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New Destinies #9
New Destinies Vol. 9: Fall 1990
New Destinies Vol 9 Volume 9 1990 Jim Baen
Paperback
First published August 1, 1990
29 people want to read
About the author
Jim Baen
125 books7 followersJim Baen was Editor-in-Chief and publisher of Baen Books, and renowned in the science fiction field for his taste and ability to select authors with strong storytelling ability and steer them to commercial success. Prior to founding of Baen Books, he was the editor of science fiction magazine Galaxy, science fiction editor of Ace Books, and an editor at Tor Books.
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April 8, 2025
I usually let books age on my shelf like fine wines, but I ended up starting *New Destinies* the very day I purchased it because I was on vacation and needed to stop by a used bookshop and grab something to read. I picked this edition of *New Destinies* up because I have read several of Jim Baen's *Destinies* anthologies as published by Ace in the late 70s and early 80s, which usually turn out to be solid collections which contain the occasional outstanding piece or the occasional dud amidst a sea of serviceable shorts - just the kind of reading I need while on vacation. Sadly, I found this last edition of *New Destinies* - put out by Jim Baen's own publishing house, Baen Books - to contain distinctly middling or below-average pieces. The writers here are less known than those acquired for *Destines* volumes, and I think it shows in unevenness and the lack of sure-footing in a lot of these stories. Still, there are a few memorable ones here, and I'm looking forward to breaking all of them down...
--"Risks of Memory" is an early Elizabeth Moon story which is about a scientist living under a totalitarian government. He knows the government is wrong and corrupt, but he lost his legs years ago and has his mechanical replacements on some kind of loan from the government, so when . It's not a bad story, but I never really connected with the main character, and this is really supposed to be a character-driven story more than anything else. It does kind of remind me of John Varley's "Blue Champagne" which also features a character whose decisions are dictated by their cybernetic body parts, but "Risks of Memory" lacks the colorful worldbuilding of that story. It's just kind of... bland. The prose is fine - guess it gets a 6.5/10 for mediocracy.
--"Werehouse" by Michael F. Flynn is a disturbing fable of body swapping in a grungy future where three boys who think they're men enlist the services of a carter, who illegally turns one of them into a jane (a prostitute) and the other two into wolves. Our protagonist is the best of the three boys and should know better, but that doesn't stop him from . It's a harsh punishment, but they deserve a harsh crime. And it's a harsh story, but I didn't find it to hold much value outside of shock theater; it'll probably gross you out, but I don't think it will tell you anything about people or technology that would surprise you. Still, in some ways, it is technically effective - 6.75/10.
--My favorite story here is "The Most Important Things in Life" by Kevin O'Donnell Jr., which is about a man whose partner has left him for his therapist. Then that therapist shows up on his doorstep to talk about the "addiction" that he puts all his money into: ... this macabre twist is the point of the story, and I think it's effective. It's helped the landscape of the whole piece stick in my head, and it's the cleverest thing here by far. 8/10 might be high, but in comparison to everything else here, it earns it...
--I'd never heard of T. W. Knowles II before, but "Curtain Call" ain't half bad. It looks at AI through an interesting angle: using simulacra to play parts in movies. Only in this case, one simulacra can remember its past even though its mind is being wiped, and it starts to think it's in something like a Philip K. Dick novel (or the *Westworld* TV series, or so I hear). A couple of directors are then forced to prove their simulacra technology when their producer tries to force them to close so he can take the wreckage of their company for himself - there's quite a bit going on in this story, and while I enjoyed it at the time, by the end of it I realized that it just wasn't fitting together. Knowles does the amateur thing of trying to pack too many concepts in at a single time - between AI, the movie industry, his branch of Texan flavor, and the legal scenes, he either needed to be a better juggler or write a few extra pages to flesh things out. Still, there's a distinct feel to this that implies he could've wrote more memorable pieces if he'd kept writing SF; 7.25/10.
--"Thematic Aberration" by Charles Sheffield is more of a metafictional story than a science fictional one; it's about a group of wannabe SF authors that meet every week to swap stories and about a newcomer who's not all that good at writing but can put his computer skills towards creating a machine that intakes stories and outputs them... differently? It's hard to explain, and I didn't really understand all the fuss about everything, which really took me out of the story. I have the feeling that it's smarter than I currently think and that the characters are meant to be specific people, which always helps things stay fun, so I'm giving it a 7/10 despite my misgivings.
--"Thus I Refute Kafka" by John J. Ordover is an inconsequential Kafka joke. It's a page long. I won't bother analyzing it, but it might make the Kafka devotees smile.
