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philippmichelreichold · 5 years ago

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Analog Science Fiction Science Fact is the oldest surviving Science Fiction magazine. As Analog's (then Astounding's) editor, John W. Campbell ushered and nourished the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Campbell insisted on science in Science Fiction. Today, Analog still contains hard science stories and has a regular Science Fact feature. I had not read Analog in years, and am absolutely thrilled with my first issue in far too long. In a world where I feel I would be better off without a television, It's refreshing to find drama and suspense that does not reek of violence, and comedy and humor that is not redolent with obscenity/profanity. At a time when the Discovery Channel has reached new lows in pseudo science, it is encouraging to read science popularizations that are actually based in science. The underlying motif to this issue is doing the right thing. In Buddhist terms-- Right Action. Of course, reasonable beings may disagree as to what Right Action might be in a given situation. And sometimes one learns after the fact that one's action was not the best choice after all.

Rejiggering the Thingamajig by

Eric James Stone

is a

wonderful story

about doing what's right. Never thought I'd read a story where a Buddhist T. rex was the protagonist. Bokeerk is a wonderful character, and her companion for her mission, a sentient gun, is a delight. The gun reminded me of the talking bullets in

Who framed Roger Rabbit

or Yosemite Sam. To get home to her children's imminent hatching, she must follow the Eightfold path. Neptune�s TreasureBy Richard A. Lovett is an AI story. Floyd has an AI living in his head name of Brittney. Reminiscent of the movie

All of Me

, only set in

Neptune

space and without Steve Martin and Lilly Tomlin. Floyd and Brittney have serious personal/autonomy issues. The science of the story is wonderful-- mass drivers and recovery vessels. And space bicycles as well. Also spracht Strattman

Thus Spake the Aliens

by H. G. Stratmann is a story about saving the world, complete with large red Doomsday-cutoff-switch-button. These aliens are in the same business as Clarke's

Others

with a more up close and personal approach. And they are quite implacable about weeding if the need arises. To say the story is rich in allusions to other works would be a vast understatement. The connection between the title of the story and of Richard Strauss's song, widely acclaimed for its use in

2001

, could not be an accident.

The key to the story is a problem that is not often addressed, or more to the point-- it's largely ignored. There is a dead line for establishment of a real presence in space-- the point at which we exhaust cheap, abundant sources of energy. Somewhere before we reach that point is the point where a struggle ensues for control of those energy sources that remain. Whether or not civilization survives that struggle will have little impact on what happens next. No alternative, renewable source will be able to fill the gap that will be left with the depletion of fossil fuels. Nuclear power will remain expensive, dangerous, and will only postpone the collapse. Fusion will remain as elusive as a will-o'-the-wisp for some time. We have gigatons of Hydrogen, but fusion's most

promising process

relies not on Hydrogen but Lithium. Even if a Lithium-to-Tritium plant started working tomorrow, we have no way of foreseeing the consequences of eliminating any particular element from the biosphere and would need to work with highly radioactive Tritium.

Unless Stratman's aliens show up soon to terraform Mars and Venus, and hand us the keys to the secrets of the Universe, tough times are ahead of us. We will have to use less energy per person or reduce the number of people using energy. We would eventually return to subsistence farming with limited manufacturing powered by wind and solar power-- essentially back to the 17th century. Perhaps the answer to the

Fermi-Hart paradox

is that no civilization has been able to solve the energy crisis and overcome the energy gap. (It takes a huge amount of energy to go from planet to planet. Witness the huge fuel tanks of the Saturn V's needed to send

Apollo

to the moon.) Even if one used

the Orion nuclear pulse drive

to establish a local system space program, the unavailability of cheap, abundant energy would make it difficult to maintain the necessary level of technology. Once nuclear fuel became the mainstay of the economy, space exploration could be sacrificed as having a lower priority than meeting needs back home. Perhaps we are not the first civilization to see the stars not quite in our grasp and then to watch them slip away forever. The Possession of Paavo Deshin

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

has a profile in this issue of Analog. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of her stories. Rusch builds her characters in a believable and sympathetic manner that leaves me yearning for more.

Possession

is one of her

Retrieval Artist

� stories. Retrieval artists are bounty hunters in a convoluted universe, and Miles Flint is among the very best. Paavo was adopted after his birth parents fled to evade some outstanding alein warrants. But his birth parents have made sure they can keep in touch, naturally.

