Love and Rockets
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
SFR—NOT JUST SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ANYMORE
SECOND SHIFT
GATEWAY NIGHT
THE WOMEN WHO ATE STONE SQUID
WANTED
AN OFFER YOU COULDNOT REFUSE
IN THE NIGHT
FISN’T FOR FREEFALL
IF THIS WERE A ROMANCE
THE BUSINESS OF LOVE
MUSIC IN TIME
DANCE OF LIFE
FOR OLD TIMES SAKE
DRINKING GAMES
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Gini Koch
Haunted . . .
Haunted, Loren thought. The man haunts me. She sat up in her bunk and turned on the console, then pulled up the entertainment files. Old stories, she liked; the oldest, ones that took place on Earth.
A planet she had never seen. A planet no one she knew had ever seen.
The Consort probably knew Earthlings among the senior Crew . . . “Stop it,” she whispered, and continued searching through her files.
Of course, everything was backward, just all wrong, here in the real world. Nothing like the stories. For it to be true romance, the Consort should have offered to carry the carryall today, not sent Loren on her way with a sharp word.
And she should be a stolen child of aristocracy—a princess in disguise, or hidden, through some astonishing mix-up of fortune. Awaiting discovery of her rightful place . . . and the hand of her price.
But no. Loren was already in her rightful place, and lucky to have it. Her workshift was not onerous, her teammates were decent and engaging, and Gramma Francesca was a benevolent work gang boss. She’d heard stories, knew how it could be.
So why did she feel as though her life was being wasted, one unendurable sliver at a time?
from “If This Were A Romance . . .”
by Shannon Page and Jay Lake
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Some of the darkest hints in all of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos relate to what will happen after the Old Ones return and take over the Earth. What happens when the Stars Are Right, the sunken city of R’lyeh rises from beneath the waves, and Cthulhu is unleashed upon the world for the last time? What happens when the other Old Ones, long since banished from our universe, break through and descend from the stars? What would the reign of Cthulhu be like, on a totally transformed planet where mankind is no longer the master? It won’t be simply the end of everything. It will be a time of new horrors and of utter strangeness. It will be a time when humans with a “taint” of unearthly blood in their ancestry may come into their own. It will be a time foreseen only by authors with the kind of finely honed imaginative visions as Ian Watson, Brian Stableford, Will Murray, Gregory Frost, Richard Lupoff, and the others of Cthulhu’s Reign.
Steampunk’d, edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg
Science fiction is the literature of what if, and steampunk takes the what if along a particular time stream. What if steam power was the prime force in the Victorian era? How would that era change, and how would it change the future? From a Franco-British race for Kentucky coal to one woman’s determination to let no man come between her and her inventions . . . from “machine whisperers” to a Thomas Edison experiment gone awry, here are fourteen original tales of what might have been had steam powered the world in an earlier age, from Michael A. Stackpole, Donald J., Bingle, Robert Vardeman, Paul Genesse, Jody Lynn Nye, and others.
Copyright © 2010 by Kerrie Hughes and Tekno Books
All Rights Reserved
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“SFR—Not Just Science Fiction Research Anymore,” copyright © 2010 by Lois McMaster Bujold
“Second Shift,” copyright © 2010 by Brenda Cooper
“Gateway Night,” copyright © 2010 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
“The Women Who Ate Stone Squid,” copyright © 2010 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
“Wanted,” copyright © 2010 by Anita Ensal
“An Offer You Couldn’t Refuse,” copyright © 2010 by Sylvia Kelso and Lillian Stewart Carl
“In The Night,” copyright © 2010 by Steven H Silver
“F Isn’t For Freefall,” copyright © 2010 by Donald J. Bingle
“If This Were A Romance,” copyright © 2010 by Shannon Page and Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
“The Business of Love,” copyright © 2010 by Kelly Swails
“Music In Time,” copyright © 2010 by Dean Wesley Smith
“Dance of Life,” copyright © 2010 by Jody Lynn Nye
“Old Times’ Sake,” copyright © 2010 by Tim Waggoner
“Drinking Games,” copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
SFR—NOT JUST SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ANYMORE
Lois McMaster Bujold
Romance and science fiction as literary genres have both traditionally been hard to define. One senior practitioner of the SF form finally and famously defaulted to, “Science fiction is what I mean when I point to it.” Romance, the older term, has passed through multiple meanings over the centuries, many of which still linger in formal academic discourse. But if one stands in a bookstore today and points to each, one will definitely find oneself pointing in two different directions, at two different populations of books and browsers.
