Analog November 1966

John W. Campbell (editor) Analog November 1966 (1966 obviously)
The more I learn of John W. Campbell, the less I like, and this didn't help. I've recently been listening to Frank Zappa's We're Only in It for the Money album and have found myself particularly entertained by Bow Tie Daddy, a short jolly burst of ragtime sarcasm.

Bow tie daddy dontcha blow your top,
Everything's under control.
Bow tie daddy dontcha blow your top,
'Cause you think you're gettin' too old.
Don't try to do no thinkin',
Just go on with your drinkin',
Just have your fun, you old son of a gun,
Then drive home in your Lincoln.

Anyway, I get the impression that Analog was probably essential reading for the bow tie daddies of America. This is the second issue I've read, and the first featured Henry G. Stratmann's The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya which is probably the worst short story I've ever encountered.

'What the fuck, Lawrence, man?' I hear you ask. 'Why you be putting yourself through that shit? Man, that's fucked up.'

I was in one of those used book stores resembling the front room of some hoarder - weird smells, nothing in any particular order, and half of the stock piled in random towers here and there. I found this and bought it, being quite partial to a spot of Murray Leinster. Only when I got home did I realise that I'd already read Quarantine World as one of the three collected in SOS from Three Worlds.

Oh well.

Unfortunately, while SOS from Three Worlds is not without charm, it was never anything mind-bending, and Quarantine World is arguably its weakest story; which leaves us with Christopher Anvil's Facts to Fit the Theory, Stewart Robb's Letter from a Higher Critic, and the final instalment of Randall Garrett's serialised Too Many Magicians. There's also a scientific article about alternative dimensions which seemed to be mostly sums and was therefore incomprehensible to me; plus book reviews, letters, some editorial about antibiotics and the FDA, and an advertisement for a five album boxed set from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on the back cover. The issue to follow this one apparently featured Amazon Planet by Mack Reynolds, as summarised thus:

Amazonia, being the only planet colonised by a bunch of fiercely feminist women, was naturally all the more fiercely determined that the other misguided (read: "male-guided") planets of the United Planets weren't going to interfere in any way whatever.

Which made it a l-i-t-t-l-e difficult for a United Planets man to land on the planet—even if Amazonia needed his help badly. But when a little, inoffensive contract negotiator man got into a slight mix up over names—they read his name Guy as Gay—he was in for trouble of types he had never dreamed of. Amazonia has some very unusual marriage customs it seems…

See what I mean?

Anyway, Facts to Fit the Theory is a short story taking the form of memos and letters exchanged between various star colonels and solar lieutenants discussing military protocol as applied to the defense of some planet during an alien incursion, so I couldn't be bothered to finish that one. Letter from a Higher Critic is yet another story taking the form of a letter, this time composed by someone from the far future disputing the facts of ancient history, which is actually our present, and for reasons which aren't really sufficiently novel as to form the basis of a short story; and the title Too Many Magicians probably tells you as much as you need to know about Randall Garrett's thing, which employs the address my Lord in more or less every other sentence, ingeniously features a character named Sir Lyon Gandolphus Grey, and amounts to an unusually long episode of Midsomer Murders written as a tenth generation Tolkien knock off. It isn't quite so bad as Anvil or Robb's contributions, but I nevertheless gave up about half way through. There just didn't seem to be a point in reading any more.

Yup. Excepting one of Leinster's lesser works, this was rubbish, I tell you what. Even Bow Tie Daddy deserved better.