Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10 Read online

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  Monday, November 1, 2010

  EDITORIAL

  Stanley Schmidt

  Most people tend to balk at rules, to some extent, even though they also want the security that comes from having other people follow them. Some kinds of rules, of course, are more likely to meet resistance than others. Most people accept prohibitions against murder, and even hire police to enforce...

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  Jeffery D. Kooistra

  It filled me with deep sadness to learn of the death last year of Dr. Oleg D. Jefimenko. His name will be familiar to some of you as it has come up more than a few times in these columns. I briefly reviewed a couple of his books in “Recent and Worthy” from the April 2003 Analog. I also...

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  Space opera isn’t what it used to be. And that’s a good thing. When Wilson Tucker coined the word in 1941, “space opera” was a term of derision. It was analogous to the earlier term “horse opera,” a pejorative label for Western films. Tucker used the expression...

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Dr. Stan: I wanted to express my thanks for H.G. Stratmann’s “The Day the Music Died” in the May issue. As one who suffers regularly from “earworms,” I appreciated the story immensely. Having done what obviously was rather extensive research on the subject, I...

  IN TIMES TO COME

  Our December issue again offers an unusual combination of a story and a closely associated fact article. The story is Shane Tourtellotte’s “The Man from Downstream,” about a time traveler who does what he does for an unusual reason, and then faces an unexpected challenge about ...

  UPCOMING EVENTS

  Anthony Lewis

  December is always a slow month for conventions because of the holidays. 19–21 November 2010 SFContario (Toronto SF conference) at Ramada Plaza Hotel, Toronto, ON. Author Guest of Honor: Michael Swanwick; Editor Guests of Honor: Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden; Fan Guest of Honor: Geri...

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  EDITORIAL

  RULES AND REASONS

  Stanley Schmidt

  Most people tend to balk at rules, to some extent, even though they also want the security that comes from having other people follow them. Some kinds of rules, of course, are more likely to meet resistance than others. Most people accept prohibitions against murder, and even hire police to enforce them. They are far less likely to accept an anonymous nosy neighbor trying to get everyone on a block to keep all their window shades exactly halfway up during the day.

  Clearly there are different kinds of “rules,” some of them essential cornerstones of civilization, some so silly they richly deserve being flouted at every opportunity—and some that really are imposed by a higher power and literally can’t be flouted, no matter how much anyone might like to.

  No, I’m not referring to the commandments of any religion. Even though many people sincerely and deeply believe that this or that set is divinely inspired or dictated, all such commandments can be disobeyed, and frequently are. But nobody disobeys natural law, because nobody can. Mother Nature is the ultimate exerciser of the classical parental excuse: “Because I say so.” You can’t run off a cliff, like a cartoon coyote, and expect to stay aloft, because the law of gravity is what it is—for you and everybody else. And there’s nothing you can do about it (though there are things you can do to work around it, like learning the rules of statics and aerodynamics and how to use them).

  The “rules” made by humans (or other intelligences) are in a completely different category—or, more precisely, several different categories. Some have the force of law and are enforced by government agencies. Ideally they exist for reasons that most citizens agree are valid and reasonable, but in practice this may or may not be the case. The aforementioned ban on murder is one of the clearest examples of a law that most people want to see not only on the books but enforced. There is widespread disagreement about how to enforce it, but most people agree that the ban is needed, not only for their own personal safety, but because society would quickly disintegrate into chaos if people were allowed to go around killing others who annoyed them. New York State tax law is a good example of a law (or an astonishingly voluminous mass of them) that is far from unanimously approved. Most residents agree that some form of taxation is necessary to finance state services, but there’s plenty of controversy about who should provide how much of that revenue and how and on what it should be spent.

  A second broad set of rules made by humans, for humans, includes guidelines that people are expected, but not legally required, to follow. These include rules of etiquette and fashion, both of which often appear so arbitrary that it’s hard to imagine what, if any, reason ever existed for their coming to be regarded as rules. You won’t wind up in court for wearing your hemline too high or too low, or for using the wrong fork for your salad, but you may find yourself snubbed or looked down on by certain people (whose opinions may or may not matter to you).

  Then there are procedural guidelines like the ones that we and other publishers provide on request to authors interested in submitting to us. We call these guidelines rather than rules, partly because it sounds less harsh, and partly because nobody’s going to fine or otherwise punish you for violating one of them. But we do wonder what’s going on in the mind of a writer who sends us a story with a cover letter beginning, “Thank you for sending your guidelines,” and then violates half a dozen of them in the manuscript.