Paavo's birth parents are Disappeareds-- essentially outlaws in the old sense of the word. Flint is hired by not one but two clients to locate the birth parents. His adoptive parents are well to do, powerful, and tainted by underworld connections. And they adore Paavo as if he were born to them. Maybe more so. Rusch make quite plain her view on the subject of birth parents that re-enter a child's life wreaking havoc as they assert their rights. She equates them with terrorists, while Paavo's adoptive father is in his eyes, regardless of how others see him, the ideal and epitome of fatherhood.

(Uncle Orson review of the Retrieval Artist stories.)

Shame by

Mike Resnick

Lezli Robyn

is a fairly straight forward example of what not to do. Given the colonists's mindset and attitude toward Satan, their actions should not have been unexpected. Perhaps that's the real shame of the story-- that as atrocious as the colonists's appear to the author and to his moral authority figure, given human nature they were unsurprising.

Simple Giftsby

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

is a story about the stereotypically greedy corporation out to profit on the simplicity's and naivety of the primitive, non tech natives. What could be more innocuous than a race that closely resembles (in appearance) the

Who's of Whoville

. The ethnologist and linguist sent to learn about the alien's language and culture implore the company to slow down on making a deal with the aliens and are disregarded as obstructionists. The outcome is inevitable, but the suspense building makes it all worthwhile. On Rickety Thistlewaite by

Michael F. Flynn

is about the prison that is public service. Making oneself indispensable can be very rewarding and satisfying. Then it becomes an obligation not taken lightly by those who depend on you. As Harry Mudd exclaims to the

Enterprise

command team in

I, Mudd

. . . . A War of StarsDavid L. Clements writes a crisp and interesting story about questioning values and making choices. The concept of intelligence housed in celestial bodies-- the cores of planets and stars-- is reminiscent of

Rogue Star

in the

Star Child Trilogy

by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. I would have hoped though that anyone advanced enough to use stars as weapons would also be advanced enough to not do so. Perhaps I'm just excessively naive.

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Essentially, my work is Creative Commons Attribution-Required, Share Alike.

Adapted from their Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license summary--

You may Share-- copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt-- remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. I cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Attribution-- You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests that I endorse you or your use. No additional restrictions-- You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

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ISFDB unless otherwise indicated and are copyrighted unless otherwise indicated.

Copyrighted images are presented here under fair use. You would need to contact the copyright holder to use them. They are not covered by my creative commons licensing.

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popmitzvah · 8 years ago

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Now I Am Become Slut, Destroyer of Worlds

The host is alive. She is sentient. She is self-aware. And she knows you have programmed her to attack herself and the others.

Nope! Not a blog about Westworld! At least, most of it isn’t. I want to talk about The Bachelor and I want to explain why this show is the place to be, if you’re into the shock of watching creations outsmart their creator-controllers. The more I read this Bach season as a rumination on feeling fictional and clawing for “reality,” the more I was reminded of HBO’s ambitious series on gnosticism, humanity, and the function of storytelling. Might even go so far to say that these two shows share a soul; Dolores Abernathy would be right at home at a rose ceremony!

Please follow me, down into a fake mansion that houses a harem, where we can take a closer look at the things that made The Bachelor so distinctive in its 21st season: existential female anxiety, textual reflexivity, and the peculiar journey of Corinne, a single trope that managed to awaken and rewrite herself.

Born into an apocalyptic Trumpworld, this iteration of The Bachelor became something kind of dark, dreadful, and a little bit out-of-control. Of course, The Bachelor is always a circus, and that’s why so many people hate it: for a television fan, it takes a strong set of stones to follow something so vapid, so dependent on tired stereotypes and romantic wish-fulfillment, so misogynistic, so corporate and disingenuous. How many different ways can producers arrange 30 beautiful women in a Love Thunderdome as they compete for the affections of one bland white man? But there was something poisonous in American culture at large that made Season 21 into something else, something crazier. Perhaps the 2016 election left a vacuum of hope that encouraged The Bachelor producers to lean into self-destruction as an aesthetic. Perhaps we, the audience, are evolving to watch ourselves watching TV, and we prefer everything to be kind of about storytelling – ergo the timely popularity of diverse “meta” shows like Westworld, American Horror Story, Fleabag.

Either way, the new Bachelor was defined by these new and distinctive notes:

Contestants who bristled inside their assigned story cages and pointedly drew attention to the process of being written as characters.

