Here we come to the negative side of today's horror field. Although horror should elicit emotion from the reader, what's forgotten by the purveyors of a tiny subgenre that's been screaming for attention--gross out/extreme horror--is that they're taking the easy way out. Eliciting disgust and repelling readers might be a charge in the short run but in the long run it's self-defeating, a stylistic choice more than a thematic one--and a dead end. They've left behind the idea that the gore needs to be integrated into a story in which you care about what's happening. They've forgotten that gore for gore's sake becomes numbing. This sort of horror has a limited audience within the horror community and an even tinier audience outside the horror community. I believe that most of the writers writing it now will tire of it and move on--or stop writing. And if they don't move on? That just means they have nothing to say.

  But whenever I feel discouraged by the shouting, I know I can cleanse my literary palate by reading the work of newer writers who excite me--voices of the dark short story such as Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, Tia V. Travis, Marion Arnott, Tim Lebbon, and Gemma Files--and by reading the dark stories and novellas by some of my favorite writers, such as Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, Paul McAuley, Lucius Shepard, P. D. Cacek, Kim Newman, Terry Lamsley, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe, and a host of others who are creating chilling dark fiction with verve, a graceful use of language, and imagination. And over the years, while reading for theYear's Best Fantasy and Horror series, I've read brilliant horror novels by Stewart O'Nan (A Prayer for the Dying), Jack O'Connell (Word Made Flesh), China Mieville (King RatandPerdido Street Station ), Janette Turner Hospital (OysterandThe Last Magician ), and everything by Jonathan Carroll.

  Whenever you have so many writers (and others who I didn't mention for reasons of space) producing and publishing their best work, you've got a healthy field.

  ALTERNATE HISTORY

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove has set his award-winning novels in many alternate times and places.

  A friend of mine once claimed that alternate history was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don't know that I'd go that far--and I do suspect I could get my face slapped for experimenting--but the subgenre certainly does have its attractions.

  First, of course, are the pleasures any good story offers: evocative writing, interesting characters, and a well-made plot. Right behind those is the peculiar fillip you get only from science fiction: seeing if the author's extrapolation from the change he or she has made to the so-called real world is plausible and persuasive. Though alternate history changes the past rather than the present or the future, it usually plays by the same sort of rules as the rest of science fiction once the change is made.

  But alternate history also has a special kick all its own. It looks at the world in a funhouse mirror no other form of fiction can match. In it, we can look at not only fictional characters but real characters in fictional settings, bouncing what we already know about them off the paddles of a new pinball machine. If the Spanish Armada had won, what would have happened to Shakespeare's career? If the Union had lost, what would have happened to Abraham Lincoln's? If Muhammad hadn't founded Islam, what might he have done? And what would the world look like then?

  Most science fiction projects onto a blank screen. You know only what the author tells you about the world and its inhabitants. Like mainstream historical fiction, alternate history assumes you know more; some of the people and situations involved will be familiar to you ahead of time. But, where historical fiction deals with pieces of the world as it was, alternate history demands more of its readers: it asks them to look into that funhouse mirror and see things as they might have been.

  And it can do more than that. It can turn whole societies upside down. If a plague completely destroyed Western Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, what would the world have looked like afterwards? Could there have been an industrial revolution? If blacks had enslaved whites in North America rather than the other way around, how might they have treated them? (Reversing roles and looking at consequences is one of the things science fiction does particularly well.) If fascism or communism had triumphed during the turbulent century just past, how might things look?

  From a writer's point of view, there's one other joy to doing alternate history: the research. If you aren't into digging up weird things for the fun of digging them up, this probably isn't the subgenre for you. If you are, though, you can transpose Newton and Galileo into Central Asia, make obscure references that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your readers will never notice but that will horrify or crack up the hundredth, or make all your readers feel as if they're looking at a trompe l'oeil painting. Perhaps the finest compliment I ever got was from a reviewer who said a novel of mine made him think he was reading an accurate portrayal of a world that in fact never existed.

  Jeremiads? What goes wrong in alternate history is the flip side of what goes right. Bad writing and inept characterization can and too often do afflict any fiction. But the subgenre's besetting sins are failure of research and failure of extrapolation. A few years back, there was a novel (marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF) that had to do with Jefferson Davis's reelection bid after a Southern victory in the Civil War. Lovely--except that the Confederate Constitution limited the president of the CSA to a single six-year term. There's another book about a world where the Romans conquered Germany and the Empire survived into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it's also a world where Roman society never changed even though the Empire had an industrial revolution . . . and a world where, despite the immense changes a successful conquest and assimilation of Germany would have caused, Constantine still gets born three centuries after the breakpoint and still plays a role recognizably similar to the one he had in real history.

  Suspension of disbelief is probably harder to pull off in alternate history than in most other forms of fiction, not least because you're playing in part with what your readers already know. If they thinkShe'd never act that way, not even under those changed circumstances, because she did thus-and-so in the real world orEven if they had invented Silly Putty then, that doesn't mean we'd all be going around with hula hoops twenty years later , you've lost them. Once disbelief comes crashing down, a steroid-laced weightlifter can't pick it up again.

