Aeon Nine Read online

  http://www.aeonmagazine.com

  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editor

  L. Blunt Jackson

  Æon Nine is copyright © 2006, Scorpius Digital Publishing, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

  Cover art (View From Castle Io) by Bridget McKenna

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  Novelette

  The Girl Who Left . . . Terry Hayman

  Short Stories

  Michael Banks, Home From the War . . . Marissa K. Lingen

  One Small Step . . . Ken Scholes

  Life Sentences . . . Robert J. Howe

  Mirror Bound . . . Lisa Mantchev

  Remember . . . Josh Rountree

  Eat the Rich . . . Daphne Charette

  Poetry

  Unnatural Poetry Workshop . . . Greg Beatty

  There is a Story . . . Jaime Lee Moyer

  Departments

  Signals . . . Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Æternum . . . The Æon Editors

  Parallax . . . Dr. Rob Furey

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  NINE

  So I go out on a limb. I write an essay for a book called Star Wars on Trial, in which I discuss the influence of the media on science fiction and ask why science fiction literature sales are declining when science fiction media sales continue to grow. People who’ve read my work know I’ve been asking this question for a long time. That’s the tree. The limb I crawled out on was the answer I finally gave to that question:

  I think most SF novels aren’t entertaining. Most of them are good-for-you stories that build on what’s come before. In other words, there’s a lot of broccoli out there when most readers want meat, potatoes, some fruit, some other veggies—and yes, cake.

  People noticed I was on this limb when Asimov’s reprinted the essay in the September, 2006 issue. And in the discussions that followed, I got accused of…emotional manipulation.

  I don’t get accused of being wrong. No one writes a rebuttal, filled with facts and figures. No one argues me point by point.

  Instead, the critics lob “emotional manipulation” at me and leave it at that.

  Which seemed odd to me until I Googled emotional manipulation and science fiction together, and got a series of reviews and essays by the “literary lights” of the SF field. In these vast pages of analysis about the science fiction genre, only one phrase emerges as a phrase of derision. You guessed it. “Emotional manipulation.”

  A few years ago, a British interviewer accused New York Times bestselling mystery writer Jeffrey Deaver of emotional manipulation. Deaver answered calmly (and I’m paraphrasing here), “That’s what I get paid to do.”

  He’s exactly right. Fiction is about emotion. Non-fiction, especially academic non-fiction, is about intellect. Now, you can have intelligent fiction, and fiction that explores intellectual themes, but you damn well better have some emotion to go with it, or your fiction becomes known as “dry,” “difficult to read,” or the dreaded “dull.”

  Guess what’s happened to science fiction, folks. Writers like me, who value a good emotional read, get criticized for the very thing that makes fiction good.

  And how do writers respond to that criticism? If the writer is only familiar with science fiction, she can soldier on and write her own stuff, and hope some creative editor will publish it, or she can start writing emotionless fiction that has an intellectual framework which belongs in a position paper, not in a novel.

  If the writer is familiar with other genres, she can move away from science fiction. She can write “paranormal” romance (which embraces science fiction gladly—and sells at larger numbers than all of the science fiction genre put together) . Or she can write science-based mystery novels or technothrillers (which often use futuristic science to make their points) or, heaven forbid!, mainstream novels.

  Writers in all other genres—and reviewers and literary critics and the editorial gatekeepers and readers—all practice emotional manipulation, happily, joyfully, and with great verve. These genres are alive. They aren’t on their last legs like the SF literary genre is. Heck, fantasy writers do too—and you know what some of these same SF “literary lights” call fantasy? “Elfy welfy crap.” As in, “why did you publish that elfy welfy crap? You’ll ruin your carefully built reputation.”

  The response to my essay was, in other words, why should we listen to her? She practices emotional manipulation. Case closed. They act as if I’d kicked puppies or murdered children (oops! Am I manipulating you here?). The one science fiction novel that I mentioned in a footnote as showing hope for the genre, Jack McDevitt’s Polaris (not because the novel broke new ground, but because it told a good story), was also demeaned as being horribly emotionally manipulative.

  Thank you, literary lights, for showing me exactly how you’re murdering my favorite genre. You don’t want it to make you feel anything except smart and superior. You want SF to engage your brain and not your heart.

  Yet without heart, no story stands the test of time. Novels that are about scientific theories will be outdated within a few years. Novels about great characters whom we can all care about, novels with spectacular stories that take us on grand journeys and sweep us away with romance and adventure, novels that have a mystery at their core—not an intellectual one, but one that resonates emotionally, those are the novels that stand the test of time.

  Those are the novels that sell. Those are the novels that get remembered.

  Jeffrey Deaver and Nora Roberts and George R.R. Martin know that. That’s why their books sell millions of copies.

  It’s time SF stops listening to the “literary lights,” people who are afraid of their own feelings, and start letting emotional manipulation back into the genre.

  Editors: Buy SF novels that move you even if the idea has been done before. And readers, when you find an SF novel that has heart, tell your friends. Encourage them to read that author, those novels—and look at who is publishing the books. Buy more books from that publisher. Vote with your dollars.