--"Tiger Hunt" by John Dalmas is like "Curtain Call" - it's trying to do a lot at once, and starts off looking really smart, but has a bit of a cold resolution to things. It's about a park ranger in the Pleistocene Mammals Range hunting down a saber-toothed tiger for the President of what remains of North American government (this is set after a series of tragedies including the explosion of the Yellowstone Volcanic Field and a pandemic called the Red Plague) to be able to hunt for himself when he visits. But during that visit things comes to light: . But that plot thread is more or less forgotten about so the story can have a mildly abrupt, "full steam ahead" kind of closing. It's not entirely convincing, and the characters definitely felt underserved. The world was kind of cool, but not enough emphasis was put on it... still, there was potential with it. For now, Dalmas caps at a 7.25/10.
--The last story is "Defense Initiative" by John Gribbin. It's a glimpse into what would happen if a worm virus (it's a computer thing) from an alien race would infect the computer systems on the farside of the moon and of the poor guy who's sent over there to fix it. The story is told partially from the computers' points of view, which makes things unclear and murky when you've also got parts told from the humans' perspective and Gribbin isn't a good enough prose stylist to make any of it distinct or engaging. It's just kind of blocky and *there*. I wasn't a huge fan, but I appreciated the concept and everything. Still, forgettable for some wrong reasons; 5.5/10.
--Then come the essays, which I'll probably more-or-less breeze through. First was a "State of the Sciences" by Jerry Pournelle, where he goes over developments he heard about at a scientific conference. These involve everything from electricity to nuclear power. Wasn't particularly interestingly written, and didn't really stick with me. That's a problem with reading science from over thirty years ago, but that wasn't Pournelle's fault...
--Poul Anderson and his wife attend a viewing of a Voyager launch in "Neptune Diary." It's a nice glimpse into what these kind of launches were like during NASA's hazy late 80s for someone who wasn't alive for those years, but once again, not going to do too much for everybody.
--"The Potentials of Nanotechnology and Megascale Engineering" by H. Keith Henson is an interesting piece about macroengineering on many levels (a little terrestrial and a whole lot of interstellar). Could be good food-for-thought for the science fiction writer.
--Charles Sheffield returns for "The Unlicked Bear-Whelp: A Worm's Eye Look at Chaos Theory," which he thought was a clear look at chaos theory. Well, clear is an exaggeration - it still didn't make too much sense to me. Now, I read this while on a road trip, so... maybe it's not completely Sheffield's fault. Still, I did not get as much from this as what was promised on the tin.
--Something a little more outdated is Mark L. Van Name's "2001: The Personal Computer," which theorizes what PCs would look like in the year 2001. I work in IT (Information Technology), so it was fun to see this interpretation of where the future would be. I'm not going to bore you with the technical details, but it did more for me than the majority of these essays.
--"Fusion Energy and Civilization" by S. M. Stirling talks about how different civilizations harnessed different kinds of energy, from nuclear fission to the sun. It's a solid piece, and a little more interesting and engaging than most of these shorts.
--Finally, "The B-2 Lottery" by Marc Stiegler proposes that the US could make its B-2's more reliable if it offered a cash prize to anyone who's able to shoot them down as they perform cross-country flights - I mean, a bounty system is pretty interesting, and I'm sure there's a good story in this. But as a matter of practicality? I don't think it's being taken too seriously...
Overall, this collection was middling, but there's no real big duds that could drive this rating down to 2 stars. I kind of want to give it one because I don't think that it really adds anything of much value to the field, but the nonfiction half doesn't deserve that even if it didn't do it for me... I'm going to give it 6/10, straddling the line between 2 and 3 stars. I won't be rushing out to buy more *New Destinies*, but I am sometimes a sucker for an anthology series, so I'm sure I'll at least find more volumes of both *Destines* series as time goes on. Maybe you'll see me write about them here on Goodreads; we'll find out. Until then, happy reading, no matter when it's from.
--"Risks of Memory" is an early Elizabeth Moon story which is about a scientist living under a totalitarian government. He knows the government is wrong and corrupt, but he lost his legs years ago and has his mechanical replacements on some kind of loan from the government, so when . It's not a bad story, but I never really connected with the main character, and this is really supposed to be a character-driven story more than anything else. It does kind of remind me of John Varley's "Blue Champagne" which also features a character whose decisions are dictated by their cybernetic body parts, but "Risks of Memory" lacks the colorful worldbuilding of that story. It's just kind of... bland. The prose is fine - guess it gets a 6.5/10 for mediocracy.