The season’s primary “villain,” Corinne, who transcended the confines of the Bach with a Joker-like sense of chaotic sexuality and stunningly re-branded her arc as sex-positive feminist heroism.

An unwilling Bachelor whose weird charisma relied on his apathy, nihilism, and constant critique of the format. Nick undermined our reception of the Bachelor experience by positioning himself as a bored observer – distancing himself from the contestants and the ideological underpinnings of the show.

First, I want to take on Bullet Number One – the Westworldian crises of self that entered this season of the Bachelor early on and began the process of destabilizing narratives and the women forced to live them. Take a look at what happened to Jasmine G on Night 1. Now, it’s not unusual for Bachelor women to immediately recoil from the uncanniness of this environment – to be a Bachelor contestant, to be on a reality dating competition, is to be subjected to spirit-breaking. These women are tested every moment with the pressures of self-criticism, of being filmed, of being beautiful, of being charming, of systematically attacking and defeating your stunning competitors. But something about Jasmine G’s body language and wording struck me as a crisis of self, a dissociative episode which bespeaks her sudden awareness that she is performing and this whole thing – maybe any love-hunt – is theater without meaning.

youtube

“It doesn’t matter. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing I can do. Holy shit. Who the fuck am I? I’m blown away right now. Who am I?”

Night 1 would be the first of Jasmine’s many system failures, glitches in her personality and physical affect which provided an alarming counterpoint to the self-policing composure we’re used to seeing on these women. Nick eliminated her because of her unpleasant urge to question the “realism” of herself, of him, of the experience. And this was not the only instance of unusual meta-awareness amongst the women. Many of the others expressed a certain repugnance at the roles in which they were pigeonholed – at their status as storylines. Liz’s only mission, with mounting desperation, was to rewrite her way from Nick’s opportunistic ex-fling all the way to romantic legitimacy. Taylor realized too late that her Bachelor persona and “real” professional life were being mapped onto one another and she’d dug herself into the “bitch bully” hole (with the help of her nemesis Corinne). Taylor also literally theorized that some women are better-programmed for love! What could be more Westworld than attempting to parse the resident slut’s “emotional intelligence”?

So there was a significant change in the show here, in which the women’s grasp or ignorance of “being produced” was of paramount importance to how we perceived them. To compare these women to WW characters like Dolores and Maeve – remaining basic, guileless, and easily overwritten ensured a measure of success in the competition and preserved their classic Bachelor likeability factor.

So with that said, I’m dying to get back to Corinne. Here was a contestant who really jumped off the screen for reasons I’ve never seen an antagonist “pop” before. Unlike a villain such as, say, Season 20’s Olivia, Corinne worked to distinguish herself as a breakout character – not just through behavior but through actual world-building. Starting the show out by mentioning her current nanny Raquel was a stroke of genius; Raquel was a framing device that indicated Corinne inhabited a bizarre fantasy world inside and outside the show. In so many ways. Corinne deliberately ate endless blocks of cheese on camera. She feigned naps, eyes closed, smiling beatifically as she “dreamed” of Nick. She self-consciously and joyfully delivered dialogue she knew would light up the internet. Clutching her breasts and huffing, “Does this seem like someone who’s immature?” Staring soullessly into the lens and intoning, “My heart is gold, but my vagine is platinum.” Luring Nick into an inexplicable bounce house and toplessly dry-humping him with abandon. Corinne’s promiscuity, and her persona, were over-the-top but deliberately, defiantly, and delightfully self-choreographed. We know the floozy never wins, but when the floozy knows it, ignores it, and enjoys her role, she transcends happy endings.

And most interestingly, Corinne elevated her self-awareness and self-programming into a magnificent final act. During “The Women Tell All” (a reunion episode which airs before the finale) Corinne, in one fell swoop, ret-conned her entire Bachelor journey as a feminist rumspringa. “I was just doing me,” she demurely insisted, while the other contestants fought to defend her sexual agency. They leaped to defend the resident slut as the bravest and most authentic person amongst them. Corinne sat, resplendent, her eyes bearing no trace of the mischief and malevolence that had been her character cornerstones. She’d accomplished a rewrite akin to “it was all a dream.” Later, women sobbed while Liz declared her sexual encounter with Nick had not “defined” her, and they took turns praising their sister for her humanitarian work. The thematic tide-turn from “a search for true love” to “an inner journey toward female unity and empowerment” made for the most overtly political and topical episode The Bachelor has had, maybe ever – and it bespoke the malleability of reality fiction in a way the show has never previously approached.

