Analog September 2008

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog September 2008 (2008)
This was the first issue of Analog I ever bought, and it probably wasn't a great place to start. I've long held The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by Henry G. Stratmann to be the worst short story I've ever read. Coming back to it fifteen years later, I realise it's not quite so painfully didactic as I recall, and online research reveals the author to be an almost certainly above average decent guy whom I find difficult to square with this particular example of his writing. Last Temptation reads like fundamentalist Christian science-fiction written by someone who prefers movies to books and who might be more at home churning out romance novels. The story is that mysterious and powerful aliens have moved Mars into a lower orbit around the sun, somehow rendering it habitable, but only two people are allowed to visit - a man and a woman, and maybe you can see where this is heading. She's deeply religious. He comes from a more scientific background and is portrayed as cynical - although it seems he's simply a realist to me. The two of them discover a giant pyramid within which they are subjected to a number of spiritual and moral trials seemingly to determine whether or not humanity will be allowed to colonise. On this, my second reading, the story isn't quite so simplistic as I've made it sound, but as with much fiction driven by religious ideology, it feels as though we're playing with a stacked deck, are perhaps even subject to a certain level of condescension, and the symbolism seems at least as heavy-handed as painfully allegorical episodes of sixties Star Trek - although I sort of enjoyed Stratmann replacing the apple in the Garden of Eden with a radish, for what it may be worth.

That being said, it's better than I remember and, I would guess, is more likely a philosophical tale which suffers from the necessary fine balance having eluded its author, rather than the Bible-thumping sermon for which I took it in 2008. It doesn't help that a couple of deferential references to romantic fiction do nothing to prevent it reading like the same, or the number of times Stratmann invokes a specific TV show or movie.

He looked up at the towering structure and growled, 'A pyramid on Mars. With our luck, we'll find Sutekh waiting for us inside.'

'Who?'

Martin smiled mischievously. 'That's right.'

I'm sure that works for most of those who would get the reference, and who would then go on to declare the author a genius in the tradition of literary giants such as Terrance Dicks, but it didn't do a lot for me. I still find The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya vaguely annoying, but after this second reading I've warmed to the idea that Stratmann has probably written better.

Elsewhere in the magazine we find an article about nanotechnology which I didn't really understand and three further short stories which, if not terrible, mostly had me hoping the next one would be better, which it wasn't. We close with one of those review columns which simply relates a detailed plot outline of each title under discussion, then part two of the presumably novel length Tracking by David R. Palmer. Tracking is written in an experimental first person narrative shorthand which tends to eschew pronouns and articles so as to presumably mimic the sensation of experience, so it reads like Chris Claremont's thought bubbles from eighties issues of X-Men. It sort of works once you're used to it, but forty pages seems like a lot and I gave up after about twenty.

The best thing about this were Stanley Schmidt's editorial and his memorial to Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, even his response to some letters page dingus accusing him of expressing eugenicist sympathies in a previous issue is more interesting than the rest of it. I guess this explains why I never became a regular reader.