The Way the Future Blogs

Emperor penguins in Antarctica.

If you’ve seen me lately, you might have noticed a good-looking blonde hanging around. That’s my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who may soon be famous as the editor of what I think may be close to the best science-fiction anthology ever published, but is already locally well known as a woman who has gone swimming in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. It happened on two trips, several years apart, but I’ll tell you what I learned about the two remotest sections of our world now.
 

Betty Anne and me.

The Antarctic is said to be very cold, but when we were next to the Palmer Station on the Antarctic peninsula the air temperature was 37 degrees F. When we left Chicago, the temperature at O’Hare had been –4.

Antarctic ice comes in several pretty colors, It is blue or green if it has been at the bottom of some heavy layers of other ice and the air has been squeezed out of it, rarely reddish or yellowish if it has picked up a load of algae or something and — everybody’s favorite — the rest of the time most of it is the whitest white you ever saw.

The principal visible inhabitants of Antarctica are penguins. There are more than a dozen brands of penguins, but which brand any given penguin belongs to is of real concern only to another penguin. I can tell the difference, but only if they’re fairly close and I have the guidebook in my hand.

A pretty sight is to see several Buick- to bungalow-sized ice floes sailing by, each one with a penguin catching a free ride by sitting on its top.

Penguins live on land but have to return to the ocean if they want to catch anything to eat. This makes quite a problem for them because on the other side of one of those holes in the ice that they use to let them get into the water may well be one or more hungry seals, who are swimming around down there, waiting in the hope of catching a penguin for the same purpose. That is why you see the number of penguins parked next to a hole growing until, at last, one of them dives in and the rest follow pretty much all at once. If there is a single famished seal waiting there he’ll catch one of the penguins, all right, but the rest are home free.

Penguins don’t exactly swim. They sort of fly through the water and are very good at it.

Ice floes come in all shapes and sizes, some like castles with towers and minarets, some like craggy mountain ranges, some like huge, flat, square-cut pizza boxes, some like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Most of a berg or floe is under water with a lot of mass and jagged edges. Consequently every once in a great while one of them holes a ship, and then there’s big trouble. One small cruise ship did go down a few years ago, with I believe two people trapped inside.
 

While on the other end of the planet —

 
The Arctic Ocean contains no continent (though it is bounded by several) and very few islands (although one or two new ones are being discovered as the ice melts away).

When we sailed north toward the Pole, we hit lucky on the weather. It was fair and not very windy, thus giving us only gentle waves. As we approached the Arctic ice cap there was at first only a vague blur on the horizon. Then abruptly it transmuted itself to what looked a wide bay that we were entering. The closer we got, the more it began to look like — wow! — a tropical island that we were approaching, with a narrow beach of white sand, lacking only some palm trees and a central mountain to resemble Bora Bora or Moorea.

Actually, that whole scene was composed of nothing but size-sorted bits of floating ice. We were almost on top of it before I could see that the “beach” part was made up of a gazillion tiny ice bits, more or less marble-sized, next to a band composed of larger strawberry-to-baseball sized pieces, then one band after another, each band’s pieces getting bigger and bigger as you headed Poleward. Each separate piece of ice was jigging independently up and down in the gentle waves but they all kept to their spots within the group. (I developed a theory that there was a feeble northward current around there, perhaps a straggling fragment of the dissipating Gulf Stream, pushing on the surface waters to line the ice fragments up so neatly, but never found an oceanographer to tell me how all wet I probably was.)

Then the captain took us right into the ice, all the thousands of tons of our cruise ship, until we were more than a quarter mile from open water and getting a bit close to some biggish ice floes. The captain stopped the ship so we could all take pictures. (And, gee, I wish I had.) And then he carefully backed us out of the ice, staying within the liquid-water lane we had opened on the way in.

 
There aren’t any penguins in the Arctic. What they do have there is the local knock-off of the same general design, the auk, only they don’t have many of them anymore because 19th-century sailors found them quite tasty. We didn’t see any, anyway. Other Arctic creatures we didn’t see include polar bears, Arctic foxes and various aquatic and semi-aquatic forms.

