By Any Other Name PDF
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By Any Other Name Spider Robinson This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Copyright a 2001 by Spider Robinson All stories copyright by Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants a 1984, Half An Oaf a 1976, Antinomy a 1980, Satan’s Children a 1979, Apogee a 1980, No Renewal a 1980, Tin Ear a, 1980, In the Olden Days a 1984, Silly Weapons a 1980, Nobody Likes to Be Lonely a 1980, “If This Goes On—” a 1991, True Minds a 1984, Common Sense a 1985, Chronic Offender a 1984, High Infidelity a 1984, Rubber Soul a 1984, The Crazy Years was originally published in parts in the Toronto Globe and Mail a 1996–2000, By Any Other Name a 1976. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. A Baen Books Original Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 www.baen.com ISBN: 0-671-31974-4 Cover art by Richard Martin Interior art by Rocky Coffin First printing, February 2001 Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH Printed in the United States of America For my friends Ted and Diana Powell —and for Ben Bova, without whom all this would not have been necessary . . . BAEN BOOKS by Spider Robinson By Any Other Name The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson) Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson) (forthcoming) Deathkiller Lifehouse User Friendly Telempath (forthcoming) FOREWORD Perhaps a story collection should be allowed to speak for itself. That was my original intention; I submitted this book to Toni Weisskopf without a foreword. The basic plan was simple: to gather all the short stories I’ve written that aren’t already collected in User Friendly (Baen 1998), with a little bit of nonfiction for lagniappe. So the assembly process was not onerous. Basically I pulled manuscripts from the trunk, glanced at their titles, nodded nostalgically, and added them to the pile. Deciding their order was a no-brainer: begin and end with a Hugo-winner, and in between those, alternate humorous and serious stories. Writing a foreword seemed superfluous. Then a few days ago the galley proofs arrived, and I sat down and read them through, and here I am writing a foreword after all. I have not written short fiction for some time now. Novels pay so much better that, without consciously planning to, I just stopped getting short story ideas a few years back. So I hadn’t read any of those stories particularly recently. Some I had not read in twenty years or more. As I rediscovered them now, unexpected patterns emerged. I’d begun the galleys firmly resolved to do nothing but correct typos. I was determined to make no retroactive improvements to these stories—to let them stand as they first came into the world, flaws and all. But I found I kept wanting to push dates forward. I was rather startled to realize how many of these stories are now chronologically outdated. Written, in some cases, in the early 1970s, they tended to be set in the “distant future” of twenty or thirty years later. I’m most comfortable in that range: the further ahead into the future I speculate, the less confident I am about my own guesses—and if I’m dubious, how am I to convince a reader? But history has begun to overtake me. I was not dismayed—or even surprised—at how often my guesses about the future had turned out to be dead wrong. I’ve never claimed or wished to be a prophet; I write about possible futures, and strive for plausible ones. But I was somewhat surprised at just how my speculations were wrong: over and over, it seems, I was too optimistic. I don’t mean that all the stories you’re about to read are upbeat, by any means. But most of the futures I imagined were, in retrospect, at least a little better than the one we actually got. At least more technologically advanced. I find I’m proud of that. I only pray I can manage to sustain that attitude of positive expectation, that tendency toward benign delusion, through the next quarter-century of tumult and shenanigans. And infect as many other people with it as possible. Because unconscious expectations are so important. We need all the Placebo we can get. It’s been shown again and again: if you introduce a new teacher to a perfectly average class of kids, and tell him they’re the Advanced group, by the end of the year they will be. This real year 2000 may not be quite as advanced as some of the ones I envisioned for entertainment purposes . . . but it is, I think, a far nicer one than most average citizens living in the 1970s or 1980s would have believed possible. (Just for a start: no Cold War.) Optimistic science fiction may just have had something to do with that. As my friend Stephen Gaskin once said, “What you put your attention on prospers.” Case in point: the title story of this book. It was, if memory serves, the third story I ever tried to write for money. I’d sent my first one to the most popular magazine in the field, Analog—talk about irrational optimism—and miraculously, it sold. But the second, set in the same tavern, had not sold there . . . or anywhere else. Then from somewhere came “By Any Other Name,” and I just knew this one was going to sell. Perhaps it’s weird to call it an optimistic story, since it posits the total collapse of technological civilization—but it also suggests that humanity will ultimately survive just about any collapse. In any event, it was a much more complex and ambitious story than anything I’d ever tried before, and I certainly sent it off with high hopes. It was bounced by every market in science fiction. More than a dozen rejections, beginning with Analog and ending underneath the bottom of the barrel. The last editor on the list lost the damn thing for several months . . . then rejected it . . . then lost it again. (I was so green, the only other copy in existence was the handwritten first draft.) By the time I finally got it back, I had written several other stories, and not one of them had sold, either. I suspect the only reason I even took the manuscript out of the envelope was so it would burn better in the fireplace. But my own opening sentence caught me. I ended up reading the damn thing all the way through one more time— —and by God, I still liked it. All thirteen of those editors, I decided on the spot, were wrong. So I rejected the rejections. I mailed the story, unchanged, to Ben Bova at Analog a second time. It was a perfect act of irrational optimism, of benign delusion. You guessed it: he bought it this time. But it wasn’t just a sale. “By Any Other Name” was my first Analog cover
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