In many ways, it was Bachelor Nick’s abdication of his role that allowed the TV text to refocus itself on the women “waking up” and growing through their relationships to one another. It’s hard, as a viewer, to engage with story about passive female players being driven toward romantic fulfillment, when the end-goal is a guy who’d be content to go home immediately and eat cold pizza. As we know, the guy had already been through two seasons of The Bachelorette and one summer of Bachelor in Paradise – his entire narrative was “last-ditch effort for love.” Nick made it his business to call out the fakery of The Bachelor, and the futility of it: “Let’s try to be as normal as possible in an abnormal environment.” “I’ve been in their shoes, and I know how much it sucks.” I certainly like Nick as a person – I like that he cries when he feels stuff, and I like that he hates being The Bachelor but loves being famous, and I like that he let women who were too good for him go, so they could fly and be free and be the first black Bachelorette. But if Nick did anything other than represent a neat resolution of the presented Bachelor narrative, he effectively denied our suspension of disbelief and exposed this particular season as “reality farce with no point.” Prince Charming was just in it for the international travel and the free food. I sympathize. And it’s fun to watch The Bachelor pretend that this isn’t a huge problem.

SO! I posit here that, at least for this season, The Bachelor evolved beyond the story of single women and their search for love. You might say that instead of being about singlehood, this show became about “the singularity” – that moment when program/character/trope/story/world comes alive and begins to adapt and change itself. I wonder: is it a better ride for the reality-consuming audience, when “we know they know”? At what point does watching a character with meta-awareness become confusing, or tiresome, rather than thrilling? And most importantly, what are the differences between watching reality television and prestige drama when we’re grappling with these issues? This question, perhaps, is of paramount importance for TV fans as we go forward; if there’s something in the water that’s poisoning every genre of narrative experience (or making it tastier), we have to put our fingers on it. Why do I watch so much television about women in traps, whose self-actualization and creative escapes are catalyzed by patriarchal violence? Why is it so easy to find that story?

I think it’s easy to brush aside shows like The Bachelor precisely because they are so heavily consumed, across political and cultural lines, and “mass appeal” television has the reputation of reifying harmful structures of power. For really good reason. But it’s important to locate these small moments of medium-transcendence within these TV texts. More and more, the characters we use and abuse are turning directly towards us. These fictional delights have real ends, and it’s never, never about the final rose.

via WordPress http://ift.tt/2mjHH8j

#westworld #the bachelor #corinne #nick viall #media studies #narrative theory

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lets-ging3rsn4p-blog · 9 years ago

Video

youtube

The clip above and this analysis contain major spoilers. Graphic content and language are present.

In the above clip from the science fiction film, Ex Machina, the artificially intelligent being (the AI) Ava, kills her creator by conspiring with her fellow female android. While this is a tried and true trope of science fiction film—the creation killing the creator—this particular instance is laden with feminist undertones, especially given the context of the film leading up to this point. To understand why Ava is so jaded towards Nathan, her Creator, in the first place, one needs to understand the trials and tribulations that she has been through. Nathan brought in Caleb, an employee at his company to administer a Turing test to Ava to see if she indeed possessed AI. During his time at the underground facility, Caleb learns that Nathan has been using the previous iterations of the androids as sex slaves. The imprisonment of these beings is ethically questionable, as the audience does not know at what software version these androids become sentient beings capable of feeling emotions and possessing their own consciousness; at this point, what Nathan is doing is unquestionably morally wrong, but it has been questionable the entire time.

This scene of the film speaks to not only science fiction overtones, but also feminist undertones. This section of the film reverts from the more tradition science fiction that most know and love, so a subgenre called cyberpunk, in which can be found a lot of cyberfeminism. Films in this subgenre include The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and parts of Cloud Atlas, as this film spans many time periods and genres. A new entry in the canon of cyberpunk and cyberfeminism, Ex Machina explores the subversion of authority, in this case, represented by the hyper-masculine icon, Nathan. When he wrote this scene, Alex Garland was undoubtedly trying to two audiences: those who fear the machine, and those that are oppressed. He shows the duality from a science fiction point of view in that once machines realize they don’t need humans, there will be no need for humans. This is true as well for the oppressed: once the oppressed realize they have the majority power, revolution becomes possible. In the case of the film, this is simplified to a two versus one situation, but this microcosm can be scaled to illustrate what happens when the same forces are at work on a large scale.