--"Werehouse" by Michael F. Flynn is a disturbing fable of body swapping in a grungy future where three boys who think they're men enlist the services of a carter, who illegally turns one of them into a jane (a prostitute) and the other two into wolves. Our protagonist is the best of the three boys and should know better, but that doesn't stop him from . It's a harsh punishment, but they deserve a harsh crime. And it's a harsh story, but I didn't find it to hold much value outside of shock theater; it'll probably gross you out, but I don't think it will tell you anything about people or technology that would surprise you. Still, in some ways, it is technically effective - 6.75/10.
--My favorite story here is "The Most Important Things in Life" by Kevin O'Donnell Jr., which is about a man whose partner has left him for his therapist. Then that therapist shows up on his doorstep to talk about the "addiction" that he puts all his money into: ... this macabre twist is the point of the story, and I think it's effective. It's helped the landscape of the whole piece stick in my head, and it's the cleverest thing here by far. 8/10 might be high, but in comparison to everything else here, it earns it...
--I'd never heard of T. W. Knowles II before, but "Curtain Call" ain't half bad. It looks at AI through an interesting angle: using simulacra to play parts in movies. Only in this case, one simulacra can remember its past even though its mind is being wiped, and it starts to think it's in something like a Philip K. Dick novel (or the *Westworld* TV series, or so I hear). A couple of directors are then forced to prove their simulacra technology when their producer tries to force them to close so he can take the wreckage of their company for himself - there's quite a bit going on in this story, and while I enjoyed it at the time, by the end of it I realized that it just wasn't fitting together. Knowles does the amateur thing of trying to pack too many concepts in at a single time - between AI, the movie industry, his branch of Texan flavor, and the legal scenes, he either needed to be a better juggler or write a few extra pages to flesh things out. Still, there's a distinct feel to this that implies he could've wrote more memorable pieces if he'd kept writing SF; 7.25/10.
--"Thematic Aberration" by Charles Sheffield is more of a metafictional story than a science fictional one; it's about a group of wannabe SF authors that meet every week to swap stories and about a newcomer who's not all that good at writing but can put his computer skills towards creating a machine that intakes stories and outputs them... differently? It's hard to explain, and I didn't really understand all the fuss about everything, which really took me out of the story. I have the feeling that it's smarter than I currently think and that the characters are meant to be specific people, which always helps things stay fun, so I'm giving it a 7/10 despite my misgivings.
--"Thus I Refute Kafka" by John J. Ordover is an inconsequential Kafka joke. It's a page long. I won't bother analyzing it, but it might make the Kafka devotees smile.
--"Tiger Hunt" by John Dalmas is like "Curtain Call" - it's trying to do a lot at once, and starts off looking really smart, but has a bit of a cold resolution to things. It's about a park ranger in the Pleistocene Mammals Range hunting down a saber-toothed tiger for the President of what remains of North American government (this is set after a series of tragedies including the explosion of the Yellowstone Volcanic Field and a pandemic called the Red Plague) to be able to hunt for himself when he visits. But during that visit things comes to light: . But that plot thread is more or less forgotten about so the story can have a mildly abrupt, "full steam ahead" kind of closing. It's not entirely convincing, and the characters definitely felt underserved. The world was kind of cool, but not enough emphasis was put on it... still, there was potential with it. For now, Dalmas caps at a 7.25/10.
--The last story is "Defense Initiative" by John Gribbin. It's a glimpse into what would happen if a worm virus (it's a computer thing) from an alien race would infect the computer systems on the farside of the moon and of the poor guy who's sent over there to fix it. The story is told partially from the computers' points of view, which makes things unclear and murky when you've also got parts told from the humans' perspective and Gribbin isn't a good enough prose stylist to make any of it distinct or engaging. It's just kind of blocky and *there*. I wasn't a huge fan, but I appreciated the concept and everything. Still, forgettable for some wrong reasons; 5.5/10.
--Then come the essays, which I'll probably more-or-less breeze through. First was a "State of the Sciences" by Jerry Pournelle, where he goes over developments he heard about at a scientific conference. These involve everything from electricity to nuclear power. Wasn't particularly interestingly written, and didn't really stick with me. That's a problem with reading science from over thirty years ago, but that wasn't Pournelle's fault...
--Poul Anderson and his wife attend a viewing of a Voyager launch in "Neptune Diary." It's a nice glimpse into what these kind of launches were like during NASA's hazy late 80s for someone who wasn't alive for those years, but once again, not going to do too much for everybody.
