Orbit 16 [Anthology]

324 Pages·2016·1.12 MB·English

by  Knight Damon

Orbit 16

Ed by Damon Knight Proofed By MadMaxAU

CONTENTS

THEY SAY

MOTHER AND CHILD
Joan D. Vinge THE SKINNY PEOPLE OF LEPTOPHLEBO STREET
R. A. Lafferty A BRILLIANT CURIOSITY
Doris Piserchia PHOENIX HOUSE
Jesse Miller JACK AND BETTY
Robert Thurston PRISON OF CLAY, PRISON OF STEEL
Henry-Luc Planchat HEARTLAND
Gustav Hasford SANDIAL
Moshe Feder THE MEMORY MACHINE

IN DONOVAN’S TIME
C. L. Grant AMBIENCE
Dave Skal

BINARY JUSTICE
Richard Bireley THE HOUSE BY THE SEA
Eleanor Arnason EUCLID ALONE
William F. Orr

They Say

At that point, my theoretical work complete, I began to look around for those
new forms that my theorizing had led me to demand. And I found them
everywhere, hiding under a classification which seems designed to guarantee
that they are not “serious literature.” The classification, as you are all aware, is
“science fiction,” and it conceals a body of work that is truly astonishing, not
just in its “amazing” content but in its range and variety of expression, its
present quality and future potential.

—”Stillborn Literature,”
by Robert Scholes, Bulletin
of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Spring 1974
“Science fiction” is a publisher’s marketing category like “westerns” or
“gothics” or “nurse novels”—a packaging definition. When you walk through a
supermarket, you can tell the breakfast cereals from the detergents at a glance,
even though they come in boxes of roughly the same size and shape. . . . Science
fiction writers have complained that serious literary critics automatically ignore
their work, no matter what its merits, and sometimes have spun elaborate
theories about the snobbishness of the “literary establishment.” But after all, how
can a serious, conscientious literary critic sort through the year’s mountain-high
pile of tacky-looking science fiction paperbacks to find a few real jewels buried
in this heap of literary mediocrity? He knows what a potentially important book
looks like as an artifact, as a physical package, because publishers have
consistently packaged most of these books in an identifiable style. He may even
realize that one soap box out of twenty contains breakfast cereal, but is he going
to chomp through nineteen boxes of soap to find it?

—Norman Spinrad, Modern
Science Fiction (Anchor, 1974) Mr. Bryan: . . . During the nerva experience, I
first came into contact with aec and the methodology they were using.
Obviously, since we were developing a nuclear plant that was going to fly over
people’s heads, we had some of the same problems— in some cases even more
severe, since we were moving the plant rather than having a stationary source.
We spent a considerable amount of money on research into improved reliability
techniques when we entered the nerva program. This was primarily because you
could not build a lot of these and test them like we could in the Apollo program
to find out where the problems were. During this experience, we would
occasionally be analyzing a potential accident or problem and we’d see the
similarity between that and what a power plant would have, so we would go to
the aec or to the industry and try to find out what was going on in analyzing this
particular sub-problem.

We were very surprised to find a lack of overall knowledge of aerospace
techniques within the afx, and pretty much a lack of interest in developing them.
They were having a lot of problems at that time just with normal Qc-type
functions—quality control; they were just implementing that as a program,
which, of course, had been in aerospace for many years and in industry many
years before that. But they were having problems implementing that type of
program—which, incidentally, is an inspection-after-the-fact type of program
whereas reliability is trying to analyze it before the fact. So we didn’t find a lot
of help from anything that was going on within the aec or within the industry. . .
.

Since we had spent considerable millions in research to develop some new
techniques in the nerva program for reliability and safety analysis, we were
urged by our aec funding sponsors to contact other aec people to see what could
be salvaged from this program and transferred over to the aec to use in nuclear
power plant analyses. So we made many presentations to aec personnel on just
what we had gone through—what we had learned and the techniques we had
developed. We were very disappointed that they elected not to take advantage of
this experience—not even to consider, for instance, taking our final documents
and reports into a library function to hold until they got to the point in their
learning curve where they could use them. What we found was a major concern
with their own problems and a very typical resistance to change. ... I personally
concluded, from these many contacts and from discussions with people since
those contacts, that in general, the aec is up to ten years behind the times as far
as implementing aerospace reliability and safety techniques is concerned, and as
a substitute for good analysis, is pushing phony reliability and safety numbers to
assure us of just the opposite. . . .

Chairman Warren: Can you explain fault tree analysis?

Mr. Bryan: Yes. A fault tree analysis is where you start with some problem that
can occur, some system malfunction, then you start tiering your analysis much
like an organizational chart. You start with a box at the top that says you’re
going to have a loss-of-coolant accident. You then tier it down to the six or so
things that can cause a loss-of-coolant accident, and then for each one of those
six things, you analyze the things that could cause each of those six, and you just
keep tiering down until you’re down to the nuts and bolts of the system.
The problem in building a fault tree and getting a number out of the fault tree
analysis is obvious. You have this huge tree of possible failure mechanisms that
all inter-react and all lead into other events for which you have no quantifiable
data. The only possible way to quantify each one of these boxes is to have a
failure rate for each one. You’d have to have a failure rate for the bolt. You have
to have a failure rate for the inter-reactive effect between two adjoining parts.
You have to have a failure rate for the seal leaking between two parts. You just
have to have failure rates for every point in the analysis, and there just does not
exist that type of information. So you end up doing the same thing we’ve always
done. Where you can get failure rates, you use them. Where there are industrial
failure rates, use them. For instance, maybe you can’t find anything on the
particular burst failure mechanics of a high pressure line that you have, so you
go to the oil industry and see what they’ve got. Obviously, a pipe used in the oil
industry is going to fail much differently from one in a nuclear application, but
this is the best you have got so this is what you use.

