Asimov's Magazine - November 2011 - The Short Stories

Image via WikipediaThe Cult of Whale Worship - Dominica Phetteplace

Dominica Phetteplace has a small webpage with a link where you can say 'hi.' On the front page, there is a nice little picture of a whale in blue. The page is very micro - there are probably less than six sentences spread out over the entire webpage.

I think whales are pretty awesome creatures. Octopi, too, are pretty amazing. I admire them for their intelligence. Octopi I admire, also, for their amazing ability to adapt to their environment. They can also be extremely beautiful creatures. Nonetheless, there is a large market for both of these animals. That is sad. I suppose everyone probably has an animal or two in mind that they object to the killing of. However, it is a little easier when it comes to killing for food. Japanese people eat the whole whale: bones, organs, meat, and even the semen I've heard. In other words, they waste nothing of it at all. When western European nations hunted for whales, they did so for the oil it would give their lamps. When they did so, they pushed the populations of whales to the brink. I have an easier time accepting that people might eat them without waste than I do using them for lamp oil. That bothers me a lot.

The protagonist of this story is Japanese. A scientist, Tetsuo, has accidentally infected himself with a disease that had been created as a biological weapon to be used against the eaters of whale meat. The disease causes the infected to have an abnormal love for these whales. It works so well that Tetsuo, after becoming infected, fantasized about being eaten by one of the whales.

This Pretty Face - Jason K. Chapman

 Chapman actually has a pretty decent webpage for himself. It's really a blog, but it's actually pretty well crafted. It's much better than a lot of the other personal webpages I've found over the last few months while reading these short story magazines. It offers a small list of his published work and links to get your hands on it.


This is a story about time travel. A very distant descendent from the future is travelling back in time to try to change the future. That is to say, the protagonist will begat offspring who will be extremely destructive to the culture, according to the individual who is travelling back in time to try to change the past so that the protagonist, Kyle, never begets the child who will beget the child who will... etc. 


He is faced with the task of having to kill himself and his family. However, in his recent history, he had lost the love of his life in a terrorist attack on a Parisian cafe. Later, he meets another woman, and it's this relationship that will cause him to have the children who will lead to the children, who ultimately have that destructive individual.


Rather than kill himself and his family, however, he decides to send a message 200 years into the future that they should contact him in his own past, just before the terrorist attack, so that he might save his first love, Anna. This is successful, he goes back in time, and everything gets changed from that point. 


I am not a big fan of these types of stories. They never really work because of the paradoxes. He does talk about there being multi-universes or dimensions, or as the author wanted to coin the term, quantiverse (due to his love for quantum mechanics, most likely). However, it is a kind of weak work-around. However, this is not new, and my objection to it is not new either. Time-travel stories are too often incapable of working seriously. The Simpsons did it successfully because it was a comedy and it was funny. H.G. Wells' Time Machine kind of worked, because it did not try to go to the past to try to change the present. Although, he does try to change things so that the future changes. Star Trek IV kind of worked, because it had something to say about what we were doing wrong in the then present (90s), and it was a very funny critique of the past and comparison of the present to Roddenberry's vision of the future. However, flying around the Sun really fast was a dumb idea to make time travel work. It's always a dumb idea. This story, in my opinion, like so many like it before and after, simply fails in the logical side of making it work.

The story is OK, I guess, but not really my thing.

The Pastry Chef, The Nanotechnologist, The Aerobics Instructor, and the Plumber - Eugene Mirabelli

Mirabelli does not have her own webpage. At least, it was not in the first ten hits. There are a lot of links to other sites that talk about him. The best webpage I found was at the author's guild.

This story is kind of funny. It starts with the nanotechnologist who is something of an ass. The story's setting is at the 'other woman's house' far from the wife and kids. 

The pastry chef, his live-in lover, can hear the faucet talk. It talks in Italian. Later, the toilet speaks Turkish. Finally, the shower is Italian. Everyone can hear it except the nanotechnologist. 

