Writers of the Future, Volume 27 Read online

  Marianne managed a painful nod. “It’s true.”

  Susan turned away from them. “This is all my fault! One lie. One little lie!” She turned back to Marianne. “How could one little lie cost all these lives? Tommy, Alex, Gerald. Where does it stop? When does it stop?”

  Marianne took a deep breath. “It stops . . . when you—”

  Branson interrupted. “You have to tell the truth about Habitat Fourteen. Tell the truth, once and for all.”

  Susan shook her head, her face twisted in fear.

  “You . . . have to,” Marianne said.

  Susan shook her head.

  This was going nowhere. Susan was still frozen in inaction. Marianne needed to force her. “Where’s . . . your . . . phone?” Marianne asked.

  Susan shook her head.

  Branson grabbed her arm and shoved her toward Marianne. “The Republic tried to kill this woman!”

  Susan turned away.

  Branson continued, “The same way they killed your husband, Thomas! How many deaths will it be? Five? Six? They’ll kill me too.” He shook her. “How many more have to die before you stop this murdering cover up? Sooner or later, the Lunar Republic’s going to realize that you know their secrets. Captain Hail isn’t able to protect you anymore. You’ll be the next to take a trip in the air lock. Like Tommy and her.”

  Susan broke into tears. Marianne struggled and took her hand. What they were asking her to do was terrifying, but she was on the edge of tipping and just needed to be comforted. She needed to have someone, like Tommy or Alex or Gerald, to tell her everything was okay.

  “It’s . . . all . . . right. Help us.”

  There was a chime at the door and before Marianne saw it, Branson had the needlegun in his hand. From behind the door, she could hear “Mrs. Hail, are you all right?”

  Marianne gasped, and the pain made her wince. “Help us,” she begged.

  Another chime. “Mrs. Hail, are you in there?”

  “Yes—yes, I’m here.”

  The voice behind the door asked, “Is everything all right?”

  Susan stared at Branson’s needlegun. “Yes—yes, it is.”

  “Please stay in your quarters until further notice. Let us know if you notice anything unusual. Understand?”

  “Is anything wrong?” Susan asked.

  Branson pointed his needlegun at the door.

  “A prisoner escaped from the jails. We’re searching the city. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  Susan looked at Marianne. “Is Gerald okay?”

  There was a brief pause. “Of course, ma’am. He’s leading the search.”

  Susan looked to Branson who shook his head. Susan closed her eyes and took a heavy breath. “Thank you. I’ll stay here.”

  Marianne recognized the breath as the one that would solidify this story. She nodded her head gently, reassuring Susan.

  Susan walked to another room and returned moments later with a videophone. Without a word, she handed it to Marianne.

  Marianne was glad to see that Captain Hail had an encrypted line. She selected it and struggled to dial the number for Roy. He picked up after several seconds. His smile vanished after the connection was made. “What in hell happened to you?”

  “Long story. Record this . . . transmission.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She took a deep breath and yelled, “Trust me! Record this!” She didn’t have the time to explain this to him.

  Roy leaned forward, then said, “It’s recording.”

  “This is . . . Marianne . . . Summers. The Luna City . . . conspiracy . . . is true.”

  Marianne crawled out of the chair and motioned for Susan to sit.

  Susan sat, composed herself, then started. “I am . . . My name is Susan P. Rubner.”

  Marianne closed her eyes, then drifted off to sleep as Thomas Rubner’s wife told her story.

  How to View Art

  by L. Ron Hubbard

  Upon the inauguration of the Writers of the Future Contest in 1984, L. Ron Hubbard made this penetrating insight into the relationship between an artist and society: “The artist injects the spirit of life into a culture.”

  He recognized the unique potential that the artist has for helping to inspire society and create a finer world.

  While the original Contest focused on encouraging new authors, Hubbard’s own artistic endeavors were not confined to just one field. True, he may best be known as a writer. He published hundreds of works and millions of words between 1929 and 1950, when the name L. Ron Hubbard was virtually synonymous with American popular fiction.

  But Hubbard also worked in visual media such as filmmaking. By the summer of 1937, for example, one finds his stamp on such scripts for the big screen as The Mysterious Pilot, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock and the Spider series, while his name was quite formally attached to The Secret of Treasure Island—among the most profitable serials of Hollywood’s golden age.

  Hubbard was also an accomplished photographer. A keen student of the craft through his youth, by early 1929, his celebrated China landscapes had been acquired by National Geographic while his spectacular aerial shots as a pilot were found in the pages of Sportsman Pilot. His later work, including promotional photographs for various European governments and official portraits of heads of state, was equally acclaimed.

  Similarly, although he never counted himself as a professional musician in the strictest sense, his musical accomplishments are by no means insignificant. He created a “soundtrack” to Battlefield Earth using previously unexplored computerized instrumentation, followed by a no less innovative Mission Earth album, themed against his best-selling series and performed by Edgar Winter.