We did see some whales.

 
Oh, and listen, those waters in the Arctic and Antarctic that I said Betty Anne had gone swimming in. Did I mention that they were the swimming pools located on the upper decks of our cruise liners?

The viewable path of the next total solar eclipse, predicted for 11 July 2010.

Remember Omni? It was a wonderful, slick-paper magazine published and edited by Bob Guccione and his gorgeous wife, Kathy Keeton, and I just this minute realized that one of the reasons I liked it so much was that its basic editorial policy was pretty much identical with that of this blog: Its primary interests were science fiction and science, with excursions into anything else that attracted the attention of its editor — in Omni’s case Guccione, in this blog’s case me. We knew that we had interests in common, too, and that’s why I did a lot of writing for Bob’s magazine throughout its all-too-short history.

At the same time, I’ve been looking over some pieces I wrote on various subjects for various periodicals long ago, and wondering how many of you guys would like to see some of them reprinted here. So let’s find out. And to do that, here’s the eclipse of ’91 report, just as Omni published it nearly twenty years ago.

 
7:27 a.m., July 7, 1991. We’re ninety-six hours from the eclipse, but some of the dedicated eclipse fans are already out on the starboard railings of the S.S. Independence, squinting anxiously at the sun. It’s good and bright, right this minute. That’s pretty much the way you’d expect the sun to be here in these sunny Hawaiian waters, and the good news is that if the moon were going to slide in front of it today instead of four days from now you’d surely say that it was being eclipsed, all right. The bad news is that you wouldn’t be able to make out some of the fainter outer corona because there’s a thin, high fan of cirrus that starts at the horizon and spreads out over the eastern sky. It won’t keep you from getting a sunburn, but it’s just enough to fuzz out the fainter patches of coronal light. Maybe our luck will be better on July 11.

Maybe it won’t, too. Pacific skies are cloudy. I’ve flown over this ocean twice in the last few weeks, fourteen and a half hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and there was never a minute when I could look out my window and see no clouds in the sky at all. This morning there are fluffy little clumps of cumulus all over the eastern horizon. Twenty minutes later, while we’re eating our breakfast papaya and omelets on the fantail, a couple of clumps slide right over the sun, and that’s the kind of thing that can really spoil an eclipse for you.

Of course, on the Independence we’ll be a moving target. We should be able to dodge a few cumulus shadows. We’d better do it, too. There are 800 passengers who have booked passage on the Independence for the sole and simple reason that they want to see the sun go out. If they don’t see it with their own eyes some of them are going to be thirsting for blood.

Continue reading ‘Cruising While the Sun Goes Out’ »

    Frank Herbert, 1978.
 

As promised, we made Hawai’i our destination on our usual get-somewhere-out-of-the-cold trip one winter. Frank and Beverly Herbert had built themselves a house in the district of Hana, on the island of Maui, an area renowned for its beauty even in the state where there is very little that isn’t. Betty Anne and I had talked about taking a look at Hana before, but never as a serious plan, because Hana wasn’t easy to get to. You had to drive for a long time on a bad road through tropical near jungle to get there and that didn’t sound like much fun. But now a brand-new puddle-jumper airline that linked Hana to the capital of the island had just become available. It required no use of that unlovable road, and anyway, that’s where the Herberts were.

So we booked the flight and a hotel. Hana was indeed a particularly interesting area to see, home to a few movie stars and once a beloved retreat for, among others, Charles Lindbergh. When Lindy’s flying days were over, he spent the end of his life in Hana, and his family elected to bury him here. The area also has a waterfall nearly a hundred feet high and all sorts of beautiful growing things. Betty Anne saw most of them with Bev as a guide, while I mostly stayed near the hotel pool or my typewriter.

Of course, we were staying in the hotel, and not with the Herberts. We had known in advance that that wasn’t possible. Their multi-roomed house, though it had six baths, had only one bedroom, and that was their own. (They didn’t like the idea of houseguests.) At dinner, Frank conceded that they were beginning to believe that it might be nice to be able to put friends up now and then, after all, as long as they weren’t in the same house as the Herberts themselves. They were thinking that maybe, someday, they would put up a little guest house down the hill for that purpose

I don’t think that ever happened. Beverly’s health worsened and not long afterward she died. She and Frank had been married for nearly forty years.