  Done well, alternate history is some of the most thought-provoking, argument-inducing fiction around. It also often inspires those who read it to go find out what really happened, which isn't a bad thing, either. Done not so well, it reminds people how painfully true Sturgeon's Law is. And I expect we'll all go on arguing about what is good and what's not so good and why or why not for a long, long time to come.

  FILM AND TELEVISION

  Michael Cassutt

  Michael Cassutt successfully writes both SF and television scripts.

  In my increasingly distant youth, a science fiction or fantasy film was a rarity, either a low-budget wonder that happened to sneak out of Hollywood early one morning or, like2001 , a major studio event that got made only because a powerful director wouldn't take no for an answer.

  Now, a year into Kubrick and Clarke's millennium, five or six of the ten top-grossing motion pictures of all time are science fiction or fantasy, depending on what megablockbuster has opened lately. SF and fantasy are part of the motion picture landscape--a lucrative part.

  Television is also our playground, if you believe a recentUSA Today poll, in which baby boomers namedThe Twilight Zone andStar Trek as two of their top three favorite series of all time. More recently, several generations ofStar Trek sequels have had long, loving runs--Next Generation, Deep Space Nine,Voyager, and nowEnterprise . Intriguing series such asBabylon 5 andMax Headroom have come and gone.The X-Files lasted for nine seasons.Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still kicking satanic butt.Farscape sails on through its peculiar universe, low-rated but critically approved.

  What is there to complain about? Well, for one thing, most SF or fantasy films and television are still written and produced by mainstream talents, not by SF writers who have published in the magazines or written novels. (Babylon 5'sJ. Michael Straczynski is the notable exception.)

  Which means that the cutting-edge concepts on display inAsimov's ,Analog , orInterzone don't make it to the screen. Well, make that rarely: there was this movie calledThe Matrix . . .

  It may be that cutting-edge SF is, by its nature, limited to a more elite (which is to say, smaller) audience.

  Look at the finalists for the Nebula script category, as selected by the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:X-Men (based on the famed Marvel comic book), the wonderful Chinese fantasyCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , the Coen Brothers'O Brother, Where Are Thou? and (fromBuffy the Vampire Slayer ) Joss Whedon's television script "The Body."

  Four fantasies. If you wanted to be tough about it, you could saythree fantasies:O Brother is a musical comedy that continues the Coen Brothers' exploration of the American yokel.

  The Spielberg-posthumous Kubrick collaboration,A.I. , based on material by Brian Aldiss and Ian Watson, and emerging from the core of traditional science fiction, didn't make the cut. Nor was it particularly successful, certainly not by Spielbergian standards. It's not hard to see why: the treatment of the subject matter was slow and obvious. Worse, Kubrick's cold, unflinching, and unforgiving view of human nature fits with Spielberg's warmth and sentimentality like a shot of gin with a slice of tiramisu. Yuck.

  Perhaps the most rigorously traditional and successful SF film or television production of 2001 was Sci Fi Channel's miniseriesDune , adapted and directed by John Harrison from the classic Frank Herbert novel. It was not as artistic as David Lynch's critically battered (yet, by some, secretly appreciated) 1984 feature film, but it made more sense, helped, no doubt, by a six-hour running time.

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only prime-time drama series to approach the very mainstreamWest Wing in having a clear writer's voice, suffered somehow in moving from the WB to UPN for fall 2001. It would require more moral character than I possess to give WB network execs credit forBuffy 's success; perhaps Whedon and his talented staff are tired or, with the spin-offAngel series, stretched too thin.

  Enterprise, which is simultaneously a follow-on toVoyager and a prequel to the original series, premiered strongly in fall 2001, though it has yet to become "appointment" television. Well,Next Generation andDeep Space Nine took two seasons to find themselves.Enterprise has the outlandish luxury of a five-year, 120- episode commitment.

  Syndicated science fiction continued to fill Saturday afternoons, with varying degrees of success.Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda prospered in its second season;Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict , ran out of gas in its fifth. The superhero seriesMutant X arrived, aimed squarely at the audience that enjoyed theX-Men movie but was impatient for the sequel.

  Not all the SF on television held its own as well as these series.The X-Files tottered into the television equivalent of old age.Roswell squandered a terrific concept (alienated teenaged aliens here on Earth). The Sci Fi Channel and UPN had notable failures, best left undescribed.

  The failures and even the successful series suffer from a conceptual sameness: they all deal with heroic starship captains, alien hunters, or superheroes. Where are the stories set on our world in a future we might see? Where are adaptations of SF?

  I think they're on the way. The explosive growth in computer-generated special effects has made it possible to create almost any sort of world on the screen, even on a series television budget and schedule.

  Certainly, feature films show astonishing promise. In the fall of 2001,Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone andThe Fellowship of the Ring opened to huge box office success.Harry Potter , based on the megaselling novel by J. K. Rowling, was perhaps as good a movie as one could expect, butThe Fellowship of the Ring was successful in almost every way. Simplycommitting to the three movies--at a cost of more than half a billion dollars--was an act of astonishing courage by New Line. For an effects-laden fantasy film with no big stars? And a relatively unknown director (Peter Jackson)?

