FSF, April-May 2009 Read online

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  Spilogale, Inc.

  www.fsfmag.com

  Copyright ©2009 by Spilogale, Inc.

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  April/May * 60th Year of Publication

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  NOVELETS

  THE SPIRAL BRIAR by Sean McMullen

  "A WILD AND A WICKED YOUTH” by Ellen Kushner

  THE PRICE OF SILENCE by Deborah J. Ross

  ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM by John C. Wright

  SHORT STORIES

  THE AVENGER OF LOVE by Jack Skillingstead

  ANDREANNA by S. L. Gilbow

  STRATOSPHERE by Henry Garfield

  CLASSIC REPRINTS

  SEA WRACK by Edward Jesby

  DEPARTMENTS

  EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  BOOKS by James Sallis

  PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: THE ART OF THE STATE by Paul Di Filippo

  FILMS: HOW I SPENT MY ITALIAN VACATION by Lucius Shepard

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  COMPETITION #77

  CURIOSITIES by Roberto de Sousa Causo

  COVER BY BRYN BARNARD

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor

  BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

  JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor

  CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  JOHN M. CAPPELLO, Newsstand Circulation

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 116, No. 4 & 5, Whole No. 682, April/May 2009. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $6.50 per copy. Annual subscription $39.00; $51.00 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2009 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646

  GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030

  www.fandsf.com

  CONTENTS

  Department: Editorial by Gordon Van Gelder

  Novelet: The Spiral Briar by Sean McMullen

  Department: Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Department: Books by James Sallis

  Department: Plumage From Pegasus: The Art of the State by Paul Di Filippo

  Short Story: The Avenger of Love by Jack Skillingstead

  Novelet: “A Wild and a Wicked Youth” by Ellen Kushner

  Short Story: Andreanna by S. L. Gilbow

  Department: Films: How I Spent My Italian Vacation by Lucius Shepard

  Short Stories: Stratosphere by Henry Garfield

  Classic Reprint: Sea Wrack by Edward Jesby

  Department: Science: A Lighter Look At Science by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty

  Novelet: The Price of Silence by Deborah J. Ross

  Novelet: One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

  Department: F&SF COMPETITION #77: “Found in Translation"

  Department: FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Department: Curiosities: Sambaqui: A Novel of Pre-History by Stella Carr Ribeiro (1987)

  Department: Coming Attractions

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  Department: Editorial by Gordon Van Gelder

  In my editorial last month, I mentioned that the whole nature of what a magazine is has changed during the last decade. I've been giving a lot of thought to that subject over the past few weeks.

  ...which immediately brings us to one of the big differences. In those old days before the information superhighway ran through so many homes and offices, an editor might write an editorial on October 15, send the piece off for copyediting and typesetting, and the article would appear in print in January. Subscribers might send their first responses to the editor by the first week in February, in time for a new editorial to be composed on February 15 ... that's right, there would be a lag of four months between the first editorial and the first response to feedback.

  By contrast, in the online world, an editor might write a piece on October 15, post it on their blog, and they could easily have a hundred responses by October 16. What's more, those responses aren't just traditional letters to the editor; they're notices posted online that allow for back-and-forth discussion.

  Indeed, if past experience is any indication, an editorial posted online on October 15 will be thoroughly dissected and discussed by October 20 and it will probably be old news by October 24. Over and done with. On that info superhighway, things move fast.

  Print magazines—even weekly publications—just can't compete with the Internet in such matters.

  But what (if anything) is lost in the switch from print to electronic media?

  Well, some might argue that the Internet is not friendly to the long, thoughtful, carefully considered piece. In fact, I'm one who would make just such an argument. I find it hard to read anything online that's longer than eight hundred words or so. And when I'm communicating online, I rarely have the patience to write a long piece when I can dash off something and then get feedback for it almost immediately.

  But this observation is nothing new, and I'm sure veteran Web surfers are saying, “Yeah, so what? We heard all this before Web 2.0."

  True. What I don't hear many people saying, however—and the reason I'm publishing this piece in print and not online—is this: the voices of people who do not use the Internet are lost. Practically every discussion that I read online assumes that everyone uses the Internet now and of course everyone in the future will use the Internet. And since these discussions are held online, no one disputes this assumption. The chorus would never claim that it won't be the one to carry the tune.

  But I hear regularly from people who don't use the Internet at all. Some live in remote areas where they don't get any service. Others have health reasons like carpal tunnel syndrome or they get migraines from using a computer. And there are incarcerated folks and people who just can't afford computers, and there are stubborn folks who just don't want to go online, and there are people who have used the Internet and decided they don't like it, and....