Yet in science, it’s a truism that boundary conditions are always the most interesting, and that also tends to be true of literature. And the two sets of readers turn out to not be nearly as immiscible as had formerly been thought.
I have a science-fictional definition for romance stories: they are tales of the promulgation of human evolution through sexual selection. Since a recent theory among the evolutionary biologists is that human intelligence is itself a result of sexual selection, this isn’t as much of a joke as it might appear. But many romance stories stop short of the reproduction part. So what’s really going on, here?
The romances I’ve read, as constituted in the modern genre sense, actually seem to be stories of the power negotiation in a sexual relationship, in which the woman’s agenda wins. The details of the agenda vary with the tastes of the writers and readers, but almost invariably a permanent pair-bond results with a hero capable of holding up his side. (In the case of same-sex romances, a permanent bond also results, and the “holding up his or her side” likewise persists.) The story is over when the deal has been proposed, tested—the “tested” part is where the plot goes—and sealed.
Many tales that feature sexual relationships are nonetheless not romances. Romeo and Juliet, most famously, is not a romance, but a didactic tragedy; nobody wins in that one, although the survivors are invited to learn a lesson. So love ’em and leave ’em tales or other tragic romances that nonetheless end in sterility and death (with or without lessons) fall outside the modern category. Romance, like tragedy, is defined by its ending.
A lot of people have the notion that all contests must be zero-sum games; if one wins, the other must lose. A satisfactory romance is the very opposite of a zero-sum game; unless both win, both lose. I sometimes wonder if the root of the more vociferous discomfort and negative response to romance by these readers is in the mistaken notion that if the woman has won, the man must have lost.
An extremely interesting counter-fantasy to ones in which the woman wins are the men’s action-adventure tales, of which the most quintessential example is probably the James Bond series. His women notably don’t win anything, but lose spectacularly. A romance with Mr. Bond is very much a zero-sum game, and marriage to him will result in the woman slumped over the dashboard of her car in the Swiss Alps with a line of bullet holes stitched across her back. James doesn’t exactly win either—his life remains sterile—but also free of the dread domestication and adult responsibility, a lethal Peter Pan who never grows up or old. It’s a perfectly reasonable vicarious reader-fantasy, and one which I’ve enjoyed myself in the past, but despite the inclusion of sex, it could never be classified as a romance.
(Comparison of K-selected and r-selected reproductive strategies versus women’s romance and men’s adventure, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
Science fiction (and most fantasy) also have an added task on their literary plate: world-building. The world is very nearly another protagonist; by the end of the tale, readers rightly expect to have met it, explored it, and learned what makes it tick, just as they expect to have come to know the hero or heroine. The SF reader also expects to learn what is different about the world compared to our own—including especially new technologies, and their impact in the characters’ lives, not to mention the plot. The novelties introduced should make a difference.
This leads to one of the most interesting tensions between romance and F&SF. Since sex was first invented in the primordial ooze, leading to the explosion of evolution, it has been deeply conserved, from the cellular level right up through the organism and its society, in the case of creatures complex enough to have societies, which most definitely includes humans. It wouldn’t be so durable if it weren’t so defended, despite all the change it fosters. There are deep reasons why romance tends to be a conservative genre, not in a political sense, but in terms of resisting destruction.