  One such writer recently wrote, “I always assumed that a ‘guideline’ was not mandatory.” Strictly speaking, that’s true, but such nitpicking seems counterproductive for a writer who wants to have the best possible chance of selling to a particular market. There’s a reason for everything our guidelines (or those of any other publisher) ask a writer to do, and the foremost of these, from the writer’s point of view, is that we as publishers want to make it easy for you as a writer to present your work in as good a light as possible. That includes presenting it in a form that won’t make life unnecessarily difficult for us, as publishers, if we like your story and want to publish it. In our specific case, with our present methods, that means (among other things) that we want the manuscript double-spaced, on one side of the sheet only, because (a) I read so many manuscripts that I want them to be as easy as possible on my eyes (for which I have no spares), and (b) if we buy the story, the copyeditor will need room to write comments and instructions during the first stage of editing.

  Sometimes the reason for a rule seems so self-evident that we’ve never felt a need to state the rule at all, but it seems that even that can’t be taken for granted. Lately, for reasons that perplex me, I’ve been getting an astounding number of manuscripts with no page numbers, a practice for which I’m hard put to imagine an advantage. If such a manuscript is dropped—or disassembled for production—how will we know which page goes where when it’s reassembled?

  Production methods vary in detail from publisher to publisher, and consequently so do guidelines. So if you’re considering submitting work to any publisher, the first step is to get that publisher’s guidelines and follow them exactly. You may be sure that I, when I’m being a writer rather than an editor, do that. And you may be equally sure that I don’t waste time or make myself unnecessarily annoying by trying to convince some other editor that he or she should do things my way.

  It’s not surprising that some writers and artists (usually inexperienced ones) do that; creative people, by the nature of the beast, are especially likely to balk at rules for which they s
ee no obvious reason. (More than one business manager has complained that managing PhDs is like herding cats.) And the kinds of guidelines (or rules, if you insist) I’ve been describing are just procedural things like the physical (or electronic) form of a manuscript and how to submit it if you expect a response. When it comes to “rules” regarding creative content, artistic types—again, most often inexperienced ones, but with an important exception I’ll mention later—are even more resistant to being “told what to do.”

  I’ll offer my younger self as a sacrificial example. When I started trying my hand at musical composition, I did a lot of listening to a wide range of composers, often following scores while doing so, to get a feel for what kinds of music I liked and didn’t like and to try to learn by observation how composers I liked got the effects they did. I also read enough about music theory to know of the existence of rules of harmony, counterpoint, and form—but not enough to really understand what they said or how to apply them. So I said to anyone who would listen or couldn’t get away fast enough that in my composition I didn’t want to be bound by those silly rules, and in my defense I pointed to the fact that some of the later pieces that I liked—e.g., some by Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev—deviated markedly from those rules. What I would never have said (even to myself), but freely admit now, was that my sneering at the rules was in large part a smokescreen for the fact that I didn’t understand them well enough to follow them skillfully even if I wanted to.

  What I eventually learned, to my benefit, is that even though some small-minded teachers and critics may regard rules of composition as rules to be followed Because They Are Rules, that’s not really what they’re for. They aren’t decrees that somebody laid down to lord it over composers and limit what they can do. They’re attempts, evolved over time, to codify principles that past composers have found often work. What does it mean to say that a piece of art works? Simply that it has the kind of effect on an audience—listener, viewer, reader, or all of the above—that the creator hoped it would. Audiences are the ultimate judge, and rules exist not to limit creators, but to help them by providing a framework for understanding what is more or less likely to affect audiences in the intended way. Sonata form is not a piece of legislation that says a piece of music Must Have an Exposition That Does This, a Development That Does That, and so on, but an observational description: many pieces that succeeded had this general form, and writing a new one that also does so has a better-than-average chance of seeming well-proportioned and satisfying.

  And what about those later composers who fed my defiance by breaking the rules? I realized eventually that, unlike me, they weren’t breaking them because they didn’t understand them. They understood them very well indeed, but were original and creative enough to come up with new ways of doing things that went beyond the old rules but also worked (on audiences). Important corollary: mere novelty, or just going beyond the rules, is not enough. New ways are successful only if they work, and not all work equally well. In the early twentieth century, there was a fad for “twelve-tone music” among composers; it has had some lasting influence on the work of later composers by expanding their toolbox, but in its purest form most of it had little success with audiences (largely because it deliberately ignored the fact that some musical relationships really do have a clear physical and physiological basis for seeming special).

  Similar considerations apply in any other art, including literature. Beginning writers sometimes grumble that they don’t see why every story has to involve a conflict or why they’re usually better off avoiding present-tense narration or viewpoint shifts within a scene. It isn’t that they always have to follow those rules, or that editors are looking for things to criticize them for. It’s that a great deal of shared experience has found that stories following those principles are, in general, more likely to work than those that don’t. There can be reasons to violate any of them, dictated by the needs of a particular story—but to recognize when you have one of those special situations, it’s very helpful to have a solid understanding of what has usually worked, or not worked, in the past. One of the most popular stories Analog has ever published was David R. Palmer’s “Emergence,” which violated all kinds of rules: it ran something like 17,000 words, told almost entirely as a monologue, written in a very unconventional kind of English, and containing few characters and almost no physical action—and it powerfully, unforgettably affected almost everyone who read it. But Palmer knew exactly what he was doing, and why, with every word in it—and he could just as easily write a story that does follow all the rules.