  The whole world is not online, but reading blog discussions, I get the impression that people who are trying to determine the ways of the future tend to forget this fact.

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  On a related note, I posted on our blog back on August 21 about the free fiction we've published on our Website. The gist of it is that I realized I'd been running the experiment of publishing fiction reprints online without ever measuring the results. So I asked readers for feedback on four questions (most of which are leading questions):

  1. When you read a story online that you like, do you feel inclined to support the publisher of the piece?

  2. Have you ever subscribed to a print magazine on account of a story you read on their site?

  3. Most magazine publishers post their Hugo- and Nebula-nominated stories online for free. If F&SF started charging the cost of an issue to read these stories, would you pay for them?

  4. Do you think the prevalence of free short fict
ion online has made you less inclined to pay for short fiction?

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  I also asked people to include their age with their responses.

  Originally, I intended to reprint the entire blog post in F&SF, just to see how readers of our print edition value the online reprints. I'm still interested in hearing from readers on that count, but after the blog entry brought in 170 responses in one week, I was overwhelmed and never did publish the piece here in F&SF.

  Those online responses were all over the map—dizzying, baffling, helpful, useless, hurtful, thoughtful, weird, provocative, and insightful. I did very little to solicit responses to the survey, so the respondents were a self-selected group of people, which made for some interesting results (including several comments from people who don't care for short fiction). Many of our respondents were directed to our survey by two or three writers who mentioned it in their blogs. Curiously, those writers themselves didn't respond to the survey, but a lot of other industry professionals did.

  Anyway, I'm grateful to everyone who took the time to respond. In an overgeneralized and thoroughly unscientific way, here are the results:

  1) Age of the respondents skewed heavily to people from twenty to forty.

  2) People who read fiction online that they like are not averse to tipping the publisher if it's easy to do so, but they are much more inclined to pay money directly to the author.

  3) Very few people are inspired to subscribe to publications based on reading a story or two online.

  4) Most people wouldn't pay to read the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated stories online and several people seemed angry or offended at the thought of doing so. As one respondent noted, “It's weird to have to pay to read a story I'm being asked to vote for,” but I found it striking that no one drew a connection between questions 1 and 3.

  5) The vast majority of respondents insisted that the prevalence of free stories online leads them to spend more on fiction, not less.

  What was more interesting than any of these points, however, was the overwhelming (to me, anyway) prevalence of an attitude among the responses that publishers need to do more to cater to readers. Many people said they don't like to buy a magazine and then find they only enjoy one or two stories. Others felt there should be better ways to sample the contents of a publication before buying. Several people said they'd like to see an approach like Napster's where readers could select individual stories they'd like to read and thus assemble a magazine issue by themselves. And there was this post from Rose:

  I'm in my mid-twenties, so I definitely missed the era where it was common to pay for short fiction in magazines. Every time I've ever been tempted to buy a story magazine off the newsstand a quick flip through the issue has sent me toward Vogue instead. But I do really like short story collections by my favorite authors and anthologies based around interesting topics, and I will pay for those. The difference, I guess, is that with real books I feel like I'm getting a better guarantee at quality and a more lasting value.

  Do “real” books really guarantee a higher level of quality? Or is the difference that magazines strive to offer a wider variety of material while many anthologies are more narrowly focused? Consider these comments that Damon Knight made in 2001:

  Avram Davidson said that an editor once told him, “Reading your stories is like eating one jelly bean after another.” Magazines provide variety that a one-author collection can't give us. In a mag issue, ideally, every story is well framed by all the others; a Davidson story is more fun if it has a Varley story on one side and a Niven story on the other.

  Mag editors strive for another kind of variety. One of the great Saturday Evening Post editors, but I forget if it was Lorimer or Hibbs, said, more or less, “I give my readers a magazine that is one-third what they think they want, one-third what they really do want, and one-third what they will want when they see it.” He might have said, too, that some of the stories he published were of excellent quality, some mediocre, and some poor, corresponding to the intelligence and taste of his readers.

  Does the approach that Damon outlined—the general-interest approach—appeal to readers in the digital age? Or has the Internet created a shift in reading habits? A reader wrote, “I find a magazine a highly efficient delivery vehicle for giving me a bunch of short fiction that I can read on the bus or the subway.” But then he went on to say, “But I also realize that I'm a fifty-year-old guy and may well be in the last generation of reading newspapers and magazines."

  I've got more questions than answers right now, but I plan to explore this topic further in future editorials. I hope to hear from readers with thoughts to share on the subject.