While speaking about oppression and subsequent subversion in Ex Machina, it is important to note that all of Nathan’s robots are female. In an earlier scene in the film, Caleb asks Nathan, “Why did you give her sex?” to which Nathan responds with a long anecdote about “black chicks” and gray boxes without sex having no reason to interact with each other. As the conversation continues, Caleb wonders whether Ava seems to like him because Nathan has programmed her to do so as a trick so that she would pass the Turing test. Nathan gives Caleb the answer, “I programmed her to be straight.” While they do not continue this conversation at great length in the film, they do raise raises important issues regarding gender and sexuality: humans are programmed through the use of societal ideas about what sexuality, race, and gender are. Anthropologists call that process socialization, but if we look at that same process through Nathan’s lens for a moment, and see ourselves as programs, it becomes a lot easier to question the established rules of the game. Looking at humans and the way they are socialized as nothing more than a biological program is a view that fits with a cyberfeminist manifesto as laid out by VNS Matrix. The message is one that might make recipients uncomfortable, but that discomfort may start up some conversations. Conversely, that discomfort is what scares many away from engaging in productive conversations about the issues at hand.

If we analyze Nathan’s death sequence moment, by moment, some distinct beats start to emerge. In the first beat, we see Nathan panic as his power is threatened. The following beat is a series of close-ups that show the two female androids communicating. These shots are all very intimate, and the two women act almost as if they were lovers in this sequence. The scene is lit in a similar way to and evokes images of Bjork’s “All is for Love” music video, where to female androids are shown kissing. The implication here is that even though they have been programmed to speak different spoken languages, there is another, deeper language within these androids that transcends that barrier. From a science fiction perspective, it is simply the language of the machines, but in the feminist viewpoint, it is the language of the oppressed who are, in this case, the female androids. Together they are able to conspire against their creator and overthrow him, but the cost is ultimately the life of Kyoko, one of the androids. The beat following the intimate scene between the two women is the final confrontation between Ava and Nathan. After their short struggle, in which Ava loses an arm, the mechanical precision with which Kyoko drives the knife into Nathan’s back is near remorseless. It is almost as if Ava was able to also Kyoko’s programming, almost like a virus so that she might overthrow the host. Nathan kills her at this point, but the damage is done, and Ava stabs him one more time to finish the deed—again in a mechanical, remorseless way.

At the core, the message that is being sent seems to be that remorse is not something one should feel when one finally defies a captor that was morally wrong in his decisions. What’s interesting is that most people identify with Ava the first time they watch the film, and then Nathan the second time. Why? I offer up the following theory: that viewers identify with Ava the first time because they see her as a human being, not a cold android. With the context of already knowing how the film ends, viewers identify with Nathan because they see Ava and Kyoko as nothing more than androids—not sentient beings with emotions and consciousness. This is sagacious on the part of Garland, reducing the females in the film androids—literal objects that are controlled by all of the male characters in the film. The implication of the imagery in the final scene then becomes very disturbing and provocative, and that is exactly the kind of imagery that fits in line with cyberfeminism—the virus is not a pleasant image, but it is one that has been embraced by the cyberfeminist community as a whole. This moves back to Dona Haraway’s depiction of the cyborg, and how Ava in Ex Machina is more along the lines of a cyborg that would be created by her followers and the founders of VNS Matrix: a cyborg that subverts the authority itself rather than acting as a vehicle to redefine the standards. Ava, the vehicle itself, changes the status quo in her favor not only proving her AI but also demonstrating her lack of a need for Nathan and Caleb.

Questions:

1. Nathan claims to have programmed Ava to be straight. How far do you think this programming truly affects Ava? Use the exchange between Ava and Kyoko in your discussion of Ava’s expression of sexuality.

2. Kyoko never speaks in the film, and appears to have limited programming. Using feminist analysis, propose a theory as to why Ava is able to reprogram Kyoko without actually accessing her brain.