  So “rules” is a word that covers a lot of ground. Some of them, those imposed by nature, none of us can choose to ignore. Some of those made by our fellow creatures we can ignore, but at risk of severe penalties. And still others we don’t have to follow; but there are frequently reasons why we should, and it’s to our benefit to try to understand what those reasons (and their limitations) are.

  Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  E-MAILS TO JEFIMENKO, CHIEFLY ON CLOCKS

  Jeffery D. Kooistra

  It filled me with deep sadness to learn of the death last year of Dr. Oleg D. Jefimenko. His name will be familiar to some of you as it has come up more than a few times in these columns. I briefly reviewed a couple of his books in “Recent and Worthy” from the April 2003 Analog. I also discussed his work on the theory of electromagnetic retardation in my January 2006 column, “Length Contraction.”

  We had a valuable period of e-mail exchanges about five years ago, a portion of which I am publishing here. It relates to one of the most interesting findings of his work and other admirers and “students” of his should know what he had to say.

  While doing consulting work in late 2000, I stumbled upon an abstract for a lecture in an old physics journal that I knew he would find of interest. I regret that I didn’t tell him immediately, but better late than never.

  I sent the first e-mail on July 14, 2005, with the subject line, “The rate of moving clocks.”

  Dear Dr. Jefimenko,

  I was going through once again Electromagnetic Retardation and Theory of Relativity and (once again) came upon this statement on pg. 236-237: “For some inexplicable reason, apparently nobody has attempted to calculate and compare the rates of any types of stationary and moving clocks . . .” This reminded me that I have long intended to send you the ref. in the attached photo. (I finally have a scanner, so now I can just e-mail it to you.)

  The ref. is from pg. 770 of Phys. Rev. Vol. 85 (1952). I have never been able to find an article by Ruark in which he followed up on his analysis of simple clocks, and I don’t know if he ever compared the rates of clocks like you did—but this is the closest hit to that I’ve been able to find.

  If you know about this already, please pardon the intrusion.

  Best,

  Jeff

  This is what the abstract said:

  P1. Electrodynamics as a Basis for Special Relativity. Arthur E. Ruark, Institute for Cooperative Research, The Johns Hopkins University.—The Lorentz transformation is usually derived from the symmetry of the physical experiences of two observers on inertial frames, and the assumption that both observers obtain the same value of c, no matter how the source is moving. Suppose we replace the second postulate by the statement that the Maxwell equations and the Lorentz force are valid for the “resting” observer. We can discuss a simple clock—a negative charge, rotating (sic) around a heavy positive charge in a plane perpendicular to the X-axis. Setting this system into uniform motion, it becomes the clock of the moving observer. The resting observer can use the retarded potentials to discuss its behavior. A few lines suffice, to derive the mass increase and the decrease of angular velocity that occur when the clock is set into motion. The expansion of times associated with a moving body, the constancy of li
ght velocity for the moving observer, the Lorentz contraction of a moving body, and the Lorentz transformation follow in order, with ease. This attack makes these matters so readily understandable, on the basis of retardation of electrical forces, that it appears to possess didactic value.

  Dr. Jefimenko said, in his reply on July 19:

  Thank you very much for the very interesting abstract of Ruark’s paper on relativity. I did not know of its existence. It is interesting for me for two reasons. First, because Ruark speaks of a moving electromagnetic clock, but mostly because he associates relativity with electromagnetic retardation.

  As far as his clock is concerned, it is physically and mathematically much more complex than any of my clocks in Electromagnetic Retardation and the Theory of Relativity (the electric field of a charge in a circular motion is far from simple—see Example 4-4.1 on pp. 89-92 in R & R). It would be interesting to see Ruark’s calculations, but it is entirely possible that he had never published them. I suspect that he simply had an idea—an intuition—and submitted the abstract of the paper that he intended to present at the Physical Society meeting before actually completing the calculations. It is also entirely possible that he never presented the paper at the meeting because, as I suspect, the calculations had not supported his initial announcement. Specifically, I do not think that it is possible to deduce mass increase, time dilation, constancy of light velocity, Lorentz contraction, and Lorentz transformation—all this by simply analyzing the behavior of a moving clock. It may be noted that Larmor, as early as in 1897, concluded that the period of an orbiting electron in a moving reference frame is longer than its period in a system at rest. But Larmor based his calculation on what we now call Lorentz (incomplete) transformations, not the other way around. And as far as the constancy of light velocity, length contraction, and mass increase are concerned, I do not see at all how they can be deduced just from an analysis of a moving clock. I may be wrong of course.