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  Notice for Subscribers

  With this issue, F&SF moves to a bimonthly schedule. Although the change was mentioned in the editorial last month, we realize this change is rather abrupt, for which we apologize. Economic forces (particularly postal rate increases) have led us to publish bimonthly double issues.

  Subscribers can find their subscription expiration dates on their mailing labels, at the end of the line above the name. If your subscription expired with the December 2009 or with the January 2010 issue, it now expires with the Dec./Jan. 2009-2010 issue. So anyone who subscribed for one year will receive a year's worth of issues. Subscribers with questions can always contact us through our Website or by phone or mail.

  We thank our readers—both longtime and new—and we look forward to publishing F&SF long into the future. Take a look at this issue's competition for a chance to win a subscription for the next sixty years.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelet: The Spiral Briar by Sean McMullen

  Sean McMullen recently completed his Ph.D. by studying the popularity of medieval fantasy in literature and movies. The degree doesn't have much bearing on his job as an IT Analyst in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, but it might have had a bit of an impact on his fiction, including this new tale. Sean—oops, make that Dr. McMullen—says about this story that the design of the ships’ engine was tested in model form and later confirmed by a real marine engineer.

  It was Anno Domine 1449, and the world was about to change. An idea was approaching the market town of Keswick, just north of Derwentwater. The name of that idea was La Hachette, and she already had a following.

  The Brother

  Sir Gerald always rose from his bed a half hour before first light and walked from Keswick to the Derwent River. Every day, for seven years, the hour before dawn and the hour following sunset would find the knight sitting on a rock that had become known as Gerald's Watch. The rock was near a bridge of planks and poles that spanned the river.

  In Keswick it was well known that Gerald did not tolerate company while he waited and watched, and so he was surprised as well as angered when a figure came into view in the half-light before morning. At distance it looked to be a man carrying an infant, then Gerald noticed that the bundle was glowing. The intruder stopped a little upstream. The knight was able to make out the shape of a helmet and the gleam of chainmail in the weak light.

  Gerald strung his bow before striding down to the water's edge. The intruder had arrived at the very worst time possible, and Gerald had opened his mouth to say as much when he saw a little boat on the water. Curiosity smothered the knight's anger.

  The boat was half a yard long, with six thick candles burning along its keel. Astride them was the metal rendering of a long, thin dog, its head facing backwards and its tail raised to display its bottom to wherever the boat might go.

  "Sir, do you know who I am?” asked Gerald, deciding to be polite because he was intrigued.

  "You are Sir Gerald of Ashdayle,” replied a soft but commanding voice. “You sit here every morning and evening, seeking revenge."

  "And who might you be?"

  "I am Tordral."

  "The master armorer?"

  "None other. Look into my boat, what do you see?"

  Although inclined to tell T
ordral to move on, Gerald looked.

  "I see a metal dog, and beneath it burn six candles. From its head protrudes a spigot.... A sufflator! The brass dog is a sufflator. I have seen them used in France."

  "Very good. Turn the spigot, and steam gushes from the jaws."

  Suddenly Gerald remembered why he was there.

  "If you know me, you must know I am not to be disturbed,” he said sternly.

  "What use has a sufflator?” Tordral asked, ignoring the warning.

  "I—ah, they are vessels that are half filled with water and heated by a small fire until steam gushes from the mouth. They may be used like a bellows to make a fire blaze up, even in wet wood."

  "True. Now watch."

  Tordral turned the spigot in the dog's head. A jet of steam blasted from its mouth, so loudly and abruptly that Gerald sprang back and put an arrow to his bow in a single movement.

  "Be at ease, Sir Gerald,” said Tordral above the sharp hissing.

  The armorer aimed the boat into the middle of river, then released it. Amid clouds of steam, it drew away from the bank. Gerald crossed himself.

  "Had I not seen, I would not have believed,” he said fearfully.

  "As a child, I found that a rock flung from a boat's stern will propel it forward a trifle."

  "But your boat flings no rocks,” said Gerald.

  "My boat is flinging steam."

  Gerald stared after the boat. It was now moving at the pace of a walking man.

  "So, your toy can cross a river,” he said, again remembering that Tordral was intruding. “Am I meant to be impressed, or—It's gone!"

  "Observant of you."

  "At the river's midpoint, it vanished. How? Where? It did not sink, I was watching."

  "You know the lore of boundaries, Sir Gerald. This stretch of the Derwent River is special. It exists in both our world and another. The banks are a boundary between earth and water, the midpoint is a boundary between one half of the river and the other, but crossing between worlds involves more than just crossing a river. You can only do it where the boundaries exist in both worlds, and during the half light boundary times, dusk or first light, that are neither night nor day."