  Thus, L. Ron Hubbard developed a love for and mastery of several art forms, and in that spirit the Illustrators of the Future Contest was created to be a companion to the Writers of the Future.

  L. Ron Hubbard’s diverse perspective made him especially qualified to find common ground across all the arts. Synthesizing his experiences in writing, filmmaking, photography and music, he was able to advise others about a skill rarely addressed in the study of creativity: How an artist can successfully evaluate his own works as he endeavors to perfect them so that they have a powerful impact on others.

  How to View Art

  There is a skill needed by anyone engaging in any of the fields of the arts including writing, music, painting, editing of films, mixing—in other words, across the boards.

  It is the ability or skill, native or acquired, to view any piece of work in a new unit of time each time one views it. One has to be able to sweep aside all past considerations concerning any piece of work which has been changed or is under handling and see it or hear it in a brand-new unit of time as though he had never heard of it before.

  By doing this, he actually sees or hears exactly what is in front of him, not his past considerations concerning it.

  The skill consists solely of being able to see or hear in a new unit of time as though one had never seen or heard the work before.

  Only in this way can one actually grasp exactly what he now has before him. When he does not do this he is viewing or hearing, in part, what he saw or heard before in memory and this gets confused with what it now is.

  If one can do this, he can wind up with stellar presentations. But all too often, when he doesn’t do this, he winds up with hash.

  Some painters, for instance, will redo and redo and redo a painting up to an inch thick of paint when, possibly, several of those redos were quite acceptable. But he continued to try to correct the first impressions which were no longer there. By not viewing his painting in a new unit of time as though he had never seen it before, he cannot actually get a correct impression of what is in front of him.
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  Some painters or illustrators have a trick by which to do this. They look at their painting via a mirror. Because it is now backwards, they can see it newly.

  There is another trick of looking at a painting with a reducing glass (like looking at a view through the wrong end of a telescope) to reduce the painting to the presentation size it will eventually have, let us say, on a printed page. It is quite remarkable that this reduction actually does change the appearance of it markedly. But at the same time, a small painting, enlarged, can be absolutely startling enlarged when it did not look good at all small. But this is actually change of format, not viewing in a new instant of time. The additional skill of viewing something in a new instant of time is also vital.

  When anyone engaged in any of the arts in any field has not acquired this skill, he never really knows when he has arrived at the point of completion. And he can often get a distorted opinion of a piece of work which does not any longer merit it.

  Audiences

  There is another skill which is also acquired in the field of seeing or hearing. This is being able to assume the viewpoint of the audience for which the work is intended.

  There are certain areas which pretend to teach various arts, while actually covertly trying to wreck the future of the student, which stress “self-satisfaction” as the highest possible goal of engaging in any work related to any of the arts. There is, it is true, a considerable self-satisfaction in producing a good piece of work. But to profess that one works in these fields for his own self-satisfaction is to overstress the first dynamic to such a point that the work of the artist or technician then fails miserably. It is actually pure balderdash and a sort of a weak limping apology for not being successful to say that one works for his own self-satisfaction.

  This false datum can mix up many artists and technicians who would otherwise be quite successful. For it blocks out the one test which would make him successful: the audience.

  It is quite vital that anyone engaged in any of these fields be able to assume the viewpoint of the eventual audience.

  One has to be able to see or listen to any product he is engaged in from the audience viewpoint.

  He can, of course, and has to, view it from his own viewpoint. But he has to be able to shift around and view or hear it from the audience viewpoint.

  There are some tricks involved in this. One of them is to keep an ear open for “lobby comment.” After a performance or viewing of any work or cinema or recital or whatever—not necessarily one’s own—one mingles with or gets reports on those who have just experienced the presentation. This isn’t really vital to do. It is quite feasible actually simply to assume a viewpoint of an audience one has never even seen. One just does it.

  A mixing engineer often puts this to a further test but this is because what he is busy mixing on his high-priced top-quality equipment is not what the audience is going to hear. So he takes a cheapo Taiwan wrist cassette-player speaker or a 3-inch radio speaker from the local junk store and he listens to the program he has just mixed through it. This tells him what the audience will actually be hearing. But this is mainly a technical matter as it is true that excellent speakers or earphones may handle easily certain distortions in a mix or performance whereas the cheapo speakers shatter on them. When they do, one adjusts the mix without spoiling it so that it will play over a cheap speaker. This is a sort of a mechanical means of assuming the viewpoint of an audience. But the necessity to do this is introduced by equipment factors.

  The truth of the matter is even the mixing engineer is not mixing to remedy “faults” but is mixing for an optimum quality presentation to an audience. To know when he has it, it is necessary for him to assume the viewpoint of the audience.

  In all arts it is necessary to be able to shift viewpoint to the viewpoint of the listener or the viewer other than oneself. And this extends out to audiences.

  Summary

  What really separates the flubbers and amateurs from the professional are these two skills. One has to be able to view or hear anything he is working on at any time in a brand-new unit of time. And one has to be able to see or hear his production from the viewpoint of the eventual audience.