  Oh, wait. I forgot. You already are.

  Nine

  Coming Soon to a Worldview Near You

  A paradigm is like an operating system: it uploads those details of basic operation that don’t need to be reinvented every time you reboot in the morning. Having a ready-made world in which to function is efficient and economical, and that’s the way your mind likes it. Your basic operating paradigm may be partly biological, passed down from the apes and alligators and amœbæ that toiled to produce you, but most of it is based upon assumptions you inherited by hearing them spoken and seeing them operate unspoken, as you grew from your larval stage into adulthood. By the time you reached puberty the envelope had become transparent, and the map had become the territory. If it had not, you would probably reside today in the sort of place where they hide the sharp objects and bring your meds in little paper cups.

  New thoughts, and particularly new ways of viewing the world, are not economical, so once something has become part of the OS it’s very difficult to get it out of there, or even find it. That’s a paradigm. Assumptions need to become reality so that we can stop thinking about them. Imagine the chaos that would result if you were allowed to rethink the universe at will. How would anything else ever get done? How would you survive? While contemplati
ng his revolutionary Para-Shift™ prototype during the early Pleistocene, Ogg MacFarlaine was mauled and eaten by a passing cave bear, and failed to pass along the genetic characters for new worldview creation on the fly. Tragic, but probably a good thing for the Big Picture.

  We modify paradigms when we break through to a new way of thinking about something. Yesterday the world was a hostile place where every day was a fight to survive. Then you saw something, or heard something, or read something that got in under the operating system, and today the world is beautiful and full of opportunity. Those kinds of experiences are rare, and difficult, and often painful. “No, this way, stupid!” says the OS, or “that way lies madness!” Sometimes it’s right about that, because if the shift is abrupt enough or the angle acute enough, breakdowns do occur—the system crashes. You’re fighting for your new worldview with the economies of paradigm, and it has a billion-year head start on you.

  It’s easier to accept a new idea if it can be demonstrated in a way you can comprehend. Eratosthenes proved the world was round around 200 BCE, but 1600 years later, world maps still reflected the nearly universal assumption on the ground that if you could see the edge of something, that was the edge. Of course you could walk five miles and see a completely different edge, and keep on doing that until you got back to where you started, but most people wouldn’t get five miles from where they were born for several more centuries, so let scholars say what they might, thousands of generations of common wisdom said that a thing with edges was flat, and there you are. Don’t fall off.

  When Columbus and Co. sailed off the edge, putting a shaky sort of faith in Eratosthenes, and came back again with proof and booty, world map making became the sexy new thing. Armed with maps that were now the new territory, we incorporated round worlds into our model. But thinking this way required not only the mathematical demonstration of 200 BCE, but the practical one of 1492. After that, anyone could do it. Roger Bannister ran a mile in under 4 minutes in 1954, a feat many “experts” maintained was physically impossible. The next year 37 runners duplicated his performance, and the year after that the figure was around 300. Before Chuck Yeager showed otherwise in 1948, the speed of sound was an impassible barrier. Now the speed of light is. No, really. It is. Isn’t it? From in here it sure looks like it, but Einstein himself said that you can’t solve a problem from the same framework in which you created it.

  Because we live inside a great nesting structure of paradigms, like an immense matrioshka doll, when we break out of one now-useless shell, we immediately find ourselves in another, and mistaking its boundaries for the edge of the world, we may stop there a while. If, however, we persist in defying our conservative consciousness and rewriting the OS, we may continue to break out all our lives. Creative people do it all the time, and one of their functions is to create the windows through which we can view new worlds.

  You’ll find nine of these open windows in this issue of Æon, beginning with Marissa K. Lingen’s (“Things We Sell to Tourists,” Æon Six) story of innocence and hope lost and found: “Michael Banks, Home From the War.” Next, Ken Scholes (“East of Eden and Just a Bit South,” Æon Six) invites us to take “One Small Step” into a frightening and not entirely implausible near future; Robert J. Howe speculates on new and disturbing kinds of “Life Sentences;” Terry Hayman tells a tale of hope and horror in “The Girl Who Left;” Lisa Mantchev shows us our own reflection in “Mirror Bound”; Josh Rountree transports us to a much earlier war and invites us to “Remember;” and Daphne Charette exhorts us, from a view of civilization gone awry, to “Eat the Rich.” Two poets return to open other doors: Greg Beatty takes us to an “Unnatural Poetry Workshop,” and Jaime Lee Moyer reminds us “There is a Story.” We’d like to remind you that there are a lot of great ones waiting for you in Æon Nine. Get reading.

  Michael Banks, Home From the War

  Marissa K. Lingen

  “If nature abhors a vacuum, history abhors an idyll even more. Nursery magic gives way to strafing runs and scrambling for the gas mask. What could even the most magical nanny in the world have to say about any of that?”

  ELLEN, THE OLD HOUSEMAID, had left the tray as quickly as she could and retreated. It was Jane and Barbara’s evening with their do-gooders; Michael had not bothered to find out what or with whom his sisters were doing good, exactly. It didn’t seem to matter any more. His tea cooled while he stared into the fire.

