Jamestown, 2107
a paywalled reprint: part 1
Advertisements for Myself
I bought the Special Slightly Spooky Issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction a few weeks go, my first one ever. Oh, I’d read others, either in libraries or personal collections, but never actually paid for one. This one was lying on the counter in the B&N Cafe, and something about the color scheme or maybe the wolf silhouetted on the cover spoke to me. Or maybe it was just curiosity.
Robert Silverberg has apparently been writing a column for them for almost thirty years, since the magazine’s namesake Isaac Asimov died in 1994.
. . . in it I talk about whatever I see fit to talk about: scientific news, cultural changes, the history of science fiction, and all sorts of things that happen to me, ME, Robert Silverberg, my travels or my work or my computer problems or my encounters with other writers, on the assumption that a wide audience will find them of interest.
Nice work if you can get it.
This column, in fact, is a kind of ongoing autobiography of my life and mind: a long series of four-page installments in which I express my thoughts and opinions and prejudices and speak of my daily experiences or my writing projects or anything else I care to, essentially creating what is, in Norman Mailer’s estimable phrase, a vast group of advertisements for myself.
I share the Grand Master’s ambivalence about naked self-promotion. I do it, to some extent, because I have to in this crowded environment, but it always feels kind of icky.
For that reason I have hired one of the best salesmen I know to help get the word out. He was kind enough to hire me to tutor his kids through the transition from home school back into the system, post-pandemic, so I’m also satisfying my karmic intuitions.
This short story was one of fourteen included in the Mohs 5.5 Mars anthology, their second Kickstarter campaign, published just as I was starting this Substack.
(Note: despite what the purple text above says, you have to scroll down past the paywall to read the full fiction story.)
The exclusivity / royalties on that story ended long ago, but I was curious and e-mailed the indie publisher to see how we did.
Sales all time are 869 (ebooks and physical), and ‘borrows’ (the Kindle Unlimited program) totaled 203, for a grand total of 1072 units.
That’s nice to know. I’ve never known, for any of my few magazine sales, the kinds of reader information that Substack provides me. That’s a tangible value. Is it worth 10%? At this point, with so few subscribers, absolutely yes. I am not yet in a position to worry about any potential “twiddling” behaviors that Cory Doctorow described in that 3-part series for On the Media that I mentioned last week.
Jamestown, 2107
“We must, indeed, all hang together,
or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
—Benjamin Franklin, Continental Congress, 1776
Dexter Schwing floated through the door of the Bench, to a view of a line of empty VR setups. One person was there, downloading the data from the latest sequencer runs on the surface. He cursed inwardly. Manipulating data feeds was a whole lot easier when nobody was watching.
“You’re early,” said the inconvenience, a short thick Indian woman with dark hair and a few facial scars, from teenage acne or possibly something more serious. Despite the multiple recent pandemics back on Earth, people were still reluctant to ask direct questions.
“Yeah, it takes forever to calibrate the VR headsets up on the Asaph,” Dexter replied. “The response times are so much faster down here.”
“Yes,” she said, but even Dexter – not the most alert person to social cues – could tell she wasn’t really listening, more intent on her own work. Everyone was behind where they wanted to be, working remotely from this low orbit habitat instead of the quarantined surface base. Phobos was the closest moon to its parent planet in the solar system, only six thousand kilometers from Mars, but that meant it whipped around the planet three times a day. During those windows when they had line-of-sight on the research facility, and could interface with the laboratory robots directly, efficiency was key. Americans worked with Americans, Indians with Indians, ESA with ESA. Officially.
Dexter tried again. “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name.” It was important for him to work out the schedule, to find those times when there were holes in coverage. The problem was, these were scientists, always working off-shift, trying to squeeze a little extra out of the impossible.
“Madhavi. I work third shift, on the methane emitters.”
“I’m a Sea Monkey.” When the woman raised her eyebrows, he continued, “You know, those little brine shrimp they used to advertise on the backs of comic books, with the drawings that looked more like humans than arthropods?” He sighed, outwardly, at her confused frown. Cross-cultural humor was tricky, especially when one of those cultures was Nerd. Not everyone watched documentaries on old pop culture. “I work on the Halobacter analogues.”
“Oh, yes! Very interesting.” They smiled at each other awkwardly for several seconds, until Dexter abruptly left. Shaken, and also somewhat stirred, Dexter thought to himself. Definitely not Bond material.
The definitive discovery of microbial life on Mars had re-ignited the debate on how life got started on Earth. Had it hitched a ride on asteroids blasted off the surface of the cratered red planet, which in earlier epochs had water and an atmosphere? If that were true, Mars’s microbiome would be older and therefore more diverse than Earth’s — assuming that time and change hadn’t killed off whole branches.
The discovery of one new species in a Yellowstone hot spring, and the heat-stable enzyme it used to copy its own DNA, kicked off a biotech revolution on Earth, allowing the polymerase chain reaction to amplify tiny samples from just about anything — soil bacteria, Neanderthal bones, single drops of blood from crime scenes. Mars was a potential gold mine, biologically, especially if the corporations could get hold of the sequences before open-source journals could publish them for the whole world to see. That was the deal Dexter Schwing had made with a company back on Earth. They approached him the same day he was selected for this mission.
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