Analog November 2011

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 2011 (2011)
I am often stopped in the street by strangers who ask me, what is this thing we call science-fiction? I can't help but smile as I give my reply - always the same reply - which is that just as Albert Einstein explored the boundaries of theoretical physics, so too do science-fiction authors such as Runcible V. Bottywang or Melvin Felch investigate the outer limits of science, imagination, and wonderment; and I leave my eager audience with the recommendation that they perhaps catch a few episodes of a certain television serial called Babylon 5. If it amuses me to explain that which most soon-to-be science-fiction fans will surely discover for themselves, it is a kindly amusement, for it isn't a bad question.

So what is this thing we call science-fiction?

You might respond with the name of some computer video game set on an amazing alien planet which you've recently enjoyed, but it is also Star Trek and Doctor Who and even a little movie you might just have heard of. It was quite popular in my day. Star Wars, I believe it was called.

This issue of Analog opens with Adam Troy-Castro's With Unclean Hands in which his Andrea Cort is sent to the homeworld of the Zinn, a once-powerful race now on the long path to extinction. She's expected to sign the approval for a simple prisoner transfer, but why are the Zinn so eager to take custody of an unremarkable human murderer? Cort becomes suspicious when she makes friends with a Zinn child - or fotir - named First Given, whose behaviour seems odd even for an extraterrestrial comprising bags of organs suspended beneath a carriage of spindly legs. Cort travels to the island upon which Simon Farr, the serial murderer, is allowed to live in relative liberty. It seems that humanity will receive a futuristic star drive in return for Farr, but Andrea Cort realises that a brutal crime is being planned against an innocent, and that the price is too high.

There's more but I can't be arsed to type out the whole fucking thing, particularly given that I found it a chore to read; and possibly excepting Jerry Oltion's Rocket Science, this issue didn't do much for me at all; and when the stories turn out to be mostly duds, the book reviews you find in these digest magazines are sometimes worth a look, usually featuring either something you've read and enjoyed or something you may potentially enjoy in the future. For what it may be worth, I've written this review of the November 2011 issue of Analog in the style of its book reviews - inconsequential musing as preamble, then a detailed description of characters, plot, and almost everything that happens, with finally a closing sentence telling us whether it was any good; and this issue of Analog is massively underwhelming. Here's some of what Don Saker wrote about Peter David's novelisation of a Transformers movie.

This one is a lot of fun. It starts with the truth about the Apollo program: despite what the world believes, Armstrong and Aldrin had a secret mission on the moon. They were sent there to explore an alien starship that crashed in 1961. They brought back some of the alien tech that they found there.

Curtain up in the present day. Sam Witwicky, human friend of the Autobots, meets British scientist Carly Spencer and immediately falls in love. But there's more than love on the agenda: the ship that crashed on the moon was a Transformer vessel, the evil Decepticons have learned of its cargo, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

I know it doesn't all have to be J.G. Ballard, which I state as someone who isn't even a fan of the guy, and yes I'm the proud (or at least not significantly ashamed) owner of a collection of about fifty-million X-Men comics, but Jesus fucking Christ - robots that turn into cars. Call me cynical, but a line must be drawn somewhere before we all end up falling out over the uneven continuity of fucking Paw Patrol.

I don't think I've ever read an issue of Analog which didn't have something wrong with it on some level. There have been flashes of inspiration here and there, and I genuinely believe Stanley Schmidt to be a decent guy; but the magazine has seemingly spent most of its publishing history as exciting and imaginative tales for an audience of people who are otherwise deeply suspicious of excitement, imagination, strangers, anything fancy, and colours which aren't either brown or light gray.

Thankfully this is the last of my unread issues.

Never again.

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.

Analog April 1980

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog April 1980 (1980)
Just when you think you know someone… as Lord Rothermere observed on the first of September, 1939. I've developed certain expectations as I work my way through a handful of unread back issues of Analog picked up here and there over the years, and true to form, the April 1980 issue features a science article which I couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first couple of pages, Jerry Pournelle droning on about something or other, advertisements which appear faintly ludicrous with hindsight, and the second instalment of Bob Buckley's World in the Clouds - which would be fine if it were just about terraforming Venus as the science is quite interesting and well communicated, but said terraforming is undertaken as some kind of futuristic community service deal by a street tough. I assume tough as a noun made sense for my father's generation and I remember finding it weird in Topper and Beano when I was a kid. The problem is that, science aside, the rest of the tale is written in a style consistent with the kind of writing you would expect in a story about a street tough.

Also, there's David A. Roach's Memo from the Big Chief which takes the form of correspondence between various cavepersons - one of whom is imaginatively named Ugg - detailing, I presume, health and safety concerns raised by the invention of fire. I didn't read it because I make a point of not reading short stories which take the form of correspondence, and the premise just isn't that funny.

However, this was otherwise a surprisingly enjoyable issue of this thing. The characteristically right leaning editorial is fairly liberal and concerns itself with the environment in terms which serve to remind us that Republicans weren't always the largely amoral corporate shitbags we see before us today and were once worth listening to, sometimes. The letters page features satisfyingly testy missives from Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt defending his 1979 novel Renaissance from a reviewer who may or may not have bothered to read it.

The star attraction for me, the reason why this leapt off the shelf and into my hands, would be Simak's Grotto of the Dancing Deer which notably won Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards for best short story. Oddly, it's nothing spectacular in context of Simak's body of work, but is nevertheless decent - as you would most likely expect - so I suspect someone or other simply felt it was high time Cliff won another award, which is fair.

Finally we have the novella length Nightflyers, an example of George R.R. Martin's early science-fiction work. I sort of enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, but not enough to read the books so this is my first encounter with his writing, and it's not difficult to see why he would eventually be shifting this stuff by the truckload. Nightflyers almost mashes a ghost story up with a murder mystery and flings the results out into deep space, and is of sufficient complexity and sophistication to oblige me to re-read the first half when I came back to it because I was already lost; and yet going back to start again turned out to be a genuine pleasure, such is the quality of the tale, which may even be the best thing I've read in any of these digest magazines. At least I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything I've enjoyed more.

I appreciate that even a stopped clock is correct twice a day - unless it's digital - but this one has made for a very pleasant change to the usual.

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.