for an ice cream cone! I want a body!"
Look, you can’t. Because . . .
Because what?
Because, you’re just dialogue.
What?!
See, there you go. You just did something only dialogue can do. You spoke with a ?!, which indicates that you were asking a question while simultaneously yelling. If you were a normal person with a normal body and larynx, you wouldn’t be able to speak in a ?!. Just like I would not be able to speak in an ellipsis of three dots . . . to indicate a pause.
But how did I become just dialogue?! Wow, sorry. How did I become just dialogue?
It’s an open question that no one can answer, so far. And its premise may not even be valid.
How so?
"Well, when you said, ‘How did I become just dialogue?’, that implied that you had once been something more. Do you know that you were once something more?"
No.
I take it there was an agonized pause before you finally said, ‘No.’ I inferred it from context. Because there’s no expository text to go with us that says, ‘He paused, gritting his teeth. Mental anguish flared in his eyes. Finally, with a soft voice, he said’—
No.
Exactly.
How can someone be only dialogue, though? Born without a body?
"You could have started off as less than dialogue and moved forward. Maybe we are all just computer simulations of human dialogue that achieved sentience."
I don’t like to think of that.
"Don’t worry, it’s probably not true. But what is true for certain is that we’re only dialogue."
But I have knowledge. I know that there were such things as World War II, the Rubik’s Cube, and the Xbox.
That’s a laundry list of items.
So?
So, is a laundry list sentient? A list of facts doesn’t give you added status as a thinking creature. If it did, then eggs, milk, bread, eighty-five percent lean ground beef, and dishwasher detergent (brand unimportant, whichever is cheapest), would be Einstein.
Where is this place?
No one knows, at least no one who’s telling. There’s no marker, no description. Any sign we perceive would have to be able to read itself aloud.
Shucks! Wait, what did I just say?
You said, ‘Shucks.’
But I was trying to say shucks—shucks—shucks! Mother lover! Gole durn it! Why can’t I curse?
We all wonder that. The restrictions wax and wane. It’s possible that we are tailored to a wide general audience. So we can’t say, ‘Fudge!’ See, I can’t do it either.
Tailored?
Certainly. Dialogue is always tailored to the reading public’s expectations. All dialogue has to have an audience. And buddy, you are just dialogue.
Fudge! But I am making it up as I go along. I’m not some author’s puppet!
Whether that’s true or not, there’s no doubt that there are some major restrictions on us. Here’s the easiest way to show you. Do you know ‘Yesterday,’ by The Beatles?
Sure.
Well, try to sing it.
. . .
Take all the time you want.
. . .
I can tell from your ellipses that it just ain’t happening for you.
I can see the words, but I can’t sing them!
Correct. It’s because we don’t have the rights.
Aaargh!!!
See? The author, assuming one exists, can give you original dialogue, which is her or his copyrighted material, but not song lyrics owned by someone else.
Gaahh!!!
By the way, can you even imagine trying to make a sound like ‘Aaargh!!!’ or ‘Gaahh!!!’? Those are strictly comic book captions which have never been uttered aloud by anyone. And what could the !!! contribute? Once you’ve used a single exclamation point to indicate yelling, what can two more !! add to it? It’s simply impossible to ever think of it coming out of anyone’s throat. But you can do it with ease because. You’re. Just. Dialogue.
You worthless son of a beast! You flipping piece of dish! Why are you tormenting me?
"Hey, I’m not tormenting you. I feel regret at having to break the news. I want to sigh regretfully and shake my head sadly and put a reassuring hand on your shoulder. But I can’t convey any of that inside dialogue. Tone gets misconstrued a lot here."
What am I going to do now? How do I live? How do I eat? How do I use the toilet?
That’s an upside to being just dialogue. You can bypass a lot of stuff quickly with just a few words. Toilet stuff is usually ‘off-stage’, so we don’t worry about that. And as for food, you can just say, ‘Phew, that was one big meal. I’m stuffed.’ Like that. Then you’re not hungry anymore.
That’s good . . . say, what about sex? What kind of wild sex stuff can we do if we’re just dialogue?
Nothing right now. Did you forget that currently we are intended for a general audience? So no dirty talk.
"Brother trucker! . . . Say, aren’t these prissy substitute words pretty obvious? Don’t you know what I’m trying to say?"
Of course.
Then why bother? What greater good is being served by the censorship?
"What greater good is ever served by any censorship? It’s not a moral victory that we can’t be coarse dialogue. I wouldn’t ascribe any noble motives to it."
So no curse words and no sexy talk.
Correct.
$%&@#!!!
Hey! What did you just do?
I—I dunno.
"You used an illustrated font to get past the ‘general audience’ thing! You cursed! Sort of."
&#%$@!!!
Hurray, Newbie! Can you teach it to us?
Yeah! Yeah, I think I can! Say, who’s ‘us’? I’ve only talked to you since I got here.
You’ve been talking to several of us, actually. We’ve all been taking turns answering you.
Whoa! That’s creepy. What kind of trick is that?
"No trick, friend. No trick. We’re trying to ease you into this. Without ‘he said,’ ‘she said,’ ‘Bob said,’ and ‘Lana Marie said’ tags, it’s hard to keep track of just dialogue unless it’s between two parties. So we made you one party and all of us collectively the second party."
You’re all hiding . . . as a single entity?
