Analog November 1979

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 1979 (1979)
Here's an Analog I've had for something like fifteen years, picked up from a shop in Cornwall because it seemed a shame to leave it on the shelf but never read because I soon came to realise that Analog was often shite, particularly the September 2008 issue which - seeing as I haven't mentioned it in about five minutes - featured Henry G. Stratmann's Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya, which is competition level dreadful.

Anyway, here we get off to a poor start with Beyond Relativity, G. Harry Stine's guest editorial about how science is never finished, and Einstein would have said as much and would therefore have been quite pissed off to find his theories about general relativity now set in stone. It's interesting and seems worth taking seriously once you've read past the repetitive tone of a nutcase muttering about how those fools have got it all wrong - wrong, I tell you! Elsewhere we find Stine explaining how difficult it will be to fly spaceships, and as a friend of doctors and dentists - professional people - he should know. Whether or not he has a valid point, I stopped caring because he does that thing which autodidactic bores always do of challenging you with a rhetorical question you will be unable to answer.

Why do you think there are still three highly-qualified people riding on that flight deck engaged in constant monitoring and ready to assume complete command in a split second?

I don't fucking know, George, but I'm sure you're about to tell me.

I couldn't get past the first few pages of Roger Arnold and Donald Kingsbury's lengthy article explaining where NASA have been going wrong all this time with regards to getting things up into orbit. Apparently there's a much easier way. Given that this notionally revolutionary article appeared in 1979 and it's now 2023 and we're still using massive rockets, I'm guessing maybe there wasn't a much easier way after all. Whilst Analog's blend of science fiction and science fact, or science almost fact was probably commendable, I read New Scientist for a number of years back in the nineties and I don't recall a single article written in the slightly cranky, defensive tone of the stuff you find in this thing - not one instance of anyone muttering about fools who don't understand.

On a marginally happier note, we have the fiction, of which Mark J. McGarry's Phoenix is readable and interesting from an anthropological perspective, placing a lone explorer in the midst of an inscrutable alien species, although it's somewhat let down when the phoenix turns out to be himself experiencing an holistic (or something) awakening after watching an extraterrestrial birthing ritual. His career was on the rocks but now he has purpose, you see.

Also featured is the second of three instalments of Simak's The Visitors, published as a complete novel in 1980, and even read bereft of top and tail, it's a pleasure and one which makes everything else in the mag seem underwhelming at best. The Visitors uncannily foreshadows the movie Arrival - or whatever novel that was based on, I guess - with its uncommunicative extraterrestrial monoliths floating hither and thither. I'm guessing it's either Simak's response to Close Encounters of the Third Kind - or some editor nudged him in that direction - from which healthy distance is achieved in, for one example, a character who shuns identity because he does not want it known that he had been 'taken up' by the visitor, he does not want to be another kook associated with flying saucers. As ever Simak, does his own thing.

Maybe it was because it was so totally unlike the common concept of something out of space. To a people brought up on the idiocies of TV and movie imagination, the reality must seem quite commonplace.

It's probably odd to read just the middle part of a novel I have on the shelf, but Simak is rewarding in any configuration, and this excerpt is additionally interesting in that the two page synopsis also seems to have been written by himself, or is at least recognisably his voice, which for me renders it the written equivalent of rare studio outtakes.

A less ambitious alien invasion is somehow prevented by a pair of old codgers in Kevin O'Donnell's Old Friends, which centres upon extraterrestrial technology disguised as a park bench - but a lot less Tharg's Future Shocks than that may sound and therefore pretty decent by Analog standards; and we end with Movers and Shakers by Thomas A. Easton which is satisfyingly absurd and possibly the best thing I've read in an issue of this magazine.

 

So this ended better than I had expected. Given the history of Astounding and John W. Campbell, Analog always had a lot of unfortunate stuff in its DNA, and even with the occasional uncharacteristic ray of sunshine peaking through those frowning clouds of manly pipe smoke, the advertising reminds us that we're hanging out with persons who don't work right, the sort of people who would actually read an outer space newspaper or send off for the microfilm edition of the magazine because it seemed futuristic and therefore exciting. From this, I guess we learn that these people were always amongst us. The difference is that now they have the internet.