Analog SFF, March 2012 (29 page)

"Yes, sir. Operation Iraqi Freedom."

To his credit, the president's gaze didn't waver. “But you're home now,” Jerrison said in a tone that Kadeem was sure was meant to elicit gratitude.

Kadeem took a deep breath, then: “Not exactly, sir. My home is in Los Angeles. But I'm being treated here."

Jerrison frowned, perplexed. “I'm sorry. I didn't know you were injured."

And perhaps he
had
already recalled what Kadeem was about to tell him—but had simply forgotten, what with the mountain of other things he had to think about. Kadeem sighed slightly. If only everything could be so easily forgotten. “I've got PTSD."

The president nodded. “Ah, yes."

"Professor Singh's been helping me. Or he was, until we got interrupted; he's still got a lot of work to do."

"You're in good hands, I'm sure,” said Jerrison. “We always try to look after our boys in uniform."

The comment seemed sincere, and although Kadeem indeed hadn't voted for Jerrison—he hadn't voted for
anyone
—he again had second thoughts about what he intended to do. No one should have to go through this.

But he had; Kadeem had. Hundreds of times now. And if the pleas of service moms hadn't succeeded, if the sight of flag-covered coffins hadn't done it, if the bleak news reports out of Baghdad hadn't been enough, maybe, just maybe,
this
would be.

"Thank you, sir,” Kadeem said. The president was hooked up to a vital-signs monitor like the one Kadeem had been connected to before; it was showing seventy-two heartbeats per minute. Kadeem imagined his own pulse rate was much higher. The president of the United States! Kalil and Lamarr would never believe this. But then Kalil and Lamarr had stayed in South Central; they probably didn't really believe—or, at least, didn't fully appreciate—the stories Kadeem had brought back from Iraq.

But the president could be made to believe.

To appreciate.

To
feel.

"Mr. President, I have to say it's a pleasure to meet you, sir. My mamma, sir, she's not going to believe this."

The president gestured toward the photographer, who quickly snapped three more shots. “We'll send her pictures, of course.” And then the president's eyebrows went up. “Your mamma—she's a nice lady, isn't she?"

"She's the best, sir."

He nodded. “This is so strange. Tanisha, isn't it? I see you love her very much."

"I do, sir. She done her best by me."

"I'm sure, I'm sure. And—oh!—it's her birthday next week, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Won't you give her my regards?"

Kadeem nodded. “She'd be thrilled, sir.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Agent Dawson looking at her watch. He doubtless didn't have much time left, and—

And even the mere thought of what he was going to do set his stomach to churning, and he could feel perspiration breaking out on his brow.

"Well,” Kadeem said, “I'm sure you've got matters of state"—a phrase he never thought he'd utter in his whole life—"to attend to.” He stood up, and the chair's four legs made a scraping sound against the tiled floor as he pushed it back a bit. He took a deep breath and swallowed, trying to calm himself, then, finally, he blurted it out: “But I hope you'll think about babies after I leave, sir."

The president looked at him, his eyebrows pulled together. “Babies?"

"Yes, sir. Crying babies.” Kadeem felt his own pulse racing and he reached out to steady himself by holding onto the angled part of the president's bed, which caused Agent Dawson to surge forward. “Crying babies,” Kadeem repeated, “and the smell of smashed concrete."

The president made a sharp intake of breath, and although the volume on his vital-signs monitor was turned almost all the way down, Kadeem could hear the heartbeat pings accelerating.

It happened with astonishing quickness: footfalls outside the door, then a woman came in—black, elegant—ah, one of Sue's memories: it was Alyssa Snow, Jerrison's private physician. “Mr. President, are you okay?” she asked.

All the eyes—the photographer's, agent Dawson's, Kadeem's, the nurse's, and Dr. Snow's—were on Seth Jerrison. There were whites visible all around his irises, as if he were seeing something horrific.