 
In 1985, Betty Anne and I decided to take in the Worldcon in Australia, a continent I had never set foot on. We enjoyed it a lot, especially the sightseeing, although just as we were getting ready to leave our home, one of Ted Turner’s producers invited me to write a script for a new Turner project. It was an attractive prospect, but it meant I would have to write a treatment for the script while we traveled, and courier it back to America from somewhere along the way. But that seemed doable, and by the time we got to the con, we had had several really long flights. That sort of thing is good for my writing. I did some of my best work on airplanes, with my weird but lightweight and almost soundless Brother typewriter on my tray table.

At the con, we were happy to find that Frank had turned up there before us, in fact now equipped with a good-looking, brand-new wife to show off. Her name was Theresa, and they too had been exploring Australia as a sort of honeymoon. Frank was full of stories about the shooting of Dune, mostly in Mexico, and the two of them seemed about as happy as newlyweds are generally supposed to be. Well, with one exception. Somewhere along the trip, Frank said, he had picked up a touch of food poisoning, and he was going to have to watch his diet for a while.

That was a self-diagnosis and, sadly, it was wrong.

The next time I saw Frank was about a year later. I was at O’Hare Airport, waiting to board my flight to Seattle, where I was to take part in a brainstorming session about future small arms for the U.S. military when I heard my name called. It was Frank. He looked leaner and a bit tireder than when I’d last seen him, but his voice was strong.

That pain in the gut in Australia, he told me, hadn’t been food poisoning. It had been pancreatic cancer.

I knew what that meant. Nearly always, it meant dying quite soon. I must have looked as though that was what I was thinking, because Frank was shaking his head.

“I know that’s got a bad prognosis,” he said, “but the University of Wisconsin medical school has some new ideas about treatment, and that’s where I’ve been.”

The new ideas, he said, were pretty strenuous. Each period of therapy had to be followed by a stretch of recovery time at home. He had completed two therapy sessions and was on his way home to rest up for the third.

“Sounds like hard work,” I offered.

“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m going to beat this thing!”

I don’t know what else we talked about. Not much, I imagine, because they started boarding the flight. Our seats were not near each other. I thought of asking to change mine so I could have his company for a few more hours, but Frank already had one of his sons and one or two other men traveling with him … and, too, I didn’t want to risk tiring him out. When we reached Seattle, I looked around for him to say goodbye, but he was gone.

A few weeks later, I learned that he had died in Madison after undergoing cancer surgery.

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man

(Actually, it’s meant to be sung as a round, but I’m not real sure it can be.)

From the blog team:

By popular request, here is the table of contents for Gateways, an anthology of original stories inspired by Frederik Pohl, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, and due out this summer from Tor:

• Elizabeth Anne Hull, Introduction
• David Brin, “Shoresteading”
• Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, “Von Neumann’s Bug”
• Isaac Asimov, Appreciation
• Joe Haldeman, “Sleeping Dogs”
• Larry Niven, “Gates (Variations)”
• Gardner Dozois, Appreciation
• James Gunn, “Tales from the Spaceship Geoffrey”
• Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre, “Shadows of the Lost”
• Connie Willis, Appreciation
• Vernor Vinge, “A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memories of Star Captain Y.T. Lee”
• Greg Bear, “Warm Sea”
• Robert J. Sawyer, Appreciation
• Frank M. Robinson, “The Errand Boy”
• Gene Wolfe, “King Rat”
• Robert Silverberg, Appreciation
• Harry Harrison, “The Stainless Steel Rat and the Pernicious Porcuswine”
• Jody Lynn Nye, “Virtually, A Cat”
• David Marusek, Appreciation
• Brian W. Aldiss, “The First-Born”
• Ben Bova, “Scheherezade and the Storytellers”
• Joan Slonczewski, Appreciation
• Sheri S. Tepper, “The Flight of the Denartesestel Radichan”
• Neil Gaiman, “The [Backspace] Merchants”
• Emily Pohl-Weary, Appreciation
• Mike Resnick, “On Safari”
• Cory Doctorow, “Chicken Little”
• James Frenkel, Afterword