I guess the story was a little funny, but I didn't really enjoy it much.

Free Dog - Jack Skillingstead

Jack does have his own webpage. It's actually pretty slick looking. Nice picture, good theme, with lots of information about his other work.

When I first started reading this magazine (Asimov's), I thought that I would find a magazine all about science fiction to be too much of a good thing: science fiction. However, I was wrong. In fact, I'm starved for science fiction, and here I am near the end of the magazine.

This short fiction was actually pretty interesting and good science fiction. It actually plays with an idea that I've had for awhile, which more-or-less came from a Boston Legal episode. That episode, I cannot remember the name of it, centred around the idea of DNA and who owned the rights to it: the hospital or lab that took it from the man, or the man who gave the DNA to the lab. That is to say, they patented his DNA, and he no longer had control over what they would do with it. Combine this with P2P and Napster style copying of intellectual property (songs), and thinking about Star Trek's replicator technology, it isn't difficult to piece together the idea of stealing intellectual property and replicating things that are much more advanced.

The divorcee wins his dog from his wife, but she wins the ability to copy the dog for a holographic representation. She then makes that copy available online for download. Before long, there is a copy of Travis Larson's dog everywhere. He hates the way it detracts from Cory's (the dog) uniqueness. He does hold that there is no dog like his dog, even thought there are copies. In the end, he is bothered further by the fact that Cory gets sick and is lethargic, whereas the copies, named Corky, are lively, even if they are just holographic.

It was an interesting idea, which is what science fiction should be about.

To Live and Die in Gibbontown - Derek Kunsken

Derek Kunsken is an author who lives in Quebec. Hey, that's where I'm from. He's got a wordpress webpage where you can learn more about him and follow his activities. However, his posts are very rare. One is a year old, and the other two years old. I don't know if there is anything better available.
 
This story is set in a world of primates who are quite evolved. Species of apes are represented in much the same way as races are in humans. The main character, Reggie, and the narrator of this first person tale, is an assassin. But, he's no ordinary assassin. His job is euthanasia. He is contracted by people who want to die. In this story, they are all elderly people.

I suppose one might say that this is kind of like Assassin on the Planet of the Apes, but without the humans in the story.


A Hundred Hundred Daisies - Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress has a nice little webpage where you can learn more about her.

The premise of the story is based on a lecture that Nancy heard that proposed the idea that one day we'd be fighting wars over water. One day, the Great Lakes will run out of water, and that might very well be the end of it for life as we know it.

Though, I don't buy the premise. She talks about how they hold 4/5 of the earth's water. OK, I will take her word for it on that one. However, the rest of the world lives off of the remaining 1/5 of the earth's water. How am I supposed to buy the idea that if, suddenly, the Great Lakes lose most of their water that water will somehow become incredibly scarce?

Also, no matter how much global warming we have, we will never lose all our water. Water does not evaporate into space, at least not while we have air to breathe. There are also the awesome contents in the ocean. I realize that we would have to desalinize the water first, but this would be a challenge we could meet. If Abu Dhabi can do it, I feel confident that we could as well. Simply put, when you have your life to save, you can do an awful lot.

The story is about a family of terrorists who are trying to sabotage water pipelines which lead water from the Great Lakes to Tucson and other southern properties. The protagonist, a young man in highschool, remembers the time before the great drought. There had been beautiful fields and flowers, and many other things that they could appreciate. They're all gone. The boy is about to stand trial for murdering someone his father murdered in order to hit the water pipeline.

The story is well told, I just don't think the story holds water.

Concluding thoughts

Well, I think it's pretty much a mixed bag in terms of quality of literature here. Some of it is good, some is really good, a good chunk of it is mediocre. Overall, though, I have enjoyed this edition of Asimov's fiction. This goes for the novellas, novelettes, and short stories. There's definitely less science fiction than I would have liked. $2.99 is not a bad price for a good mixture of work, styles, and ideas.