And he
was.
Kadeem had no doubt. Yes, just because they were linked didn't mean their recollections were in synch, but the flashback trigger would have had the same effect on the president as it was having on him. They might be experiencing different parts of it just now—Kadeem was seeing the half-track rolling over a corpse; the president might be seeing another wall shattering under mortar fire. But they were both
there,
Kadeem for the thousandth time, and Seth Jerrison for the very first.

"Mr. President?” asked Dr. Snow, desperately. “Are you okay, sir?"

The president was shaking his head slowly left and right, a small arc of what looked liked disbelief, and his mouth had dropped open. Dr. Snow was now standing on the opposite side of the bed from Kadeem and using two fingers to check the president's pulse.

Kadeem staggered backward and ended up leaning against the wall for support.

Fire.

Smoke.

Screams.

He could barely see the real world, the hospital room, the president, but he turned his head and tried to make out the great man's expression. His face showed not shock and awe, but shock and horror. The doctor was moving now to wipe the president's brow.

Explosions.

Babies crying.

Gunfire.

"Mr. President?” Snow said. “Sir, for God's sake!"

Agent Dawson moved in, too, and also said, “Mr. President?"

Kadeem knew, of course, that neither of them noticed, or, if they
did
notice, that neither of them cared that he was in distress, too. That was normal here in Washington, the way it had been not just since the start of this war, but going right back to Korea.

But maybe, just maybe, that would change now. He tried to shunt aside his own fear so that he could see Jerrison's face contort, see him recoil from some invisible blow or explosion, see him, the president of the United States, be the first person holding that office in decades to walk in a soldier's shoes, share a soldier's burden, and feel a soldier's terror at the things those back home had ordered soldiers to do.

To be continued. . . .

Copyright © 2011 by Robert J. Sawyer

[Back to Table of Contents]

Within the cosmos of science fiction, there is an alternate universe—one whose biggest names include the likes of Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Mary Doria Russell, and Kurt Vonnegut. More traditional SF names like Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, and Ursula K. LeGuin are part of this universe—but Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein are not. It is a universe in which pulp magazines might as well not have existed, and the Campbell revolution is largely irrelevant.

In this parallel universe, you won't catch readers perusing the pages of
Analog
or
Asimov's
(although they might occasionally glance at an issue of
Fantasy and Science Fiction),
and they usually walk right by the SF/fantasy section of their local bookstore. Yet here, SF is thriving; sales are good and much exciting work is being published.

I'm speaking, of course, about the universe of Literary Science Fiction.

LitSF (if I may be a bit familiar) traces its roots back to the same place as our familiar, non-Lit variety: at least to Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, and from there through Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. But whereas regular SF evolved in the direction of Gernsback and the pulp magazines of the 1920s, LitSF took a different path, a path that led through Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, B.F. Skinner, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis. Ray Bradbury somehow managed to straddle the two paths.

LitSF had its next milestone when Michael Moorcock launched the so-called “New Wave” in the pages of
New Worlds
magazine in 1964. Moorcock's writers—the likes of Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Charles Platt, John Sladek, and Norman Spinrad—were more consciously literary than previous writers. As Robert Silverberg said in
Musings and Meditations
, their work “. . . had overtones of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, not Robert Heinlein or A. E. van Vogt."

In the States, editors such as Terry Carr, Avram Davidson, Damon Knight, Judith Merrill, and Frederik Pohl provided both markets and publicity for LitSF “New Wave” authors. Some of these authors are considered minor names in traditional
SF,
but well-known to LitSF readers—authors like David R. Bunch, Tom Disch, Carol Emshwiller, R. A. Lafferty, and Joanna Russ. Others managed to keep a foot in both universes, and are household names no matter what kind of SF one reads: John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Philip José Farmer, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock himself.

As time went on, the “New Wave” phenomenon faded. To an extent, the evolution of LitSF and traditional SF converged for a time. New writers of the period were respected by readers in both universes—writers like Gardner Dozois, Ursula K. LeGuin, Barry Malzberg, James Tiptree, Jr., John Varley, and Gene Wolfe.

