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 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.

 

 

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.