June 2003
Vol. XCVII vol 6
short stories
VIEW FROM A HEIGHT, Joan D. Vinge……..12
STARSWARMER, Gregory Benford……..50
THE GREAT GRAY DOLPHIN, Ben Schumacher…….. 66
science fact
WHAT SHAPE IS A CATASTROPHE?, Ian Stewart…….. 29
novelettes
BACKSTAGE LENSMAN, Randall Garrett……..84
EMPTY BARRELS, Steven E. McDonald……..106
CARRUTHERS' LAST STAND, Dan Henderson……..142
reader's departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE …….. 5
THE ANALOG CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS……..105
CROSSWORD SOLUTION……..140
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Spider Robinson …….. 168
BIOLOG …….. 175
BRASS TACKS ……..176
EDITORIAL
trust the force
We seldom run reviews or articles about science fiction films, because most SF "flicks" have very little that's new or even interesting to say to Analog's readers. But there is now such a science fiction boom coming out of Hollywood that the phenomenon cannot be ignored.
And it is literally a boom. The two films that have caused the most excitement—"Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"—depend very heavily on their sound tracks for their powerful effect on audiences. It would be an interesting experiment, in fact, to have a fresh audience view these two films for the first time with the sound tracks turned off, to see what their reaction might be. Neither film really needs its dialogue to enlighten the viewers. In "Close Encounters" the dialogue is fragmentary and nonessential. In "Star Wars" it is inane, although occasionally informative.
The boom is an economic phenomenon, as well. Twentieth-Century Fox's stock zoomed on Wall Street when "Star Wars" unexpectedly started breaking all previous records for box-office receipts. Columbia's stock actually dropped several points when the sneak preview of "Close Encounters" was panned. But once the film premiered in New York and long lines of avid ticket buyers besieged the theater, Columbia became a growth stock, too.
Science fiction films have had a curious history. They began with the tongue-in-cheek silent movies of George Melies, a stage magician turned moviemaker who invented a hatful of special effects to go with his pioneering work, around the turn of the century. Then a few of the giants of the industry turned their hands to films of science fictional content, including Fritz Lang, whose "Metropolis" is still a mainstay of any SF film curriculum.
But while Melies gleefully melded Jules Verne ideas with Folies-Bergeres chorus girls and trick camera work that was usually intended to be humorous, Lang leaned more toward Gothic dourness and heavily moralistic themes. "Metropolis" has splendid special effects, but to a modern audience it is a dull, preachy film.
By the thirties, this dichotomy was quite apparent. Films that fell into the science fiction category were either moralistic bores, such as "Things to Come" (based on H. G. Wells's writing), or special-effect-happy adventure tales, like "Transatlantic Tunnel," where the jut-jawed hero drills through underwater volcanoes to link London with New York.
The money people who control the film industry quickly realized that adventure, exotic backgrounds, and pyrotechnical special effects (plus short skirts on the women) made more lucrative movies than idea-rich morality plays. Very rarely since then have innovative special effects been combined with truly strong stories, as was done in the now-classic "2001: A Space Odyssey," by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Many things have been written about that film, but it accomplished something that few SF movies have even tried to do: it forced the audience to think.
Once in a great while, good science fiction has been produced in strong films that needed little or no special effects gimmickry.
"The Man in the White Suit," starring Alec Guiness, accomplished marvels of insight into the dilemma of the scientist who must do his research despite all the obstacles that society throws in his path. Its only real "effect" was that marvelous "gloop-gloop"—ing chemical rig in which Guiness cooked up his indestructible fabric.
"Charlie" was a landmark film in several respects. It had no obvious special effects. It depended on an intelligent script from a prize-winning SF story. It is the only SF film in the history of the universe in which a performer, Cliff Robertson, won an Academy Award for acting.
Neither "Star Wars" nor "Close Encounters" features Oscar-level performances by anyone—except the special effects teams and the sound mixers. Both films jar the ears, and there are some social scientists who wonder out loud if we are not seeing (or rather, hearing) films that are made for the quadraphonic rock music generation—a generation that has permanently impaired its hearing by too much wattage in their amplifiers.
Be that as it may, what is the common thread that ties these films together and makes them so popular? It's certainly not the same qualities that motivate you to read this magazine. The stories in both films are negligible. There is no character development among the matchstick figures that inhabit either film. Most of the classic qualities of high drama are not only missing, they are totally ignored by filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
But they hit on something.
We used to call it "a sense of wonder." Both films show millions of viewers who have seldom (if ever) read a science fiction story that there are wondrous worlds to be seen, to be experienced, worlds and ideas beyond our everyday lives. "Star Wars" allows the audience to turn off its brain completely and spend a couple of hours in a hypnotic funk as spaceships roar, zapguns zap, robots whistle and shriek, people run, jump and otherwise cavort madly against a backdrop of flashing, blinking, exploding thingamabobs. Everyone can revert to infantile fantasy. It's like watching your very first Christmas tree and the toy train chugging around its base.
In "Close Encounters" there's an attempt to say something different, but hardly deeper. The real theme of the film is expressed in a song borrowed from Disney, "When You Wish Upon a Star." Mr. Average American can cope with a visitation from another world better than the combined powers of government and science. It's the kind of science fiction that Frank Capra would have loved.
