Amazing Stories Winter 2018

CONTENTS

Winter 2018 - Volume 76, Issue 2 #615

From the Editor’s Desk By Ira Nayman

European Author Profile By Gary Dalkins

Citizens of the Solar System By Jack Clemons

Captain Future in Love – Part Two By Allen M. Steele

Robot on a Rampage By Lena Ng

The Asteroid Contention By Marina J. Lostetter

Bold New Flock By Neal Holtschulte

The Ransom of Red Robot (Beta) By Daniel M. Kimmel

In the Republic of the Blind By G. Scott Huggins

Reset in Peace By Julie Novakova

Alison’s Bluff By Noah Chinn

Trips to Impossible Cities By Sandra Kasturi

Reptilian Brain By Valérie C. Kaelin

A Horse and Her Boy By Vonnie Winslow Crist

SF on Film By Steve Fahnestalk

Off The Top of My Head By Shirley Meier

From the Editor’s Desk

The Future is Diverse

By IRA

NAYMAN

From many conversations I have had with writers and fans, the consensus seems to be that we are not living through a golden age of science fiction. There are no giants of the stature of Asimov, Bradbury or Clarke (whose work affected me in my youth), helping to shape the genre these days. Nor are there massive talents such as Gibson, Sterling or Rucker (whose work brought me back to science fiction after an absence of over a decade) bringing exciting new ideas and directions to the field.

To be sure, there are writers doing great work, and there are writers who are extremely popular, and sometimes, there are even those rare writers who are both. Still, we seem to be living in an age of incrementalists, working within well-established genre boundaries rather than breaking new ground.

Where will we find the stories that will reinvigorate the genre? History has shown us that new ideas rarely come from the center of a culture. Those who are already established at the center cannot be too innovative without risking their positions there; for writers, this means that they have to satisfy the expectations of their readers, who are generally satisfied with the current culture, or risk alienating those people who keep them at the center.

New ideas and ways of doing things always come from the margins of a culture. Creative thinkers on the margins risk little by doing things differently than those at the center, since they and their followers are not beholden to the traditions of the center. Many, perhaps most of the ideas developed at the margins will die there, never having achieved mainstream acceptance. However, some ideas slowly work their way from the margins to the center of a culture, transforming it along the way.

A quote attributed to Gandhi (but which may not have been said by him) encapsulates this process very well: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Given this, I would argue that it is long past time to allow those who have traditionally been marginalized in science fiction (women, people of colour, non-heterosexuals, et al.) to have fun in our playground. This is, for sure, a matter of fairness: people who are not white, heterosexual males have a right to see themselves depicted in literature, to heroically battle space aliens or killer robots. However, it can also be a positive development for the genre, giving it new energy and taking it in new directions.

For me, a great example is Drew Hayden Taylor, an indigenous Canadian of the Anishnawbe tribe. A couple of years ago, I read his short story collection Take Me to Your Chief, which blew me away. It had artificial intelligence. It had time travel. It took many of the tropes that science fiction readers are accustomed to, but it re-conceived them through the culture and historical experience of indigenous people. This new perspective gave the old tropes new energy and life. (It didn’t hurt that the book was one of the funniest I had read in years.)

I was thrilled when Drew agreed to submit an original story for the first new issue of Amazing Stories.

Things are already changing in science fiction. Look at the photograph of the winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards: the majority of them are women, and some of them are women of colour. This would have been unthinkable when I was growing up and first began reading genre fiction.

There are two factors at work, here. On the one hand, a substantial amount of fandom must be open to the possibility of rewarding new writers from historically marginalized groups. Perhaps, like me, they have been seeking to recapture the excitement of science fiction that they no longer find at the center of the genre.

I suspect a second factor is that the nature of fandom is changing. As artists move from the margins to the center, they bring an accumulation of followers with them. As readers see that their experience is becoming more and more reflected in the genre, they are more likely to become active fans. At some point, the move of marginal voices to the center becomes unstoppable as formerly marginalized readers become a larger and larger segment of the mainstream; this may already be the case.

Some people who are committed to the culture at the center will, of course, resist such change. There’s nothing wrong with the art I like, those who have been well served by traditional culture will argue. They have nothing to fear: what was once central to the culture will not go away as long as mainstream publishers believe that there is a market for it, so most of them should be satisfied that their culture is not really under threat.

Of that group, a small but vocal subset will argue that the culture will actually be damaged by allowing new voices from historically marginalized groups to speak. (NOTE: This is the opposite of the argument that I am making.) When they argue in good faith (as opposed to because of straight out racism, sexism or other prejudice), their argument appears to be that culture is a zero sum game: if works reflecting other people’s experience enter the marketplace, there will be fewer works reflecting our experience. While that was a highly debatable argument in the past, the digital world blows it out of the water: not only has print on demand and e-book publication made it possible for a much larger number of small presses to flourish, but a book written by anybody can always become available with a little work and a CreateSpace account. Every readership can be served.

We applaud Rebecca Roanhorse for winning the best short story Hugo for Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ and, of course, N. K. Jemison for winning her third straight Hugo for best novel for The Stone Sky. Clearly, the part of fandom that votes on the Hugo Awards has given its approval for a new direction in science fiction.