Science fiction (its co-genre fantasy is arguable, here) is all about change. So to my way of thinking, the ideal SF-romance crossover story would not be to drop the same-old-pattern down in front of a futuristic backdrop that might as well be plywood for all the difference it makes, but to actually explore what striking changes new technologies or other aspects of the world could make to the entire sexual negotiation. What new patterns of relationships might result? Who wins what, and how? It shouldn’t be so hard; we’ve seen it in our own world, worked examples with the impact of birth control and other technologies that have partially liberated women, and with them, men, from the patterns of the past.
(Babies have their own implacable impact, of course; the whole point of the pair-bonding thing in the first place is to create a place for babies to thrive, in the interest of winning the genetic lottery by becoming grand-parents. But that’s usually past the end of the tale.)
The two genres—and here science fiction and fantasy count as one, romance as the other—also tend to have different focal planes. For any plot to stay central, nothing else in the book can be allowed to be more important. So romance books tend to carefully control the scope of any attending plot, so as not to overshadow its central concern, that of building a relationship between the key couple, one that will stand the test of time and be, in whatever sense, fruitful. This also explains some SF’s addiction to various end-of-the-world plots, for surely nothing could be more important than that, which conveniently allow the book to dismiss all other possible concerns—social, personal, or other.
In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines “win” in romances, the way detectives “win” in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters “win” in adventure tales. But certainly in the majority of F&SF books, to give the characters significance in the readers’ eyes means to give them political actions, with “military” read here as a sub-set of political. So the two genres—Romance and SF—would also seem to be arm-wrestling about the relative importance of the personal and the political.
The two genres may also be doing different psychological work for their readers. With its young-adult-lit roots, SF runs heavily to coming-of-age tales, where the principal work at hand is separation from the family and growth to empowerment. The former is often handily accomplished by burning down the village or blowing up the planet and massacring everyone in sight in Chapter One, which, at a certain stage of one’s life, is not so much a nightmare as a dream come true. Most all readers, if not young, have at least been young, and so can relate to the pattern. Romances may also start with burning down the village, if the heroine is young enough not to have already accomplished that separation, but they just as often start with the heroine already alone. The end-game of those tales is one of integration and the recreation of family, rather than empowerment as such. (The themes of later adulthood generally run to neither empowerment nor integration, but redemption.)
Add to that a decided streak of prudishness among some SF readers, and the amazement is that any writer can get the two genres to lie down and play nicely with each other at all. Trying to fit all these tasks into a short story length is a bravura exercise indeed.
Nonetheless, the writers in this volume are attempting just that.
SECOND SHIFT
Brenda Cooper
Kami closed her eyes and replayed Lance’s tender whisper. “I love you.”
Three words filled her. She listened again and again, memorizing the rise and fall of his voice. Glancing at the clock, she stripped the bud off her ear and pocketed it, afraid the temptation to hear him yet another time would take the tiniest bit of glow from the night.
Being this happy was a
s new as a dawn, as fresh as becoming an adult three years ago. Maybe it was even as good as being born in the first place. Her bones smiled.
Stupid. She knew it was stupid, knew Lance was a lifetime away from her and that every time she came on shift to be his company, his rocket companion, he was further away.
The HR girl who hired her had told her not to do this.
She liked the rebellion in it. It was only a small rebellion anyway, since her contract was good as long as Lance approved of her and the job existed.
Besides, she hadn’t done it. Not really. Love happened, right? The long nights sitting alone and talking, or even listening to the silence of his sleeping breath had surprised her into love, delighted her in a way she hadn’t expected.
Right on time, Sulieyan opened the door and started her morning routine. She plugged in an electric pot to heat water and opened the cupboard for tea. “Do you want a cup?”
Kami shook her head, hoping she didn’t look as giddy as she felt.
“No? Anything I need to know? Was the night sweet?”
She always asked that way, but this morning Kami felt her cheeks grow hot. “Sure. He’s asleep now.”
Sulieyan smiled at the unnecessary observation. The monitors on the walls relentlessly reported whether Lance slept or woke, exercised, ate, or worked.