Analog SFF, September 2010 (30 page)

Sorry, I could not resist.

Thank you for the intellectual stimulation and the consistently excellent magazine.

John Harcinske

Mitchell, SD

Dear
Analog,

Stanley Schmidt's [May 2010] editorial “Growing Pains” raises a provocative question: whether a culture must make certain wrong choices, early in its history, in order to survive and flourish far enough to recognize that the choices were wrong. If this turned out to hold true, then time travelers (or anyone else visiting—and able to influence—the early stages of another culture) would face an ethical dilemma even greater than the one Schmidt sees.

Schmidt suggests that benevolent time travelers visiting Earth's past (and initially hoping to save their ancestors from embracing such illogic as astrology or the practice of keeping slaves) might instead adopt a hands-off, “Prime Directive” premise, on the grounds that these wrong choices laid the necessary groundwork for further and better developments (astrology became astronomy, enslavement led some of its practitioners as well as its victims to understand—by contrast—the importance of freedom). However, Schmidt has not looked at the other side of the “Prime Directive” premise: If developing cultures somehow need to embrace certain wrong ideas at some stage—even cruel, silly, or otherwise destructive ideas—in order to arrive at better ideas later on, might well-meaning time travelers (or space explorers) regard it as their duty to introduce those wrong ideas to cultures that lacked them? If so, how would the people in such a culture respond, if they learned that their visitors were teaching them new things not because the visitors believed these things were right and good, but because the visitors believed that these things were wrong and harmful but that generations afar off might—or might not—someday benefit somehow from having had their ancestors believe wrong things?

In today's USA, at least, we are reluctant to sacrifice the interests of living people for the possible interests of potential people not yet born. We would, for instance, respond with horror if someone said: “I have decided to systematically miseducate my children. I'm teaching them that pi equals three, the moonwalks never happened, whales are fish, and blue-eyed people are mentally inferior—none of which I believe myself—because I believe that someday my children may decide to have children or grandchildren of their own who may benefit from my action. If I teach my children today that pi equals three and blue-eyed people are inferior, their unborn descendants in 30 or 100 or 300 years may become better and greater people from learning to reject such notions, and I have no right to deprive them of that opportunity.” We would react with horror if someone proposed to do that to his or her own children, for the sake of unborn future generations—should we feel less horror if time travelers or space explorers introduced wrong ideas (no matter how culturally necessary these ideas appeared to the explorers) into some culture that had not yet made those particular mistakes, and that seemed unlikely to do so without external “help"?

Other comments on the May 2010 issue:

David Livingstone Clink's poem “Skippy the Robot” jarred me, and likely jarred others, because of its inexcusably sloppy scansion. Whether a subject is painful or merry, whether its treatment is grave or light-hearted, a reader of SF poetry (as of any other kind of poetry) should not have to dig through metrically inept verse to find out. Metrically (and otherwise) competent verse abounds today in the world of SF fandom; if this was the best SF verse that
Analog
could find to print, I can only hope that more of today's SF poets will submit their works in order to give
Analog
anything better.

Further sloppiness annoyed me where I had least expected to find it: in a story by H G. Stratmann. His “The Day the Music Died” made a small musical blunder, but one quite out of key (if you'll pardon the pun) with this generally proficient writer's usual high competence at checking facts in any subject he writes on. Specifically, Stratmann has his narrator, an aficionado of music, improbably referring to a well-known composition by Villa-Lobos as “Bachiana Brasileira No. 5” instead of the correct “Bahiana Brasileira No. 5": the bahiana is a Brazilian samba form that has little, if anything, to do with Bach. Please get that corrected before this otherwise excellent story enters some anthology—as I hope it will.

Kate Gladstone

Albany, NY

Your speculation is a good example of the kind from which stories grow, and if you decide to try that, I'd be interested in seeing the result. I must confess that I find it harder to imagine circumstances in which time travelers would want to introduce an idea like slavery, as distinct from deciding not to try to root it out, but I suppose it could happen. I did not mean to suggest that every culture needed particular bad ideas as indispensable steps toward a greater good, but only that they may well have played such a role in our particular history. There may be other, and perhaps better, ways.