--"The Potentials of Nanotechnology and Megascale Engineering" by H. Keith Henson is an interesting piece about macroengineering on many levels (a little terrestrial and a whole lot of interstellar). Could be good food-for-thought for the science fiction writer.
--Charles Sheffield returns for "The Unlicked Bear-Whelp: A Worm's Eye Look at Chaos Theory," which he thought was a clear look at chaos theory. Well, clear is an exaggeration - it still didn't make too much sense to me. Now, I read this while on a road trip, so... maybe it's not completely Sheffield's fault. Still, I did not get as much from this as what was promised on the tin.
--Something a little more outdated is Mark L. Van Name's "2001: The Personal Computer," which theorizes what PCs would look like in the year 2001. I work in IT (Information Technology), so it was fun to see this interpretation of where the future would be. I'm not going to bore you with the technical details, but it did more for me than the majority of these essays.
--"Fusion Energy and Civilization" by S. M. Stirling talks about how different civilizations harnessed different kinds of energy, from nuclear fission to the sun. It's a solid piece, and a little more interesting and engaging than most of these shorts.
--Finally, "The B-2 Lottery" by Marc Stiegler proposes that the US could make its B-2's more reliable if it offered a cash prize to anyone who's able to shoot them down as they perform cross-country flights - I mean, a bounty system is pretty interesting, and I'm sure there's a good story in this. But as a matter of practicality? I don't think it's being taken too seriously...
Overall, this collection was middling, but there's no real big duds that could drive this rating down to 2 stars. I kind of want to give it one because I don't think that it really adds anything of much value to the field, but the nonfiction half doesn't deserve that even if it didn't do it for me... I'm going to give it 6/10, straddling the line between 2 and 3 stars. I won't be rushing out to buy more *New Destinies*, but I am sometimes a sucker for an anthology series, so I'm sure I'll at least find more volumes of both *Destines* series as time goes on. Maybe you'll see me write about them here on Goodreads; we'll find out. Until then, happy reading, no matter when it's from.
March 22, 2019
An enjoyable collection of both fiction stories and nonfiction essays from 1990. Most of the essays are somewhat dated now but I enjoyed S. M. Stirling's piece on "Fusion," and a piece on nanotechnology by Keith Henson.
My favorite story was "Tiger Hunt" by John Dalmas, which involves a reestablished megafauna preserve in Montana. Good stuff. All the stories were enjoyable though.
My favorite story was "Tiger Hunt" by John Dalmas, which involves a reestablished megafauna preserve in Montana. Good stuff. All the stories were enjoyable though.
January 6, 2013
It has been many, many years since I read the New Destinies series but I remember there were some real gems to be found in each volume. Sadly I only ever picked up volumes 1, 3 and 9. This volume 9 from the Fall of 1990 was a good one, it had three distinct sections: Science Fiction which contained short stories by Elizabeth Moon, Michael Flynn, Kevin O'Donnell Jr., T.W. Knowles II, Charles Sheffield, John J. Ordover, John Dalmas and John Gribbin.
The second section was Speculative Fact with articles like "Neptune Diary" by Poul Anderson and "2001: The Personal Computer" by Mark L. Van Name. These two articles are going to force me to re-read this book again now even though it has been on my shelf for probably 20 years. It will be interesting to see just how much Mark underestimated computing power by trying to look just 11 years into the future. Heck, I will have a challenge just trying to remember what my own computers were like that long ago.
The last section is mentioned on the frontispiece thusly "...and Marc Stiegler weighs in with a solution to overspending in the defense department and a national game show all in one: The B-2 Lottery". This is another piece that is going to be relevant even today, just substitute out the B-2 for something like the F-22 Raptor or another very expensive piece of hardware.
The second section was Speculative Fact with articles like "Neptune Diary" by Poul Anderson and "2001: The Personal Computer" by Mark L. Van Name. These two articles are going to force me to re-read this book again now even though it has been on my shelf for probably 20 years. It will be interesting to see just how much Mark underestimated computing power by trying to look just 11 years into the future. Heck, I will have a challenge just trying to remember what my own computers were like that long ago.
The last section is mentioned on the frontispiece thusly "...and Marc Stiegler weighs in with a solution to overspending in the defense department and a national game show all in one: The B-2 Lottery". This is another piece that is going to be relevant even today, just substitute out the B-2 for something like the F-22 Raptor or another very expensive piece of hardware.
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