Behind all the special effects and the derring-do, these two films—like most SF movies—exhibit a fundamental set of beliefs that stem not from the science fiction material per se, but from the minds of the movie people who produced the films. Let me illustrate this with a personal reminiscence.
Several years ago, Harlan Ellison and I were working (or trying to) with a team of movie/TV people Out There in Hollywood. They had taken a fancy to our co-authored story, "Brillo," which had been published in Analog in August 1970. The basic concept behind "Brillo" was simple, and not all that extraordinary: people insist that they want swift, impartial, efficient law enforcement from their police force—except when that swift, impartial, efficient police force catches them in a misdemeanor. Then they want lenient, forgiving, winking cops who'll let them off the hook with a good-natured warning.
So we wrote about a two-person team of police officers: one a very human, somewhat fallible man; the other a machine, a robot, that was programmed to always go "by the book."
The Hollywood people loved the idea, but what they saw in it was a Laurel-and-Hardy team with transistors instead of custard pies. They insisted that in each story, the human cop must always be shown to be superior to the robot. No matter that the robot was indestructible, untiring, incorruptible, and had instantaneous access to every criminal file in the nation. The human police officer had to produce the emotional insight that would solve the case. Every time.
In other words, they took a story that examined the interfaces between man and machine—social, economic, political, emotional interfaces—and reduced it to a Mutt and Jeff routine where no matter how smart the machine was, the human always came out ahead.
Even in as redoubtable a TV series as "Star Trek," the same fearful thinking ruled every program. Let's face it, Spock was the best person on the dear old Enterprise, and was much more capable of commanding the ship and its crew than Captain Kirk. But Spock stood for unemotional intelligence, while Kirk represented emotional humanity. Emotion must always be shown superior to brains, Out There in Tinsel Land. (If they produced movies by listening to their hearts instead of their heads, we'd get fewer retreads and maybe some interesting creative works to enjoy!)
But this heart-over-head attitude is solidly in the mainstream tradition of American theater and motion pictures. The "natural" farmer always outsmarts the city slicker. Rural values always prevail over urban values. Pitchforks are benign; nuclear reactors evil. "There are some things, Dr. Frankenstein, that man was not meant to tamper with."
Think a moment of the dumbest science fiction movie ever made, "Silent Running." Bruce Dern was supposed to be an ecologist (whatever that is) who is taking the last surviving green plants of Earth to a safe haven in space. In the name of ecology—a "good" word in Hollywood—Dern murders his shipmates and even manages to get himself killed. All the time he's doing this, he's driving his spacecraft out toward the orbit of Saturn, and then he wonders why the plants are doing poorly, ten times farther from the Sun than their natural habitat! But he's on the side of the plants and therefore he's a "good guy."
"Close Encounters" does much the same thing. The truckdriving hero is the guy the aliens really want to deal with. The scientists are left standing in the desert with their mouths hanging open while Joe Everyman happily lifts off for the stars.
"Star Wars" goes even further. The acne-prone hero is told, during the crucial dogfight, to ignore his ship's computer and all the other advanced hardware around him and "trust the Force."
It's like "The Music Man's" Professor Harold Hill telling his suckers to "think Mozart" because he hasn't the faintest idea of how to teach them to play the band instruments he's sold them.
"Trust the Force." In the film, it all comes out happily. With the aid of "the Force" the hero plants his bomb exactly in the one place where the super-dooper bad guys are vulnerable, and all the problems are solved in a titanic explosion.
"Trust the Force." Wishing will make it true. What a wonderful philosophy for a slave! The Fuhrer has all the answers. The President knows more about this than we do, so he must be right. Just buy this product and your love life will be wonderful.
This is the very antithesis of the philosophy of science, and of science fiction, which states over and over again that human beings have the brains to understand the world, and to shape it to their own needs and desires. In science fiction, we are not passive patsies who wait for a voice to whisper in our ears before we know what to do. Science fiction insists on human rationality—and responsibility.
So, although "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" are delighting millions and making their backers rich, neither film can be regarded seriously as science fiction. In fact, they bear the same relationship to science fiction as the Nazi treatment of Poland bore to the Ten Commandments. •
THE EDITOR
VIEW
FROM A
HEIGHT
The race is not always to the swift, nor even to the persistent-it is sometimes won by the reluctant.
SATURDAY, THE 7TH
I want to know why those pages were missing.' How am I supposed to keep up with my research if they leave out pages—?
(Long sighing noise.)
Listen to yourself, Emmylou: You're listening to the sound of fear. It was an oversight, you know that. Nobody did it to you on purpose. Relax, you're getting Fortnight Fever. Tomorrow you'll get the pages, and an apology too, if Harvey Weems knows what's good for him.
But still, five whole pages; and the table of contents. How could you miss five pages? And the table of contents.
How do I know there hasn't been a coup? The Northwest's finally taken over completely, and they're censoring the media—And like the Man without a Country, everything they send me from now on is going to have holes cut in it.
In Science?
Or maybe Weems has decided to drive me insane—?
