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A delightful new Christmas novella from Connie Willis. Some aliens (inaccurately dubbed the Altairi) have landed in Colorado, but no one has been able to figure out how to communicate with them. They have such an air of disapproval ("like great aunt Judith") that the people working with them keep moving on to other projects. Which is why the narrator, a newspaper columnist who once wrote about aliens, is included in the group. Meg makes for a very amusing narrator, and she's one of the ones who finally figures out the aliens. Near the beginning of the story, the aliens have been taken to a mall to see if they respond to anything, and they suddenly sit down. Meg enlists the aid of a choir director there with middle school girls, the only one who noticed that the aliens sat down in response to a Christmas song playing in the mall, and they sat down exactly in time with the title words. Together, Meg and Mr. Ledbetter begin to puzzle out which songs the Altairi respond to and why, and finally figure out what the aliens were waiting for.

This is a delightfully humorous take on both alien invasion type of stories and Christmas stories. Early on, Mr. Ledbetter calls Meg frantic that she not let the aliens listen to any other carols, since there are all kinds of dark and dangerous verbs sprinkled through them, and they don't know what the Altairi might start doing. It's obvious that Willis is pretty well-versed in her Christmas carols and has thought about this before-- including the "Satan's power" in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" that G. loves to do in a dark sinister voice. The answer, when it comes, is perfectly logical and makes great sense-- and makes you wonder what intelligent, wise aliens would think of humanity if they came to visit (turning them into a media circus, claiming they are there to support a particular religion, everyone trying to use it for their own ends).

The first part of the story is available online, but I warn you-- if you read it, you will probably do like I did and find yourself needing to buy a copy of Asimov's so you can finish the story.

Title:	All Seated on the Ground
Author:	Connie Willis
Date published:	2007 (in Asimov's Science Fiction December 2007 issue)
Genre:	Christmas Science Fiction
Number of pages:	44
Notes:

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This book was not as good as I remembered-- and I always knew it was not great literature. Now it seems like a lot of male wish-fulfillment fantasy. Stile, a serf on the futuristic planet of Proton, has an attempt made on his life, discovers he can cross over into the parallel but magical world of Phaze, and finds out that there he is one of the most powerful magicians, an Adept. In Proton he has a beautiful android named Sheen that an unknown benefactor sent to protect him, and in Phaze he befriends a shape-changing unicorn named Neysa. He sleeps with both of them whenever he is in their respective worlds, all the while admitting to himself that he can never truly love either of them since they are not human.

One of the features of Proton that seems particularly male wish-fulfillment fantasy is that all the serfs are naked-- only the citizens wear clothes. This is taking Mark Twain's humorous statement about clothes a little too far ("clothes make the man-- naked people have little or no influence in society"). Anthony makes a big deal (repeatedly) of how clothing and partially covered nakedness is so much more appealing than complete nakedness-- but his male characters also seem always to look over and visually evaluate the nude females they come into contact with. A part of me is horrified that I read this when I was younger (although I'm sure I didn't pay attention much to the nudity or innuendo, and read it more for the adventure and the unicorns). Supposedly, life is so great on Proton that people would rather be a serf there than live like kings elsewhere in the universe. There's a lot to this that doesn't quite make sense, and a lot of things that seem impractical to do nude (riding horses, running marathons, etc.), but Anthony doesn't worry about that.

I picked this book up because it was convenient when I had nothing to read; I pulled it out because I thought G. would enjoy it-- particularly because of the Game of Proton. Here, Anthony has created something pretty interesting. The great Game is one where two players make selections from broad categories in a grid, together choosing a game to compete in-- and the strategy comes in at the very beginning, trying to maneuver your opponent into a category where they are not skilled but you are. This is an interesting idea, and the descriptions of the Games Stile plays are always pretty interesting. However, Stile's wide range of expertise and skill seems a little ridiculous-- he has practiced everything from sword play to music in order to make himself a competent Gamesman, and one wonders how he has any time for his job.

I vaguely remember there being some clever reference to the title, but I didn't find it in this book. Odd.

Title:	Split Infinity
Author:	Piers Anthony
Date published:	1987
Genre:	Fantasy / Science Fiction
Series:	Apprentice Adept
Number of pages:	368
Notes:	repeat reading

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