In other cases, where there is no industrial failure rate, you go back to some
qualitative method or some guessing game.

If you’re consistent in the use of these numbers in the fault tree, when you get
done you certainly can compare one design against another and say this design is
better than the other, if you used a common data base.

Chairman Warren: But only for comparison?

Mr. Bryan: Only for comparison. The absolute value of the number is totally
meaningless. There is just no way that number can mean anything in terms of the
real-world probability of failure.
—William Bryan of the National Institute for Applied Research, testifying
before the Subcommittee on State Energy Policy of the California State
Assembly, Charles Warren, Chairman, February 1, 1974 (excerpted in Not Man
Apart, Mid-May 1974, under the title “Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, Go
Wrong, Go Wrong”) By 1919 the German bourgeoisie must have felt any means
to be justified in the defense of its power. As of this time, myths and magic
moved out of the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses to light against reason and
revolution. The flood of pseudo-scientific pamphlets and treatises became
overwhelming, sf, read by the social classes that were not reached by pseudo-
scientific and philosophic pamphlets, also succumbed to such irrationality. The
idea that the time was ripe for a “spiritual re-orientation” in literature too was
ceaselessly suggested by such authors. They called for sensations and
imaginative fantasies that would help to conquer gross “materialism” and its
literary counterpart, realism. One seemingly non-political articulation of these
tendencies went as follows: There are many indications that mechanistic
materialism—derived from the exact sciences—which has impressed its stamp
on the last decade, is at last dying out, due to the recent spiritual revolution.
Obviously, the transcendental longings of the majority of humanity cannot be
suppressed in the long run. . . . To begin with, we have again arrived at the point
of view of “wonder”—i.e., we no longer dismiss as nonsense all things that are
not explicable in terms of the known laws of physics. Mysterious connections
between human beings, independent of spatial and temporal separation, spooks,
the appearance of ghosts, all are again in the realm of the possible.

This quotation comes from the magazine Der Orchideengarten, which was
devoted to publishing only fantastic fiction and drawings—analogous to
American “weird” and “fantasy” sf magazines. Max Valier, the later rocket
pioneer and chairman of the “Society for Space-Flight,” who toured the country
lecturing about the end of the world, about Atlantis and Lemuria, about Glacial
Cosmogony and the breakthrough into Space, and in 1929 made an unsuccessful
attempt to interest Hitler in the military potential of rockets, was even more
explicit— Our present time, more than any other, requires a truly cosmic source
and center for spiritual orientation. We need a tremendous, even super-Terran
shock, in order to regain a sense of our identity which we have lost in the
whirlpool of everyday selfishness. . . . On the basis of a new theory of cognition
we will seek a more profound knowledge; and for our emotions, we will seek
sensations of truly primeval shock, so that even the end of the world and of this
Karth shall be a constructive experience.

—”sf, Occult Sciences, and Nazi Myths,” by Manfred Nagel, Science-Fiction
Studies, Spring 1974 (excerpted and translated from Nagel’s Science Fiction
in Deutschland (Tübinger Vereinigung fur Volkskunde, Tubingen, 1972)
<<Contents>>
MOTHER AND CHILD

Joan D. Vinge

The king, the smith and the alien all loved her:
and she? She loved all three.
Part i: The Smith

All day I have lain below the cliff. I can’t move, except to turn
my head or twitch two fingers; I think my back is broken. I feel
as if my body is already dead, but my head aches, and grief and
shame are all the pain I can bear. Remembering Etaa . . .

Perhaps the elders are almost right when they say death is
the return to the Mother’s womb, and in dying we go back along
our lives to be reborn. Between wakings I dream, not of my
whole life, but sweet dreams of the time when I had Etaa, my
beloved. As though it still happened I see our first summer
together herding shenn, warm days in fragrant upland
meadows. We didn’t love each other then; she was still a child, I
was hardly more, and for our different reasons we kept
ourselves separated from the world.

My reason was bitterness, for I was neaa, motherless. The
winter before, I had lost my parents to a pack of kharks as they
hunted. My mother’s sister’s family took me in, as was the
custom, but I still ached with my own wounds of loss, and was
always an outsider, as much from my own sullenness as from
any fault of my kin. I questioned every belief, and could find no
comfort. Sometimes, alone with just the grazing shenn, I sat and
wept.

Until one day I looked up from my weeping to see a girl,
with eyes the color of new-turned earth and short curly hair as
dark as my own. She stood watching me somberly as I wiped at
my eyes, ashamed and angry.

—What do you want? I signed, looking fierce and hoping
she would run away.

—I felt you crying. Are you lonely?