Oh, my God ... it would be a short trip. Look at me. I don't have any fingernails left.
("Arrwk. Hello, beautiful. Hello? Hello?")
("Ozymandias! Get out out of my hair, you devil." Laughter. "Polly want a cracker? Here . . . gently! That's a boy.")
It's beautiful when he flies. I never get tired of watching him, or looking at him, even after twenty years. Twenty years. . . . What did the psittacidae do, to win the right to wear a rainbow as their plumage? Although the way we've hunted them for it, you could say it was a mixed blessing. Like some other things.
Twenty years. How strange it sounds to hear those words, and know they're true. There are gray hairs when I look in the mirror. Wrinkles starting. And Weems is bald! Bald as an egg, and all squinty behind his spectacles. How did we get that way, without noticing it? Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.
Twelve days is a long time to wait for somebody to return your call. Twenty years is a long time gone. But 1 feel somehow as though it was only last week that I left home. I keep the circuits clean, going over them and over them, showing those mental home movies until I could almost step across, sometimes, into that other reality. But then I always look down, and there's that tremendous abyss full of space and time, and I realize I can't, again. You can't go home again.
Especially when you're almost one thousand astronomical units out in space. Almost there, the first rung of the ladder. Next Thursday is the day. Oh, that bottle of champagne that's been waiting for so long. Oh, the parallax view! I have the equal of the best astronomical equipment in all of near-Earth space at my command, and a view of the universe that no one has ever had before; and using them has made me the only astrophysicist ever to win a PhD in deep space. Talk about your field work.
Strange to think that if the Forward Observatory had massed less than its thousand-plus tons, I would have been replaced by a machine. But because the installation is so large, I in my infinite human flexibility, even with my infinite human appetite, become the most efficient legal tender. And the farther out I get the more important my own ability to judge what happens, and respond to it, becomes. The first—and maybe the last— manned interstellar probe, on a oneway journey into infinity . . . into a universe unobscured by our own system's gases and dust . . . equipped with eyes that see everything from gamma to ultra-long wavelengths, and ears that listen to the music of the spheres.
And Emmylou Stewart, the captive audience. Adrift on a star ... if you hold with the idea that all the bits of inert junk drifting through space, no matter how small, have star potential. Dark stars, with brilliance in their secret hearts, only kept back from letting it shine by Fate, which denied them the critical mass to reach their kindling point.
Speak of kindling: the laser beam just arrived to give me my daily boost, moving me a little faster, so I'll reach a little deeper into the universe. Blue sky at bedtime; I always was a night person. I'm sure they didn't design the solar sail to filter light like the sky . . . but I'm glad it happened to work out that way. Sky-blue was always my passion—the color, texture, fluid purity of it. This color isn't exactly right;
but it doesn't matter, because I can't remember how any more. This sky is a sun-catcher. A big blue parasol. But so was the original, from where I used to stand. The sky is a blue parasol . . . did anyone ever say that before, I wonder? If anyone knows, speak up—
Is anyone even listening. Will anyone ever be?
("Who cares, anyway? Come on, Ozzie—climb aboard. Let's drop down to the observation porch while I do my meditation, and try to remember what days were like.")
Weems, damn it, I want satisfaction!
SUNDAY, THE 8TH
That idiot. That intolerable moron—how could he do that to me? After all this time, wouldn't you think he'd know me better than that? To keep me waiting for twelve days, wondering and afraid: twelve days of all the possible stupid paranoias I could weave with my idle hands and mind, making myself miserable, asking for trouble—
And then giving it to me. God, he must be some kind of sadist! If I could only reach him, and hurt him the way I've hurt these past hours—
Except that I know the news wasn't his fault, and that he didn't mean to hurt me . . . and so I can't even ease my pain by projecting it onto him.
I don't know what I would have done if his image hadn't been six days stale when it got here. What would 1 have done, if he'd been in earshot when I was listening; what would I have said? Maybe no more than I did say.
What can you say, when you realize you've thrown your whole life away?
He sat there behind his faded blotter, twiddling his pen, picking up his souvenir moon rocks and laying them down—looking for all the world like a man with a time bomb in his desk drawer—and said, "Now don't worry, Emmylou. There's no problem . . ." Went on saying it, one way or another, for five minutes; until I was shouting, "What's wrong, damn it?"
"I thought you'd never even notice the few pages . . ." with that sidling smile of his. And while I'm muttering, "I may have been in solitary confinement for twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn't turned my brain to mush," he said,
"So maybe I'd better explain, first—" and the look on his face; oh, the look on his face. "There's been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on Earth, you . . . well, your body's immune responses could be , . . made normal . . ." And then he looked down, as though he could really see the look on my own face.
Made normal. Made normal. It's all I can hear. I was born with no natural immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No. No, no, no; that's all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit. . . . And now it's all changed. They could cure me. But I can't go home. I knew this could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that fact, and now it's too late to do anything about it.
Then why can't I forget that I could have been f-free. . . .
... I didn't answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There's nothing to say. Nothing at all.
I'm so tired.
MONDAY, THE 9TH
Couldn't sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind. . . . Finally t...
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