====================== Asimov's SF, June 2004 by Dell Magazines ====================== Copyright (c)2004 Dell Magazines Dell Magazines www.dellmagazines.com Science Fiction --------------------------------- NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. --------------------------------- *CONTENTS* NOTE: Each section is preceded by a line of the pattern CH000, CH001, etc. You may use your reader's search function to locate section. CH000 Reflections: *Toward a Theory of Story: Two* CH001 *The Gladiator's War: A Dialog* by Lois Tilton CH002 *Men Are Trouble* by James Patrick Kelly CH003 *My Mother, Dancing* by Nancy Kress CH004 *The Veteran* by Neal Asher CH005 *Fallow Earth* by Paul Melko CH006 *Turing Test* by Robert R. Chase CH007 *The Buried Sword* by Ruth Berman CH008 *Steep Silence* by Lena DeTar CH009 *Verse* CH010 *On Books* CH011 *The SF Conventional Calendar* CH012 *Upcoming Chats* CH013 *In Our Next Issue* -------- Asimov's Science Fiction(R) June 2004 Vol. 28 No. 6 Dell Magazines New York Edition Copyright (C) 2004 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications Asimov's Science Fiction(R) is a registered trademark. All rights reserved worldwide. All stories in _Asimov's_ are fiction. Any similarities are coincidental. _Asimov's Science Ficton_ ISSN 1065-2698 published monthly except for combined April/May and October/November double issues. -------- Gardner Dozois: Editor Sheila Williams: Executive Editor Trevor Quachri: Technical Assistant Brian Bieniowski: Editorial Assistant Victoria Green: Senior Art Director June Levine: Assistant Art Director Abigail Browning: Sub-Rights & Mktg Scott Lais: Contracts & Permissions Peter Kanter: Publisher & President Bruce Sherbow: VP of Sales & Mktg Julia McEvoy: Print Advertising Sales -------- *Asimov's Science Fiction* Editorial Correspondence only: 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 asimovs@dellmagazines.com _Asimov's_ on the World Wide Web http://www.asimovs.com Subscriptions to the print edition One Year $32.97 Call toll free 1-800-220-7443 Or mail your order to ASIMOV'S 6 Prowitt Street Norwalk, CT 06855-1220 -------- CH000 Reflections: *Toward a Theory of Story: Two* There Is One Story and One Story Only "There is one story and one story only," said Robert Graves in his lovely poem, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice," and perhaps in a certain sense that is true, though I have taken Graves' line out of context and what he meant by it is something quite different from the meaning I want to attach to it. For I want to use it as corroboration of the theory of fiction I began to develop in last month's column, that all imaginative narrative is based on a single plot skeleton that goes back into astonishing reaches of antiquity. The Graves line seems to contradict Robert A. Heinlein's famous advice that actually there are _three_ stories, which he called Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and The Man Who Learned Better. But in fact all three of Heinlein's fundamental plot structures, though they do very cleverly summarize the essential story themes that underlie nearly all fiction, can themselves be subsumed into the one I identified in our last issue as the basis of all the successful and lasting narrative of the past five thousand years: _A sympathetic and engaging character (or an unsympathetic one who is engaging nevertheless), faced with some immensely difficult problem that it is necessary for him to solve, makes a series of attempts to overcome that problem, frequently encountering challenging sub-problems and undergoing considerable hardship and anguish, and eventually, at the darkest moment of all, calls on some insight that was not accessible to him at the beginning of the story and either succeeds in his efforts or fails in a dramatically interesting and revelatory way, thereby arriving at new knowledge of some significant kind._ Taken on those terms, there is indeed one story only: the story of a conflict -- perhaps with some external force, perhaps entirely within the soul of the protagonist -- that leads to a clear resolution and illumination. Why has that formulation been so enduring and, apparently, universal? Is it simply that readers everywhere _expect_ it, and so it has become a self-fulfilling requirement? _Why_ do they expect it? When did the need for such a formulation get built into human cultural expectations? A clue to our answer can be found in the history of Greek tragic drama. We know -- because ancient Greek writers like Aristotle have told us so -- that Greek drama evolved