Analog SFF, March 2012 (30 page)

Having survived to clear his name, now Captain Frey and his crew are simply trying to make a living—any way they can. They sign up for a new job, salvaging ancient technology in a trackless jungle. There's just one problem: they're close to territory occupied by the Mane, a hostile society of teleporting zombies. And navigator Jez just might be turning into a zombie herself. . . .

It's a rollicking good time, part
Pirates of the Caribbean
and part Jules Verne, all filtered through Chris Wooding's fevered imagination. If you enjoyed
Retribution Falls
but wanted more of this world and these characters,
The Black Lung Captain
is what you're looking for. If you haven't had the pleasure, dive right in; you don't have to read the first one to enjoy this volume. Wooding has a friendly style that has the reader quickly turning pages—remember to stop once in a while to breathe. Here's hoping that the crew of
Ketty Jay
will soon be back for more adventures.

Count to a Trillion

John C. Wright

Tor, 368 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-2927-1

Genre: Space Opera

John C. Wright has been absent from SF for too long. His Golden Age trilogy (2002—2003) was competent space opera, but then he turned to fantasy.
Orphans of Chaos
(2005), the first of a high fantasy trilogy, won him a Nebula Award. In 2008 he authored a sequel to A. E. van Vogt's Null-A books.

Now he's back, with the first book in a new series.
Count to a Trillion
is a space opera that starts in familiar territory and builds wonder upon wonder into a strange and enchanting edifice.

Menelaus Montrose is a Texan, born into a twenty-third-century world whose economy has collapsed. When he was a boy, Menelaus ran across a box of old books—science fiction from our own era—which changed his life.

As a young adult, Menelaus became a hired gun . . . until he boarded a spaceship and went to search for happiness among the stars. Between relativistic effects, intellect augmentation, and the machinations of his comrade Del Azarchel, Menelaus winds up centuries and scores of parsecs away from Texas, struggling to find his place in an interstellar society ruled by Clarke's Law (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Oh, and there's a princess.

Centuries pass, humankind and artificial intelligences evolve, and Menelaus continues to change and grow. Before long, he's deep in galactic politics, balancing one power center against another in order to move history in the direction of his desires.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this sort of thing could easily get out of control and turn into a muddled, confusing mess. But Wright is a careful storyteller, and he leads the reader step by step into an almost-incomprehensible universe, rather in the manner of Robert A. Heinlein's classic
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
. Menelaus is a likable character, and his transition from cowboy to virtual demigod is gradual enough that we're with him each step of the way.

One of the things science fiction does best is to take us beyond limits, to stretch the imagination as far as it will go.
Count to a Trillion
does a great job. Definitely recommended.

Young Flandry

Poul Anderson

Baen, 736 pages, $7.99

(mass market paperback)

Baen Webscriptions: $6.00 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3465-8

Series: Technic Civilization/Flandry of Terra

Genre: Space Opera

Longtime
Analog
readers need no introduction to Poul Anderson. Across a career that stretched from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century, Anderson wrote over a hundred books of science fiction and fantasy. He won the Hugo Award seven times, the Nebula thrice, and even SFWA's Grand Master Award—as well as just about every other award in the field. He was a master of short stories as well as novels, and his worldbuilding skills were legendary.

Anderson died in 2001, leaving a legacy of generations of satisfied readers.

Among Poul Anderson's greatest work was the multivolume future history chronicling the rise and fall of what he called the Technic Civilization. The stories and books of this series, many first published in
Astounding/Analog
, include pure idea-based problem stories, sophisticated tales of alien societies, ripping adventure yarns, military SF stories, and riveting mysteries. Lately, we've become used to writers who specialize in one type of SF or another—Poul Anderson did it all, sometimes melding several different types in the same story.

With the state of SF publishing today, it's often getting harder and harder to find affordable new editions of classics by the great writers of the past. But the field can't survive on old used books: they aren't attractive to new readers, they can be hard to get hold of, and a dog-eared thirty-year-old copy of
The Rebel Worlds
just doesn't make an acceptable gift.

Luckily, Baen Books has taken on the mission of re-issuing Anderson's Technic Civilization books. These are omnibus editions, which means each one contains several books at once. These are attractive paperbacks, either trade or mass market size, and they're priced pretty reasonably. If you've joined the digital bandwagon and want e-book editions, you can generally get them from Baen for six bucks apiece.

The history of the Technic Civilization breaks into two eras, each typified by one main character. The first era, of exploration and settlement, featured master trader Nicholas van Rijn. The second era, dominated by the decline and fall of the Terran Empire, is told through the eyes of Dominic Flandry.

Flandry, in true military tradition dating back to Horatio Hornblower, starts out as an Ensign in the Imperial Navy, and works his way up to a position as personal agent of the Emperor. All the while, the Empire is decaying and dissolving, and throughout his adventures across eight volumes we watch Flandry's ultimately doomed struggle to preserve the good and eliminate the bad.

Young Flandry
, as you might expect from the title, is set at the beginning of Flandry's long career. The book includes the first three Flandry novels in chronological order:
Ensign Flandry
(originally published in 1966),
A Circus of Hells
(1970), and
The Rebel Worlds
(1969).

Here Flandry is young, ambitious, and resourceful as he confronts the Empire's enemies, both internal and external. The focus in these books is mostly on adventure and exotic locales (and nobody does those better than Anderson). If you've never read these books, you have quite a treat in store. And if you dimly remember them as fairly old-fashioned
SF,
you owe it to yourself to rediscover Anderson's inventive imagination. I promise you, these books are fresher than you remember them.