  “What’s the medicine going to taste like tonight, Michael?” asked a soft voice behind him.

  Michael started. “Couldn’t be. Absolutely bloody couldn’t be.”

  “But it is.” Mary Poppins stepped into the circle lit by the fire. “And you, young man, may kindly watch your language.”

  “Mary Poppins. Jesus Christ, Mary Poppins, after all these years of—”

  “Language, Michael!” snapped Mary Poppins. “You have not the excuse of some young men, who were not brought up by someone practically perfect in every way.”

  “Practically perfect in—” Michael began to laugh. It was not a very pleasant laugh. “Wish we’d had your practical perfection in the trenches.”

  “I was attending to all sorts of pressing matters.”

  Michael’s unpleasant laugh sounded again. “None of which involved being mustard gassed, eh, Poppins?”

  She gave him a haughty stare and pretended as if he hadn’t spoken. “I asked you a question, to start out with. Last I heard, you were brought up to give a civil answer to a civil question.”

  “What did you—oh. The medicine.”

  Mary Poppins produced a familiar large bottle, filled the spoon with an amber liquid and passed it to Michael, who drank it with a sigh. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Scotch. Neat. And yours is rum punch, as always.”

  She filled the teaspoon for herself and drank it, not deigning to notice him.

  “Can’t stand rum any more,” said Michael, shaking his head. “We had a ration of it with our tea in the morning, and I never turned it down then, but the smell of it makes me think—” He shook all over, like a dog.

  “Feeling better?” asked Mary Poppins.

  “Not particularly. No.”

  Mary Poppins’s expression betrayed uncertainty for the first time Michael could remember. “It used to work that way,” she said, almost to herself.

  “I’m going to need a bit more than a teaspoon of Scotch to feel better, Poppins. I’ve been louse-bitten and gas-masked; I’ve been cold and wet and shot in the ass, and I’ll never walk the same way again and I’m not yet twenty-five—”

  “Michael.”

  “I watched my mate Oswald get his head blown off next to me!” shouted Michael. “Right clean off, his whole head…his blood hit me, good old Osser Bastable and no head on him—”

  “Michael,” said Mary Poppins sharply. “You are overwrought.”

  “You’re damn right I’m overwrought, Poppins. You’re damn right I am.”

  Mary Poppins snapped a clean red-and-white bandanna handkerchief out of her carpetbag. “Here now. Blow.”

  Michael did as he told. “It’s very nice of you to come to see the recluse in his hermitage, M.P., but I think you’ll find that a teaspoon of medicine and a clean handkerchief will not cure what ails me.”

  “You know best,” said Mary Poppins. “As usual.” But she was somewhat less acerbic.

  “When I was small, I believed that you had an uncle, your uncle Turvy it was, who could mend broken hearts,” said Michael. “I believed you could do anything. But you—didn’t. None of the magical folks you introduced us to did, but—”

  He looked at her searchingly. “Mrs. Corry once told us that once one goes, all go. She meant you, I know it. We never ran into any of them without you. So it all comes down to you, Poppins. And you weren’t there.”

  Mary Poppins’s cheeks were no redder than ever, but her eyes took on the Dutch-doll look of the rest of her, glassy and fixed. “You don’t think I—”

  “Oh,
stuff it, Poppins. You spent my whole childhood showing me the most outlandish stuff you could, the most fantastical things you could do, and then when I really could have used something fantastic, where were you?”

  “I’m not God, Michael.”

  “No, because God didn’t create a set of expectations, did he? He didn’t serve my tea in the nursery. He didn’t draw my bath and take me to a circus of constellations and give a jacket to a walking marble statue in the park. God never made me think He’d pop up if I was naughty and got myself in trouble or was nice and needed a piece of gingerbread. God never made me think He’d be there when I needed Him.”

  “I left you children,” said Mary Poppins. “I let you know you could never count on me being there because any day—”

  “And then you returned again when we did need you, so what was the good of that? We learned to be patient, was all. Well, I was patient up there on the front. And now here you are with me while John’s up in his aeroplane—” He turned his head away and wouldn’t look at her.

  “What if I told you that it was all your dreams when you were children? That you and Jane made up stories about me and told each other they were true until you believed each other?”

  Michael turned back to her then, with such a weary look that she flinched. The small boy in him delighted in his triumph, facing down the nanny, but the adult just waited.

  “Yes, all right,” said Mary Poppins, “it was all real. It was all true. But—didn’t it mean anything to you?”

  “What was it supposed to mean?”

  Mary Poppins opened her carpet bag with a snap. “We’ll have to see, won’t we.”

  “Oh, Poppins, no,” said Michael. “For God’s sake, I’m in no condition to go out there and—”

  “Spit spot,” said Mary Poppins. She held out a great watch on a chain, almost as big as the palm of her hand. Michael stood up with a groan, and the room spun around them. He felt a breeze ruffling his hair even when the spinning had stopped. He looked around. They were on a hillside in broad daylight.