In the 1930s, few of us had any excess of spending money. What money we had was scarce and hard-won. Radio was our great professional source of comedy, with those two titans Jack Benny and Fred Allen dominating the airways. Mostly, though, we generated our own comedy and a favorite form of it was the shaggy dog story, as practiced in the haunts of New York City’s café society.

The professionals worked in nightclubs which were sometimes dingy rooms with a tiny stage, seats for perhaps 100 to 300 persons, and of course, a bar. The people performing there were professionals. We weren’t. We didn’t have furnishings, electronics, or stocked bars, we had very little but our physical selves. Fortunately, we needed nothing more.

We Futurians would collect on the front stoop at the apartment house at 2574 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. It housed the four rooms we called the Ivory Tower. After a period of talking, joking, gossiping, singing, making noise, we would start to move.

Cyril Kornbluth was likely to take part in one of these performances, Doc Lowndes almost as much so. Chet Cohen, Jack Gillespie and Damon Knight — or, as he preferentially wrote it in those days, damon knight — might be frequent performers, so might any Futurian or, for that matter, any other fan temporarily hanging out with us.

So when there were four or five of us gathered, we were likely to start the move, the narrator continuing to tell the story, and, when he came to the end, one of the others beginning a different one.

Nearly all the Futurian shaggy dog stories are lost to 21st-century performance. That’s not entirely a bad thing. The whole point of a shaggy dog story was that it needn’t have a point. When Futurians told their stories in the presence of ordinary fans, the expressions on the faces of the audience was often a sort of stupefied disbelief. A shaggy dog story was meant to be dragged out as long as possible.

I cannot write down for you the text of a classic Futurian shaggy dog story. It’s not just that my right hand would wither and fall away. You wouldn’t read it, either.

I will instead give you a short synopsis of the classic example of the Futurian shaggy dog story, which gave its name to the whole genre, and also “The Story of the Brass Cannon,” which is about the only story in the catalogue that has actually sometimes caused listeners to laugh right out loud.

The Shaggy Dog Story

A man who owns a shaggy dog has let it run away. He advertises in the all the local newspapers for the return of his dog. He says, “My dog has run away and I want him back. He is a shaggy dog and I will pay a reward for his return.

The next day he appears at the home of someone who says he has found the dog but when the dog appears at the door of the home, the man says, “Oh, not so damn shaggy.”

Continue reading ‘What Made the Futurians Laugh: The Shaggy Dog Story’ »

I found some notes about Sir Arthur C. Clarke that I had filed somewhere and didn’t have handy at the time of his unexpected death, so they got left out of the things I wrote about him at the time. So here they are:

* * *

Arthur C. Clarke
 

Arthur wasn’t a religious man in any usual sense — in the instructions he left for his own funeral, he was emphatic that there be no religious aspects to the services. He thought — as is described in The Last Theorem — that the most valuable function of a church was to provide a Sunday school for you to send your children to, on the principle that exposing them to religion in childhood, like inoculating them against polio, would prevent serious religiosity later on.

He wasn’t much of a believer in psionics or any of the other New Age fads of the 20th century, either; he was a hard-headed skeptic who didn’t believe in anything that didn’t provide good evidence of its reality. But bear in mind his famous declaration that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The obvious corollary to that is that some kinds of magic could perhaps represent a previously unknown technology.

You can see traces of that thought in some of the best Clarkes, like Childhood’s End or the short story “The Nine Billion Names of God.” And he did confess to me once, over a meal at the restaurant next to the old Hotel Chelsea, that he was kind of wondering if it was possible that Uri Geller, the notorious psychic spoon-bender of the 1960s, might really have some new kind of power.

I’m proud to say that I was the one who rescued Arthur C. Clarke from that particular flimflam. Then and there, in the restaurant that evening, I did the Geller spoon-bending trick before his very eyes.