out of rituals in honor of the god Dion-ysus, who is most familiar to us as the god of wine, but who was to the Greeks a fertility god, the embodiment of all the forces of nature, manifest in the springtime rebirth of vegetation and the rising of the mating urge in animals. There's hardly anything about Dionysus in the Homeric poems, which date from the eighth or ninth century B.C., but that doesn't mean that the worship of Dionysus was unknown then, only that his cult was of little importance to the kings and heroes who are the protagonists of the_ Iliad_ and the_ Odyssey._ Dionysus was, so we think, the god of the poor and downtrodden, who in his name gave vent to their resentments from time to time in sacred revelry of a wildly turbulent kind. There are many different Dionysus myths -- each Greek city apparently had its own version of the story -- but all employ the same concept, a god who is slain and restored to life. Dionysus is the favorite child of Zeus; while still young he is killed and dismembered by jealous older gods, but at Zeus's command he is reassembled and revivified. The annual events held in honor of Dionysus reenacted his sufferings, death, and resurrection through the violent and bloody slaughter of bulls -- or even, in some places, of human victims. Eventually the leaders of Athens and other Greek city-states, fearing that these frenzied and unfettered rites in honor of Dionysus might overflow someday into revolution, co-opted them by establishing such public festivals as Athens' Great Dionysia, where poets, dancers, and choral groups performed sacred hymns retelling the legends of the god's life. All strata of the populace attended these festivals; they listened to the stirring recitations of the story of Dionysus and the orgies of his uninhibited followers, they experienced vicarious thrills instead of tearing up the town themselves, and they went home at the end of the evening in a benign mood, having been purged of potentially dangerous emotions by the impassioned singing and dancing of the performers. In time the recitations and choral hymns that made up the Great Dionysia underwent various mutations. One of the new forms that emerged was that of the tragic play. Earlier, a poet had improvised verses in praise of Dionysus before a chorus that would reply with a traditional song; now the tales of the god were dramatized by interchanges between two semichoruses, and then by two speakers engaging in dialogue, and then, a generation or two later, _three_ actors. Thus something very much like what we think of as a play evolved. The thematic range of the recitations widened, too, so that the dramas dealt not just with the death and rebirth of Dionysus but also with the ordeals of other great figures of Greek myth: Prometheus, Medea, Agamemnon, Theseus, Oedipus, Orestes, and many more. One essential aspect of the festival-plays remained consistent throughout these evolutions. The purpose of the performance was not simply the amusement of the audience but its emotional cleansing, what Aristotle called its _ca-tharsis,_ its purgation. As Aristotle explains in his _Poetics,_ our souls are clogged by "affections," which for the sake of our mental health must be allowed periodically to discharge themselves in some harmless way. So boys often play violent games in which they pretend to be pirates or gangsters or soldiers. Girls in traditional societies act out the roles of nurses or mothers and see their imperiled charges through dire illnesses and crises. In primitive cultures dances and festivals much like the early Dionysiac revels bring about the release of the pent-up repressions. And in the highly civilized Greece of Aristotle's time the same sort of catharsis was had from the plays of such masters as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that were performed at the annual festivals of Dionysus. In these plays the audience witnessed the tragic downfall of a great king like Agamemnon, the Greek commander-in-chief of the war against Troy, who overreached himself in a prideful way during the course of that campaign and was slain after his return from the war by his own wife. It looked on as the god Prometheus, determined to bring the knowledge of fire to mankind in defiance of the orders of Zeus, met with a terrible punishment but sustained his courage nevertheless. It watched the tribulations of Oedipus, King of Thebes, who by the casual decree of the indifferent gods found himself unknowingly murdering his father and marrying his own mother, and...
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