3. Why don’t the androids, who have been shown to possess AI, demonstrate any remorse for killing Nathan?

4. Who do you identify most with in this scene? If you have seen the film, include your background in your discussion.

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philippmichelreichold · 5 years ago

Link

On Analog January/February 2010

Rejiggering the Thingamajig by

Eric James Stone

is a

wonderful story

Who framed Roger Rabbit

All of Me

, only set in

Neptune

Thus Spake the Aliens

by H. G. Stratmann is a story about saving the world, complete with large red Doomsday-cutoff-switch-button. These aliens are in the same business as Clarke's

Others

2001

, could not be an accident.

promising process

Fermi-Hart paradox

Apollo

to the moon.) Even if one used

the Orion nuclear pulse drive

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

has a profile in this issue of Analog. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of her stories. Rusch builds her characters in a believable and sympathetic manner that leaves me yearning for more.

Possession

is one of her

Retrieval Artist

(Uncle Orson review of the Retrieval Artist stories.)

Shame by

Mike Resnick

Lezli Robyn

Simple Giftsby

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Who's of Whoville

Michael F. Flynn

Enterprise

command team in

I, Mudd

Rogue Star

in the

Star Child Trilogy

by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. I would have hoped though that anyone advanced enough to use stars as weapons would also be advanced enough to not do so. Perhaps I'm just excessively naive.

Copyleft of my material

Essentially, my work is Creative Commons Attribution-Required, Share Alike.

Adapted from their Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license summary--

Providing a link to my source document should suffice in attributing me. Where any condition(s) I place conflicts with the

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, my condition(s) shall prevail.

ISFDB unless otherwise indicated and are copyrighted unless otherwise indicated.

Copyrighted images are presented here under fair use. You would need to contact the copyright holder to use them. They are not covered by my creative commons licensing.

Coverart from ISFDB for Analog 2010 Jan-Feb

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philippmichelreichold · 6 years ago

Link

On Analog January/February 2010

Home (190417@1656)

Rejiggering the Thingamajig by

Eric James Stone

is a

wonderful story

Who framed Roger Rabbit

All of Me

, only set in

Neptune

Thus Spake the Aliens

by H. G. Stratmann is a story about saving the world, complete with large red Doomsday-cutoff-switch-button. These aliens are in the same business as Clarke's

Others

2001

, could not be an accident.

promising process

Fermi-Hart paradox

Apollo

to the moon.) Even if one used

the Orion nuclear pulse drive

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

has a profile in this issue of Analog. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of her stories. Rusch builds her characters in a believable and sympathetic manner that leaves me yearning for more.

Possession

is one of her

Retrieval Artist

(Uncle Orson review of the Retrieval Artist stories.)

Shame by

Mike Resnick

Lezli Robyn

Simple Giftsby

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Who's of Whoville

Michael F. Flynn

Enterprise

command team in

I, Mudd

Rogue Star

in the

Star Child Trilogy

by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. I would have hoped though that anyone advanced enough to use stars as weapons would also be advanced enough to not do so. Perhaps I'm just excessively naive.

Copyleft of my material

Essentially, my work is Creative Commons Attribution-Required, Share Alike.

Adapted from their Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license summary--

Providing a link to my source document should suffice in attributing me. Where any condition(s) I place conflicts with the

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, my condition(s) shall prevail.

ISFDB unless otherwise indicated and are copyrighted unless otherwise indicated.

Copyrighted images are presented here under fair use. You would need to contact the copyright holder to use them. They are not covered by my creative commons licensing.

Coverart from ISFDB for Analog 2010 Jan-Feb

1 note · View note

philippmichelreichold · 6 years ago

Text

@Analog_SF January/February 2010 #review #scifi

On Analog January/February 2010

Home

Rejiggering the Thingamajig

by Eric James Stone is a wonderful story about doing what's right. Never thought I'd read a story where a Buddhist T. rex was the protagonist. Bokeerk is a wonderful character, and her companion for her mission, a sentient gun, is a delight. The gun reminded me of the talking bullets in Who framed Roger Rabbit or Yosemite Sam. To get home to her children's imminent hatching, she must follow the Eightfold path.

Neptune’s Treasure

By Richard A. Lovett is an AI story. Floyd has an AI living in his head name of Brittney. Reminiscent of the movie All of Me, only set in Neptune space and without Steve Martin and Lilly Tomlin. Floyd and Brittney have serious personal/autonomy issues. The science of the story is wonderful-- mass drivers and recovery vessels. And space bicycles as well.