  Yet it all worked. Even the pickiest Tolkien fans seemed pleased withFellowship . This picky viewer certainly was.

  If anything can be made, in film or television, how long can it be before we see real science fiction?

  CATHERINE ASARO

  Catherine Asaro--quantum physicist, mother, and former ballet dancer--zips around Maryland from NASA to ballet classes at practically light speed. Born in California, she received her Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard. She has done research at, among other places, the University of Toronto and the Max Planck Institut fur Astrophysik in Germany. She was a physics professor until 1990, when she established her own consulting company, Molecudyne Research.

  Catherine's novels combine hard science, space adventure, and romance. She makes her ideas do double duty; some of the science in her popular SF series made a more sober appearance in her 1996 paper forThe American Journal of Physics , "Complex Speeds and Special Relativity."

  First serialized inAnalog in 1999,The Quantum Rose is part of Catherine's well-receivedSkolian Empire series. This excerpt is the novel's exciting opening.

  THE QUANTUM ROSE

  Catherine Asaro

  1

  IRONBRIDGE

  First Scattering Channel

  Kamoj Quanta Argali, the governor of Argali Province, shot through the water and broke the surface of the river. Basking in the day's beauty, she tilted her face up to the violet sky. The tiny disk of Jul, the sun, was so bright she didn't dare look near it. Curtains of green and gold light shimmered across the heavens in an aurora visible even in the afternoon.

  Her bodyguard Lyode stood on the bank, surveying the area. Lyode's true name was a jumble of words from the ancient language Iotaca, which scholars pronounced aslight emitting diode . No one knew what it meant, though, so they all called her Lyode.

  Unease prickled Kamoj. She treaded water, her hair swirling around her body, wrapping her slender waist and then letting go. Her reflection showed a young woman with black curls framing a heart-shaped face. She had dark eyes, as did most people in the province of Argali, though hers were larger than usual, with long lashes that right now sparkled with droplets of water.

  Nothing seemed wrong. Reeds as red as pod-plums nodded on the bank, and six-legged lizards scuttled through them, glinting blue and green among the stalks. A few paces behind Lyode, the prismatic forest began. Up the river, in the distant north, the peaks of the Rosequartz Mountains floated like clouds in the haze. She drifted around to the other bank, but saw nothing amiss there either. Tubemoss covered the hills in a turquoise carpet broken by stone outcroppings that gnarled up like the knuckles of a buried giant.

  What bothered her wasn't unease exactly, more a troubled anticipation. She supposed she should feel guilty about swimming here, but it was hard to summon that response on such a lovely day. The afternoon hummed with life, golden and cool.

  Kamoj sighed. As much as she enjoyed her swim, invigorated by the chill water and air, she did have her position as governor to consider. Swimming naked, even in this secluded area, hardly qualified as dignified. She glided to the bank and clambered out, reeds slapping against her body.

  Her bodyguard continued to scan the area. Lyode suddenly stiffened, staring across the water. She reached over her shoulder for the ballbow strapped to her back.

  Puzzled, Kamoj glanced back. A cluster of greenglass stags had appeared from behind a hill on the other side of the river, each animal with a rider astride its long back. Sun rays splintered against the green scales that covered the stags. Each stood firm on its six legs, neither stamping nor pawing the air. With their iridescent antlers spread to either side of their heads, they shimmered in the blue-tinged sunshine.

  Their riders were all watching her.

  Sweet Airys, Kamoj thought, mortified. She ran up the slope to where she had left her clothes in a pile behind Lyode. Her bodyguard was taking a palm-sized marble ball out of a bag on her belt. She slapped it into the targeting tube of her crossbow, which slid inside an accordion cylinder. Drawing back the bow, Lyode sighted on the watchers across the river.

  Of course, here in the Argali, Lyode's presence was more an indication of Kamoj's rank than an expectation of danger. Indeed, none of the watchers drew his bow. They looked more intrigued than anything else. One of the younger fellows grinned at Kamoj, his teeth flashing white in the streaming sunshine.

  "I can't believe this," Kamoj muttered. She stopped behind Lyode and scooped up her clothes. Drawing her tunic over her head, she added, "Thashaverlyster."

  "What?" Lyode said.

  Kamoj jerked down the tunic, covering herself with soft gray cloth as fast as possible. Lyode stayed in front of her, keeping her bow poised to shoot. Kamoj counted five riders across the river, all in copper breeches and blue shirts, with belts edged by feathers from the blue-tailed quetzal.

  One man sat a head taller than the rest. Broad-shouldered and long-legged, he wore a midnight-blue cloak with a hood that hid his face. His stag lifted its front two legs and pawed the air, its bi-hooves glinting like glass, though they were a hardier material, hornlike and durable. The man ignored its restless motions, keeping his cowled head turned toward Kamoj.

  "That's Havyrl Lionstar," Kamoj repeated as she pulled on her gray leggings. "The tall man on the big greenglass."

 

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