I'm sorry you didn't like “Skippy,” but I don't agree that it's “inexcusably sloppy” or “metrically inept.” Yes, it has some playful deviations from the prevailing metrical pattern, but it's been a long time since most readers thought every poem had to follow a strictly regular metrical pattern throughout. Such a requirement is a little like saying music that is predominantly tonal should never use a chord more dissonant than a dominant seventh, or allow an occasional 5/4 measure in a tune that's mostly 4/4.

And speaking of music, I recommend extreme caution and carefully “checking facts” when tempted to accuse H. G. Stratmann of sloppiness in regard to it. In the case you cite, I regret to inform you that you're wrong. I don't doubt that there's a dance form called the bahiana, but that's not what Villa-Lobos wrote and Stratmann referred to. The Bachiana Brasileiras (and that
is
what they're called) is a group of pieces fusing Brazilian folk and popular music with a Bach-based contrapuntal style—hence the name. You can find a complete list of them in
Wikipedia
(and there's not a bahiana in the lot).

Stanley,

I appreciate your philosophical comments. What I find lacking is definition of some growing pains mistakes. And possible solutions. For instance I believe that one of our growing pains mistakes was allowing the automobile to out-compete mass transportation and ignoring alternate energies in favor of petrochemicals. Still we persist in not only allowing these entrenched vested-interest industries to continue defining our future, we subsidize them. Refusing to learn from our mistakes in favor of feeding our professional and intellectual communities.

Les Platt

Hi,

Just read this story ["Swords and Saddles,” May 2010] and it was excellent! The characters were realistic and the story entertaining. But it was not science fiction. A nearby lightning strike makes the group of men translate to another world/dimension, which happens to have a slightly different history—a classic fantasy premise, but definitely not science fiction.

Dan

Stanley Schmidt,

I have a comment about your generalization that astrology is “largely nonsense” in your May 2010 editorial. I have a scientific & engineering background and my wife does astrology readings. She uses the full birthday/birthplace for individuals and her results are (to me) surprisingly accurate. She does personalities, trends, and challenges/easy areas that individuals are or will have. The horoscopes in the paper are meant to cover such large variations in birthdates and locations that they are of not much use. A personalized chart using exact data is much more accurate. I have seen her predict problems with surgery, how a person's office is organized, challenges a person is facing now, challenges a person will face (and been right), and other things. With my background this all makes no sense, but it is not nonsense. Like anything else, some individuals will try to apply it in ways it is not accurate to apply it. This makes the whole discipline look bad—the subject of a number of your editorials.

Steven Hodder

Laramie, WY

I'm willing to be convinced by suitable data, but so far I haven't seen it.

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24-26 September 2010

FOOLSCAP 12 (SF/Fantasy literature and art conference) at Redmond Marriott Town Center, Redmond, WA. Guests of Honor: Emma Bull & Will Shetterly, Cory & Catska Ench. Membership: $50 until 17 September 2010. Info: www.foolscapcon.org; P.O. Box 2461, Seattle, WA 98111-2461

1-3 October 2010

CONJECTURE (San Diego SF conference) at Town and Country Resort, San Diego, CA. Guest of Honor: Robert J. Sawyer. Membership: $35 until 30 April 2010, $40 until 31 July 2010, $45 until 30 September 2010, $50 at the door. Info: 2010.conjecture.org, P.O. Box 927388, San Diego, CA 92192-7388.

22-24 October 2010

CAPCLAVE (DC area SF conference) at Hilton Washington DC/Rockville, Executive Meeting Center, Rockville, MD. Guests of Honor: Connie Willis; Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. Membership: $55 until 30 September, $60 until 17 October. Info: www.capclave.org/ capclave/capclave10/; Blog: www. capclave.org/capclave/capclave10/

28-31 October 2010

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