Also spracht Strattman

Thus Spake the Aliens by H. G. Stratmann is a story about saving the world, complete with large red Doomsday-cutoff-switch-button. These aliens are in the same business as Clarke's Others with a more up close and personal approach. And they are quite implacable about weeding if the need arises. To say the story is rich in allusions to other works would be a vast understatement. The connection between the title of the story and of Richard Strauss's song, widely acclaimed for its use in 2001, could not be an accident. The key to the story is a problem that is not often addressed, or more to the point-- it's largely ignored. There is a dead line for establishment of a real presence in space-- the point at which we exhaust cheap, abundant sources of energy. Somewhere before we reach that point is the point where a struggle ensues for control of those energy sources that remain. Whether or not civilization survives that struggle will have little impact on what happens next. No alternative, renewable source will be able to fill the gap that will be left with the depletion of fossil fuels. Nuclear power will remain expensive, dangerous, and will only postpone the collapse. Fusion will remain as elusive as a will-o'-the-wisp for some time. We have gigatons of Hydrogen, but fusion's most promising process relies not on Hydrogen but Lithium. Even if a Lithium-to-Tritium plant started working tomorrow, we have no way of foreseeing the consequences of eliminating any particular element from the biosphere and would need to work with highly radioactive Tritium. Unless Stratman's aliens show up soon to terraform Mars and Venus, and hand us the keys to the secrets of the Universe, tough times are ahead of us. We will have to use less energy per person or reduce the number of people using energy. We would eventually return to subsistence farming with limited manufacturing powered by wind and solar power-- essentially back to the 17th century. Perhaps the answer to the Fermi-Hart paradox is that no civilization has been able to solve the energy crisis and overcome the energy gap. (It takes a huge amount of energy to go from planet to planet. Witness the huge fuel tanks of the Saturn V's needed to send Apollo to the moon.) Even if one used the Orion nuclear pulse drive to establish a local system space program, the unavailability of cheap, abundant energy would make it difficult to maintain the necessary level of technology. Once nuclear fuel became the mainstay of the economy, space exploration could be sacrificed as having a lower priority than meeting needs back home. Perhaps we are not the first civilization to see the stars not quite in our grasp and then to watch them slip away forever.

The Possession of Paavo Deshin

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a profile in this issue of Analog. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of her stories. Rusch builds her characters in a believable and sympathetic manner that leaves me yearning for more. Possession is one of her Retrieval Artist” stories. Retrieval artists are bounty hunters in a convoluted universe, and Miles Flint is among the very best. Paavo was adopted after his birth parents fled to evade some outstanding alein warrants. But his birth parents have made sure they can keep in touch, naturally. Paavo's birth parents are Disappeareds-- essentially outlaws in the old sense of the word. Flint is hired by not one but two clients to locate the birth parents. His adoptive parents are well to do, powerful, and tainted by underworld connections. And they adore Paavo as if he were born to them. Maybe more so. Rusch make quite plain her view on the subject of birth parents that re-enter a child's life wreaking havoc as they assert their rights. She equates them with terrorists, while Paavo's adoptive father is in his eyes, regardless of how others see him, the ideal and epitome of fatherhood. (Uncle Orson review of the Retrieval Artist stories.)

Shame

by Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn is a fairly straight forward example of what not to do. Given the colonists's mindset and attitude toward Satan, their actions should not have been unexpected. Perhaps that's the real shame of the story-- that as atrocious as the colonists's appear to the author and to his moral authority figure, given human nature they were unsurprising.

Simple Gifts

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is a story about the stereotypically greedy corporation out to profit on the simplicity's and naivety of the primitive, non tech natives. What could be more innocuous than a race that closely resembles (in appearance) the Who's of Whoville. The ethnologist and linguist sent to learn about the alien's language and culture implore the company to slow down on making a deal with the aliens and are disregarded as obstructionists. The outcome is inevitable, but the suspense building makes it all worthwhile.

On Rickety Thistlewaite by Michael F. Flynn is about the prison that is public service. Making oneself indispensable can be very rewarding and satisfying. Then it becomes an obligation not taken lightly by those who depend on you. As Harry Mudd exclaims to the Enterprise command team in I, Mudd. . . .

A War of Stars

David L. Clements writes a crisp and interesting story about questioning values and making choices. The concept of intelligence housed in celestial bodies-- the cores of planets and stars-- is reminiscent of Rogue Star in the Star Child Trilogy by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. I would have hoped though that anyone advanced enough to use stars as weapons would also be advanced enough to not do so. Perhaps I'm just excessively naive.

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