The Amazing Randi
 

I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out for myself, but I was lucky in my choice of neighbors. One of them was my good friend, the former stage magician The Amazing Randi, who had taught me how to do it.

Unfortunately, I can’t teach it to any of you, because I am bound by the stage magician’s creed not to reveal any other magician’s secret tricks. Ah, but you say, how can that be, Fred, since you aren’t a stage magician yourself? Simple, I say. Randi gave me honorary magician status. He couldn’t really avoid that, since one of his best effects was levitating a beautiful girl. The beautiful girl was usually one of my beautiful daughters, Randi not having any of his own, and the muscle-supplying levitator was my muscular son, so I was going to find out his secrets anyway.

Also, Johnny Carson had just had a magician on his show who was able to order his trained dog to go to any specific person in the audience and take from his or her lap any one specific item — pair of gloves, scarf, handbag, whatever — and bring it up to him on stage. Randi couldn’t figure that one out, but I could: I had read an animal psychologist’s piece in, I think, Nature about how to train animals or pre-verbal children to do something like it, and I had clipped the article. I explained it to Randi, so he owed me.

By the way, if any of you happen to pass near the Hotel Chelsea — West 23rd Street near Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, NYC — take a look at the plaques around the entrance. As I remember they have several, including one for Brendan Behan, the Irish author of Borstal Boy, who stayed there when in New York and wrote some of his works there. Well. Arthur did much the same thing and, I believe, rather expected much the same treatment. What I don’t know is whether he got it.

 
Related post:

Sir Arthur and I

I’ve been nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo
(and I couldn’t be more pleased!)

Of course being nominated for a Hugo isn’t quite the same as winning one. This is a lesson I have been taught several times. All the same, it’s a nice feeling, and I appreciate it.

The blog team was absolutely right, too, in urging you to join the Worldcon, give them the $50 and get the sampler of Hugo nominees. It comes in electronic form instead of good old ink on paper, which I personally much prefer, but the price is right. All those great novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories would be many times more expensive if you paid retail, and you get samplings of all the other awardable categories, too.

* * *

As long as we’re talking I’ve got a couple of other things I meant to talk to you about. One is a really neat book that’s coming out next month from Tor. Its title is Gateways — note the plural s — it’s edited by my favorite anthology editor ever (that is, the one I’ve been married to for the last quarter-century, Elizabeth Anne Hull) and it came about when Betty Anne told our Tor editor, Jim Frenkel, that she would like to put together a festschrift anthology for my then upcoming 90th birthday, composed of new stories written by writers on whose careers I had had some significant effect, as editor, agent, collaborator or whatever.

When she made a list, Jim whistled and said, “That’s a list of most of the top writers in the field.” Not all of the writers were able to produce stories for her but most did, and it is my opinion that some of these are going to be showing up on awards voting this time next year.

She didn’t make the deadline for my birthday, though. I kept getting sick, and her efforts would be devoted to keeping me alive for a while. And then Betty herself fell in a bank parking lot and cracked a lumbar vertebra, resulting in pain, surgery and a lot of lost time. But now it will be in the stores before you know it, and I think you’ll like it.

* * *

Speaking of the ills the flesh is heir to—

A couple weeks ago, I had to get an adjustment in one of the contrivances that keep me more or less normal. We had just parked at the hospital where they do most of my repair work when another car pulled up beside us, and out of it came our production staff, comprising Leah A. Zeldes, our blogmeister, and her husband, Dick Smith, who makes sure we have enough bandwidth and keeps our computers functioning much of the time. (They are, by the way, pretty good fanzine Hugo candidates themselves, having been nominated for the award in three separate years for their handsome zine STET.)

I was out of there and back home in a couple of hours. Leah, not so much. She had a couple of days of being observed while the doctors figured out what she needed, then a spot of surgery, then bed rest for recuperation, and then, just to keep the doctors on their toes, a bit of pneumonia to round things off.

Now she’s back home recovering. But she still managed to get up a couple of posts from her hospital bed.