We should be wary, though, of both the congratulations and the condemnations that came with the announcement of this year’s Hugo winners. Ideally, we would live in a world where stories by women, people of color, non-heterosexuals, the differently physically abled and other minority groups win awards so frequently that the phenomenon itself isn’t worth commenting upon, negatively or positively. As editors, writers and readers of science fiction, we still have a lot of work to do to achieve this goal. The most recent Hugo Awards winners are, however, an encouraging sign that we are moving in the right direction.

Amazing Stories is proud to support diverse writers, especially those from historically marginalized communities. We do this, not because we hope to redress historical grievances (which is out of the scope of a science fiction magazine, in any case), but because we genuinely believe that this is where the most exciting stories are being told today.

Publisher

Steve Davidson

Editor-in-Chief

Ira Nayman

Art Director

Kermit Woodall

Poetry Editors

David Clink

Carolyn Clink

Editorial Assistants

Elizabeth Hirst

Jen Frankel

Judy McCrosky

J.F. Garrard

Slush Readers

Judy McCrosky

Elizabeth Hirst

J.F. Garrard

Jen Frankel

Chip Houser

Patty McNally

Rebecca Partridge

Russ Scarola

Copy Editing/Proofreading

Rhea Rose

Paula Johanson

Sally Fogel

John Park

Su Sokol

Lloyd Penney

Cover Artist

M.D. Jackson

Amazing Stories® is a registered trademark of and is published by The Experimenter Publishing Company™, LLC. P.O. Box 1068, Hillsboro, NH 03244

Amazing Stories, Volume 76, Issue 2, Winter 2018 #615 is copyrighted by The Experimenter Publishing Company, LLC. Contact Amazing Stories at its website at http://amazingstories.com to add or update your subscription. Submissions can be made at http://submissions.amazingstoriesmag.com

European Author Profile

An Interview with Nina Allan

By GARY

DALKINS

Since 2007, Nina Allan has published four collections of stories, and two novellas, Spin and The Harlequin. Her 2014 debut novel, The Race, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel, The Rift (2017), won the Red Tentacle and British Science Fiction Association awards. She has also received the Aeon and Novella awards, and Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. I last interviewed Nina Allan in 2014 (the interview is on the Amazing Stories website); with her third novel due out next March, now seemed a good time to catch up.

GARY DALKIN: When I interviewed you four years ago, you said, I’m planning to start working on something I’ve had humming along in the background for some years. It’s nothing more than a file of notes at the moment, but I am incredibly excited about it, even though I say it myself. What I’m hoping most of all is that I’m finally ready to write it, that I have the skill necessary to bring the project to fruition in the way it needs. Was this the project that became The Rift, or something else?

Photo Credit: Christopher Priest

NINA ALLAN: That’s an interesting question because I don’t entirely know the answer! Although I only ever actually work on one project at a time, it is entirely normal for me to be thinking about a new project whilst working on another, especially once I am closer to the end of writing a book than the beginning. I probably was talking about The Rift – which is in itself an ‘unfinished’ project in that I have a whole other novel I have notes for that takes place on the planet of Tristane and that deals with the creef invasion through first-hand accounts. I might equally have been talking about my upcoming third novel, The Dollmaker, which stems from ideas and characters I first began writing about a decade ago, or indeed the book I am working on now, which I have been trying to get to grips with for the past four years...

DALKIN: What is The Dollmaker about, and have any of the characters appeared in print before?

ALLAN: The Dollmaker tells the story of Andrew Garvie, who makes dolls. Andrew falls in love with Bramber Winters, who he meets through a personal ad in a doll collectors’ magazine, and is determined to be united with her. Andrew and Bramber are both keeping secrets, and both are touched by the story of Ewa Chaplin, a Polish refugee who wrote very unusual fairy tales and who also made dolls. None of the main characters in The Dollmaker have appeared in print before, although those who have read my short fiction may glimpse a couple of familiar faces here and there.

DALKIN: And what is the book you are working on now? Four years is a long time – why is it proving so elusive, and how far along with it are you?

ALLAN: As a novelist, one of my strongest interests has always been in form, and although ideas for stories are everywhere, it can take a little more time for those stories to find their proper form. It is not unusual for me to write many thousands of words of a manuscript, only to discard them, or entirely rework them, because that particular way of telling the story felt wrong to me. I used to find it disconcerting, to discard so much material. Now, I simply accept it as part of my process. And no writing is ever wasted. Even if those pages do not appear in the final manuscript, they will have changed and affected that manuscript, simply by being worked through.

The story at the heart of the novel I am currently writing came to me very quickly, and has remained basically the same throughout. The narrative surrounding that story has evolved considerably to the point where I now feel it’s found the form it was looking for. The novel is set on the Isle of Bute and centers around the murders of a woman and her two children. It sets out to be a whodunnit, but gets rapidly weirder. I am currently just over 85,000 words into the first draft, so the story itself is almost written, but there’s still a long way to go in terms of getting the book the way I want it to be.

DALKIN: You live on Bute now [Allan recently moved from Hastings, a resort town on the south coast of England, to the Isle of Bute, on the west coast of Scotland], which I imagine is very different to anywhere you’ve lived previously. How has the island, its culture, affected your writing – presumably, you’ve set the novel on Bute for specific reasons?

ALLAN: I would say that place is