Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 Read Free

As for Simenon, he and I had very similar writing careers, the one difference being that he became vastly more famous and wealthy than I did. But we both began writing professionally in our late teens, enormously prolific writers quickly turning out reams of copy for pulp markets, then began to produce more ambitious material in our thirties, and, in our late sixties, gave up writing novels altogether. (Simenon, in fact, stopped writing fiction entirely, though he spent his last years writing a series of memoirs. I've done no novels in the past decade, but I've continued to write short stories and the occasional novella.) Do even the most prolific writers eventually reach a point where they'd just like to kick back and let the new generation take over? Simenon did in 1972. I've been feeling that way since about 2002. At least he made a better job of his retirement than Lear did. I hope I do.
    Anyway, it's been a busy few weeks—unusually busy. I hope these notes don't give the impression that every day of the year brings me some new contract to sign, as it has seemed since mid-January. Believe me: there are lulls, plenty of them. But this has certainly been an active time, and it's time to take things a little easier. So off we go on a little holiday, now—a few days down in San Diego, enjoying that city's lovely weather and prowling its marvelous zoo in search of wombats and koalas. And then I'll see what March holds for me.
    Copyright © 2011 by Robert Silverberg
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Department: ON THE NET: STEAMED by James Patrick Kelly
    ours and theirs
    Haven't we seen this once before? Back in the early eighties, a group of young and ambitious writers leapt out of the back seat of science fiction and gave the genre's steering wheel a hard jerk to one side, sending us careening into cyberspace. For a time cyberpunk was our secret, although given the caterwauling it evoked in genre from its partisans and critics, it wasn't much of one. But by the end of the decade, cyberpunk was no longer a literary movement but also a lifestyle, a fashion statement, and something of a fad. It spawned movies and TV shows and comics and video games and jewelry; for some mirrorshades and leather were the uniform of the day. It was no longer ours, it was theirs, too. Anyone could take whatever they wanted from it.
    At roughly the same time, steampunk was stirring. Just as cyberpunk had a core group of writers which included such central figures as Bruce Sterling [ wired.com/beyondthebeyond ] and William Gibson [ williamgibsonbooks.com ], among steampunk's founders were Tim Powers [ www.theworksoftim powers.com ] and James Blaylock [ sybertooth.com/blaylock ] and K. W. Jeter [ kwjeter.com ]. Of course, steampunk had a much slower takeoff. Jeter is generally credited with coining the name in a letter to the editor published in Locus [ locusmag.com ] that concerned itself with what to call the nascent subgenre:
    Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock, and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like “steampunk,” perhaps . . .
    * * * *
    ( Science Fiction Citations [ jesses word.com/sf/view/327 ], an otherwise wonderful resource for genre jargon, cites a later interview with Blaylock as the first usage. Perhaps a correction is in order?) Since Jeter's letter appeared in April 1987, his prediction was off by as much as a generation, although in 2011 it has come to pass with a vengeance. It's interesting that Jeter was also a cyberpunk of note, and there has ever been entanglement between the two great punk subgenres, starting with their names. Steampunk has a note of whimsy that was lost on the first cyberpunks, who were earnestly fomenting literary revolution. Yet in 1990, Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine helped popularize steampunk tropes. Since then all kinds of writers have