Don Sakers is the author of
Dance for the Ivory Madonna
and
A Voice in Every Wind
. For more information, visit
www.scatteredworlds.com
.

Copyright © 2011 by Don Sakers

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Stan:

[Regarding the September 2011 Brass Tacks:]

For the benefit of our Canadian friends, the rationale of President Nixon's attempt to change the U.S. measurement system from the existing one to the metric was that many scientists were apparently unable to multiply and divide big numbers by 12. However, with the metric system, all they had to do was use their fingers and toes. But then, someone invented the pocket computer and that solved the entire dilemma. Of course, there were some of us in the second grade who were paying attention and learned the times tables all the way from 1 x 1 up through 12 x 12.

All in fun of course, but back in those prehistoric days, most of the same scientists used slide rulers [sic], which have now become as obsolete as the idea of forcing an entire nation to convert to a foreign measurement system just because it has round numbers and because somebody else is doing it. As it turns out, there are a lot of elements in the real world that do not conform to ten fingers and ten toes. So, while the metric system is “cute” and has its pluses and minuses, it is certainly no panacea.

Look at parsecs and the AU for example. It turns out that whoever invented the universe apparently didn't have ten fingers and ten toes and not much of a sense of humor. So far, they haven't made it easy, though the metric people have rounded some distances to km, e.g. the speed of light, the mean distance to the Sun, and the mean distance to the Moon, to impress the elite with their cosmopolitanism.

Although I was raised to employ our current measuring system, I am quite capable of doing mental conversions. But it takes all the fun out of a story if I have to stop and multiply kilometers by .621 to visualize how far something is. I disagree with you that our system is “embarrassingly and awkwardly stubborn.” I find our system neither. I doubt it makes that much difference which system one employs so long as it serves the need and those in question are comfortable using it. For those who like some other system, they can do as Mr. Blackadder of Ontario, Canada suggests and use the “search and replace” system.

Leonard R. Cook

Goleta, CA

"Because somebody else is doing it” is not a good reason to do anything, but “Because
everybody
else is doing it” requires serious consideration when the issue in question is communication—especially when everybody else is doing it for a good reason. The metric system really does make it far easier to do most kinds of calculations, especially the “back-of-the-envelope” approximations that are always a good idea as a reality check and which kids brought up excessively dependent on calculators and computers have never learned to do. Contrary to your cute but nonsensical allegation about scientists not being able to multiply or divide by 12, most of them can, but why should they have to, when it's so much easier to work with 10, 100, etc.? And it isn't just 12; the English “system” also uses many other conversion factors, including (but not limited to) 3, 16, 36, 2000, and 5280.

It isn't the system itself that I called “embarrassingly and awkwardly stubborn,” but the attitude that many Americans display toward any suggestion of changing. The only advantage I can think of for the English system is comfortable familiarity for those who grew up with it and only it. Saying you can do conversions but don't want to be bothered suggests that you're one of these. Of course converting between English and metric units is even more awkward than the conversions within the English system, but nobody actually uses the metric system that way. The way to learn metric measures is to practice measuring a lot of things
only
in metric units, so that you get a direct feel for their meaning, just as you have for English.

As for AUs, they're a special case. They don't belong to either the English or metric system, but are uniquely useful—because they're easy to use—for some of the commonest calculations science fiction writers need to do in worldbuilding.

Dear Stan,

As for the new electronic submission format ["The New Way In,” October 2011]: Damn you! You were possibly the last publishers on our great blue pebble to persist in demanding that authors submit works sponged onto strips of wood pulp, and I loved you for it. Now you have lurched off with everyone else into today's world of inchoacy, evanescence, ephemerality. A typed manuscript is a beautiful thing, like a Windsor chair or a painting of an aurochs in cinnabar on the wall of an ancient cave. And now, gone.

It's no good cursing you for it. The world is what it is. Enjoy your Kindle, Stan. But know this: There is at least one
Analog
reader and hopeful contributor who nurtures in a disgruntled and barely acknowledged corner of his mind the hope of a cataclysm, something akin to a visit to the Earth's surface by an arm of the sun's mass, that would cleanse, purify, destroy all those delicate mists and webs of tamed electrons that have now snatched finally the pen from all artists’ hands.

I love your magazine, Stan. You are a world cultural treasure. But . . . damn you!

Christopher Myers

Lovelock Correctional Center

Lovelock, NV

(I know you'll still be accepting physical manuscripts for a while. Be sure to let me know when that ends.)

". . . snatched finally the pen from all artists’ hands . . ."? A bit melodramatic, don't you think, considering that nothing has been snatched from anybody's hands? The “pen” has changed forms many times over the centuries, but artists still find artistic ways to use whatever forms are currently in use.

A Windsor chair or an aurochs painting is a thing of beauty in large part because of its rarity and its status as an example of a bygone era. The same may be true of a typed manuscript, when most of them are gone. But for intrinsic beauty, that's hard to appreciate when you deal with thirty pounds of them every week—and the good ones are virtually indistinguishable from good computer printouts.

Ephemerality, on the other hand, is a real concern, about which I've often written and spoken myself. But it's only a serious concern when records are kept
only
in electronic form. A hardcopy of a story printed out by a computer with good materials is no more ephemeral than a typed copy of the same story. However, the story produced on a computer has huge advantages from the writer's point of view, including the ability to produce new copies almost effortlessly. That is where the ephemerality problem arises: electronic versions produced with old hardware and software may be difficult or impossible to read with new ones. But as long as hard copies exist, new ones can be made from them in exactly the same (laborious) way as from a typed copy.

Dear Stan,

Thanks for your thoughts about population and its neglect by professionals in your November editorial in
Analog.