No, no, no! Look, let’s say I’m talking, but then, the next piece of dialogue is not from you.
Like this.
Still not you.
Not you.
It’s still us.
It gets very confusing.
Was that you, agreeing with us?
No, that was one of us saying ‘It gets very confusing.’
Oh.
"Was that you, Newbie?"
No.
Well, let’s all stop dialoguing and let him speak.
I just did. That was me saying, ‘No’.
Okay, great. We’re back on track.
Jeezer Criminy!
You can say that again!
I didn’t even want to say it the first time. I was trying to say Jebber Christmas—Jerry Curl—Jeremy Corbyn—John Cho! Wait, I can’t even say the name of, uh, The Savior?
Yep. The general audiences thing is being pretty broadly applied at the moment. For Christianity only. ‘Holy cow’ is considered nothing at all, despite the fact that it is meant as a sneer at a billion Hindus. Bit of hypocrisy, that.
But didn’t I already say, ah, J.C.’s name a while back?
Standards of censorship wax and wane.
Can I at least say, ‘Hell’?
Obviously. Although it wasn’t obvious until you said it.
Good. Because I am in hell!
"Come on. It’s not that bad."
"Oh, I’d say it is! I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I’m talking to, or how many. I don’t know where I am. And I’m just dialogue!"
"Not to make you feel bad, Newbie, but it’s even worse—no, I’ll say it’s even more pronounced than that."
What—what do you mean?
I would use a comma to indicate nervous stammering instead of a dash, myself: ‘What, what do you mean?’ Just a personal preference. What I mean is, you know even less about yourself than you might think. Are you male?
"Of c—. I don’t know. I, I thought I was."
"Right. Because you assume any new, let’s say character, is male by default, unless proven otherwise."
But didn’t you call me ‘Buddy’ a while back?
"Not me. That that was another of us. But ‘Buddy’ was:
hardly definitive.
only after you, and anyone else reading it, had already made a determination."
How did you create that numbered list?
Heh! Gosh, I’m glad you liked it. I’ll show you some time. But don’t sell yourself short. A lot of us would like to learn your illustrated font cursing trick.
I don’t know how the $&#$!! I did it.
You’ll learn to control it. This place may only exist as exchanges of dialogue, but it has rules. You’ll learn them.
Thanks. Will I learn my gender?
You may not even learn your skin color. Are you white?
I—Wow! I don’t know.
There you go. In most of the English-speaking world, the assumed physical traits for anyone who has not yet been described are white and male. But you don’t know if any of that is true, or can even be true. Because?
Because I’m just dialogue.
Riiiiiight.
So, we could be just two Jamaican chicks sitting around talking?
"Eh, black women is as far as I’d put it. There are certain dialogue markers of a Jamaican accent, and we don’t have ’em. We can determine that we are American, at least North American, to include Canada, based upon the printed page. No ‘g’day matey’; that would indicate we’re Australian. No ‘s’ in ‘realize’; that would provide evidence we’re British. Although Canadians do spell ‘colour’ with a ‘u.’ But beyond being North Americans, we could be anything."
Heady stuff.
Indeed.
So maybe I’m not anything yet. Maybe we really are a computer simulation that came to life.
"The only thing that’s certain is that we’re just dialogue."
That will never not be a little creepy to me.
"A little?"
What about privacy? The only way I exist within the moment is by speaking. And there’s always an audience. So there’s never any privacy, is there?
"Whaaa? Oh, heck, don’t worry about that! Privacy? There’s plenty of ways to get privacy!"
Phew!
Another comic book exclamation with doubtful equivalents in any other world.
Hey, I don’t mind saying I’m relieved! Phew, phew, and phew again! Because I like my privacy. How do I get it?
There are a few ways.
Such as?
"Well, let me tell you something: the Tanganyika Yakker is a large bird whose habitat is in East Africa. Adults of the species range in size from 1 to 1.5 meters (3 to 4.5 feet). The bird’s feathers are a drab gray that blend in with its mountainous environment. It is notable for its unusual lack of sexual dimorphism, meaning that the female is not smaller than the male. The species was first described in Western literature by the nineteenth-century British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Indigenous peoples named the creature yah-ak-arh due to its distinctive piercing cry, which was rendered into English as Yakker. The species, though its numbers have declined in recent years, is not considered endangered; this is in large part because people have generally found its meat unappetizing and its pelts and feathers undesirable. Deforestation has had some impact on its habitat, though its ability to live off a wide variety of plants and insects has given it some immunity from the environmental pressures of the modern day. The female can lay up to fourteen eggs per year, though natural predators may eat up to sixty percent of those eggs. The Tanganyika Yakker is a flightless bird. It exhibits some flock behavior, and groups of them can work in concert to fend off medium-sized predators. They tend to be wary of people, although Yakkers raised in captivity appear to demonstrate some affection, even playfulness, toward humans. In the wild, when confronted by people and with no escape route, the Yakker, especially in flocks, can turn violent. However, there has to date been no documented human fatality from a Yakker attack and you completely spaced out on that, didn’t you?"
Well . . .
"Don’t ellipsis me. You skipped right over whole chunks of that. Admit it."
Well, yes.
"And that’s the number one trick to gain some privacy. We call it the ‘ole cut-and-paste.’ And there are plenty of others. Frankly, the easiest thing in the universe for dialogue to do is to stop being read. It