To this day there are still writers who appeal to both universes: Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Dan Simmons, Bruce Sterling, Sheri S. Tepper, and Connie Willis are among them. But a funny thing happened in the 1980s: the two universes began to separate once again.

Doris Lessing, later a Nobel laureate in literature, was a major light in the literary world when she embarked on a series of novels of what she called “space fiction.” Suddenly, writers of LitSF didn't have to come up through the ranks of traditional SF (as did, say, Kurt Vonnegut, who spent most of his life denying that he was an SF writer).

With the doors opened, other big names in literature turned to work that could only be described as science fiction. Marge Piercy used time travel in
Woman on the Edge of Time
. Margaret Atwood gave us a dystopian future in
The Handmaid's Tale
. Cormac McCarthy's much-imitated
The Road
was a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Audrey Niffenegger revisited time travel in
The Time Traveler's Wife
. Michael Chabon (
The Yiddish Policeman's Union
) and even Philip Roth (
The Plot Against America
) joined in with alternate history stories.

To the average
Analog
reader, modern LitSF seems rather lightweight, not “real” science fiction at all. But we should be charitable to our literary sibling. Despite the nasty things their critics occasionally say about traditional SF (Brian Aldiss calls it “power-fantasy and escapism,” and you should hear him badmouth Asimov's work), LitSF readers are still reading science fiction; it's just a different
kind
of science fiction. There's still considerable cross-pollination between our universes; they learn from us and we learn from them. And to judge from their various apologias, the writers get a lot of grief from their literary cronies. It behooves us to be generous and welcome them to the fold.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

Margaret Atwood

Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95 (hardcover)

Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-385-53396-6

Genre: Nonfiction

Which brings us to Margaret Atwood. She has firmly established her credentials as a writer of LitSF; besides
The Handmaid's Tale
, she featured an SF story within her novel
The Blind Assassin
, and jumped on the postapocalyptic bandwagon with
Oryx and Crake
and
The Year of the Flood
. Despite her insistence that she writes “speculative fiction” instead of “science fiction,” here she has written “an exploration of [her] own lifelong relationship” with SF.

There are three major sections. First, she spends a few somewhat autobiographical chapters musing about what SF has meant to her and to society. Next, in the real meat of the book, she discusses some classic works of LitSF. Finally, she gives five short excerpts of her own published work, either SF or reflections on SF.

In the center section, Atwood offers some insightful thoughts about the works of Marge Piercy, H. Rider Haggard, Ursula K. LeGuin, Bill McKibben, George Orwell, H. G. Wells, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. (I know . . . what's Haggard doing there? You'll find out.)

Atwood's book may bring a larger awareness of LitSF to her legions of readers; but why should
Analog
readers care? Well, she's a good writer and a profound thinker; many of the things she says are equally applicable to traditional SF. Do you want to shell out twenty-five bucks for a hardcover? Probably not. Get the e-book, or wait for the paperback.

The Black Lung Captain

Chris Wooding

Spectra, 536 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-345-52250-4

Series: Retribution Falls 2

Genre: Steampunk

Steampunk already borders on LitSF; any day now I expect Michael Chabon or Tom Wolfe to discover the genre. Before that happens and steampunk gets all respectable, Chris Wooding is more than good enough.

In
Retribution Falls,
Wooding introduced readers to the pirate airship
Ketty Jay
and her scurvy crew. The setting is a vaguely late Victorian world with technology ranging from limited electricity to gaslights to machine guns to huge airships held aloft by a substance called aerium. All this technology is ultimately based on a kind of magic, possibly involving captive demons—but is dealt with as engineering rather than conjuring.

Darian Frey, Captain of the
Ketty Jay
, is a swashbuckling rascal, not above skirting the law when necessary. Narrator Jez, the ship's tough-as-nails navigator, has a deliciously checkered past. The complement also includes a crusty engineer, a drunken doctor, and two fighter pilots. In
Retribution Falls
, Captain Frey was framed for a political murder; he and his crew went on the run, and finally wound up in the legendary pirate's hideout, Retribution Falls.