  In other words, the really excellent professional can be fluid in time, not stuck in the past and can be facile in space location.

  There is no reason why one should be stuck on the time track or fixated in just his own location in space.

  Actually, just knowing that these skills can exist is often enough the key to acquiring them.

  In Apprehension,

  How Like a God

  written by

  R. P. L. Johnson

  illustrated by

  DUSTIN D. PANZINO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard Johnson was born in Botswana but grew up in England with the juvenile novels of Robert Heinlein before moving on to E. E. Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Burroughs and Asimov. He still enjoys those stories from the golden age of science fiction and hopes to emulate their use of strong characters and fast-moving plots.

  His flash fiction story “A Friend in Need” was published online in alienskinmag.com and also appeared on the Hugo Award-winning podcast StarShipSofa. He is currently completing what he hopes is the final draft of his action-thriller novel, Asura.

  Richard hopes one day to write a science fiction novel that will capture the public imagination in the same way as The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter novels did, but that molds that energy in a more productive direction. He wants enthused readers to write to their politicians demanding why that space elevator remains unbuilt and the solar system uncolonized. He wants to rekindle that spirit of optimism and faith in technology from the 1950s and remix it for the 2050s. He wants the CEOs of Rockwell and Northrop Grumman in forty years’ time to have once been kids growing up with his books. He wants Facebook to have a status update for “home planet.” Is that too much to ask?

  Until that time comes, he lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife Lynn and son Adam, where he works as a structural engineer.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Dustin D. Panzino was born April 26, 1991, in Syracuse, New York.

  After leaving Syracuse in grade school, Dustin moved to Ocala, Florida, an hour north of Orlando, and entered high school. From there he was accepted to the Marion County Center for the Arts (MCCA), an art magnet program which offers classes from traditional oil painting to conceptual AP (advanced placement) art classes at West Port High School in Ocala. After graduating both high school and the MCCA program, Dustin decided to study at the New Hampshire Institute of Art for his BFA in both illustration and fine art photography. With a well-known obsession with the way time moves forward as well as back, Dustin explains his decision to double major: “A photo is an image frozen in time; a painting is created in the image of time.”

  In the long run, Dustin aspires to achieve his master’s in illustration and one day move on to teaching in order to make a life of art. With the New Hampshire Institute of Art located in the center of Manchester and only forty minutes outside of Boston, Dustin was intrigued by not only the school itself but also the beauty and history of New England. Surrounded by such a place, Dustin’s acceptance to the New Hampshire Institute of Art seemed like a dream come true.

  In Apprehension,

  How Like a God

  I watched the jet-black ball roll across the room under its own power. Easy, I thought, just a motorized weight held off-center inside the casing. Then it reached a wall and started to roll vertically up it to join a dozen or more rolling across the barrel-vaulted ceiling twenty meters above. I had seen my share of dead bodies before, but none in a place like this.

  The Academy’s visitors’ center combined the bustle of an airport departure lounge with the cavernous silence of a library. People moved to and fro between the transport termi
nus and the fortified gates that led into the campus. Most were dressed in the color-coded robes of Academy staff, but a few, like me, wore Western suits or traditional Ugandan dashiki. And through and above the crowd rolled the black spheres, the æthernet nodes.

  One of the beach-ball-sized spheres rolled up to me. It was completely featureless, a huge black pearl. It may have slid rather than rolled for all the visible cues it gave to its motion. My æthernet feed told me it was a Class III node, a subsentient, chattel-class intelligence designated Stromboli. A table of figures specifying size, weight, role and location (both physical and metaphorical within the organizational structure of the Academy) scrolled down my vision and I slapped more data filters in place, leaving only its name hovering in dull red letters above it.

  It stopped a respectful distance away and I heard its voice through my feed.

  Mister Detective Conroy, welcome, it sent.

  I spoke aloud and hoped the thing had auditory pickups of some kind on its flawless surface.

  “Just Detective will do fine,” I said, disturbing the silence and drawing disapproving looks from nearby Academy staff.

  Yes. Detective designation, not name. Apologies.

  “No need to apologize. Just show me the customer.”

  Customer? Ah yes, customer . . . client requiring services of a homicide detective. Idiom. Slang. Jargon subsection, humor: corpse, body, cadaver, stiff. This way, please.

  The node led me out of the visitors’ center and onto the campus grounds. The Academy sprawled across seventy square kilometers of parkland that stretched along the coastline of Lake Victoria. Where our path took us near the shore I could see the Entebbe hub five kilometers away on the other side of the inlet and above all the laser-straight line of the Jacob’s Ladder rising into the sky, pinning the city down like a lepidopterist’s needle.

  Despite its size, the whole campus seemed sculpted, manicured. Paths of crushed shells wound between the buildings past stands of impossibly tall palm trees and fountains that filled the air with a gentle mist of cool water, taking the edge off the equatorial heat.