by Gideon Marcus

Tuckered out

Imagine training your whole life to run in the Olympics.  Imagine making it and competing in the quadrennial event, representing your nation before the entire world.  Imagine making perfect strides, outdistancing your competitors, sailing far out in front…and then stumbling.

Defeat at the moment of victory.

Ron Clarke of Australia, favored to win 1964's 10,000 meter race, is blown past at the last minute by American Billy Mills (and aced by Tunisia's Mohammed Gammoudi )

Every month, as a science fiction magazine reviewer, I am treated to a similar drama.  Usually, the law of averages dictates that no month will be particularly better or worse than any other.  But occasionally, there is a mirabilis month, or perhaps things are really getting better across the entire genre.  Either way, as magazine after magazine got their review, it became clear that March 1966 was going to be a very good month.  Not a single magazine was without at least one 4 or 5 star story — even the normally staid Science Fantasy turned in a stellar performance under the new name, Impulse.

It all came down to this month's Analog.  If it were superb, as it was last month, then we'd have a clean sweep across eight periodicals.  If it flopped, as it often does, the streak would be broken.

As it turns out, neither eventuality quite came to pass.  Indeed, the March 1966 Analog is sort of a microcosm of the month itself — starting out with a bang and faltering before the finish.

Frontloaded

by John Schoenherr

Bookworm, Run!, by Vernor Vinge

by John Schoenherr

Norman Simmonds is on the lam.  Brilliant, resourceful, and inspired by his pulp and SF heroes, he breaks out of a top security research facility in Michigan, his mind full of inadvertently espied government secrets.  His goal is to make the Canadian border before he can be punished for his accidental indiscretion. Thus ensues an exciting cat and mouse chase toward the border.

Did I mention that Norman is a chimpanzee?

With the aid of surgery and a link to the nation's most sophisticated computer, Norman is not only smarter than the average human, he has all of the world's facts at his beck and call.  His only limitation (aside from standing out in a crowd) is that he can only get so far from his master mainframe before the link is strained to breaking.  The pivotal question, then, is whether Canada lies inside or beyond that range.

Bookworm is a compelling story whose main fault comes (in keeping with this month's trend) near the end, when we leave Norman's viewpoint and instead are treated to a few pages' moralizing about why such technology must never be allowed to be used by humanity lest one person gain virtual godhood.  I have to wonder if that coda was always in the tale or if it was added by Campbell at the last minute to make less subtle the themes of the story.

Anyway, four stars for Vinge's first American sale (and second overall).  I look forward to what he has to offer next.

The Ship Who Mourned, by Anne McCaffrey

by Kelly Freas

Speaking of intelligence in unusual forms, The Ship Who Mourned is the sequel to the quite good The Ship Who Sang, starring a woman raised nearly from birth as a brain with a shapeship body.  In that first story, her companion/passenger/driver, Jennan, died, leaving Helva-the-ship distraught.

But with no time to grieve.  Her next assignment comes almost immediately: take Theoda, a doctor, to a faraway world so that she might treat the aftereffects of a plague that has left thousands completely immobile, trapped in their nonresponsive bodies.  Though Helva is initially frosty toward Theoda, they bond over their own griefs, and together, they manage to bring hope to the plague-blasted planet.

This is a good story.  I'm surprised to see it in Analog in part because the series got its start in F&SF, and also because the mag has been something of a stag party for a long long time (even more than its woman-scarce colleagues).  Despite enjoying it a lot, there is a touch of the amateur about it, a certain clunkiness of execution.  McCaffrey may simply be out of practice; it has been five years since her last story, after all.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the cobwebs will come right off if she can get back to writing consistently again.  A high three stars.

Giant Meteor Impact, by J.  E.  Enever

Asteroid impact seems all the rage this month.  Asimov was talking about it in his F&SF column, and Heinlein may soon be talking about it in If.  Enever describes in lurid detail the damage the Earth would suffer from an astroid a "meer" kilometer in width — and why an ocean impact is far, far scarier than one on land.

The author presents the topic with gusto, but a little too much length.  It wavers between fascinating and meandering.  Had we gotten some of the juicy bits included in Asimov's article, that would have made for a stellar (pun intended) piece.

As is, three stars.

Operation Malacca, by Joe Poyer

by Leo Summers

And it is here, at the two thirds mark, that we stumble.

Last we heard from Joe Poyer, he was offering up the turgid technical thriller, Mission "Red Clash".  This time, the premise is a little better: Indonesia has planted a 5 megaton bomb borrowed from the Red Chinese in the Straits of Malacca.  If detonated, it will wipe out the British fleet and pave the way for a takeover of Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.  Only a washed out cetecean handler and his dolphin companion can save the day. 

Sounds like a high stakes episode of Flipper, doesn't it?

Well, unfortunately, the first ten pages are all a lot of talking, the dolphin-centric middle is utterly characterless, merely a series of events, and then the dolphin is out of the picture the last dull third of the story.

Unlike McCaffrey, my predictions for Joe's writing career are rather pessimistic.  But we'll see…

Two stars.

10:01 A.M., by Alexander Malec

by John Schoenherr

At 10:01 A.M., a couple of joyriding punks cause the hit and run murder of a little girl.  Within the space of an hour, they are swallowed by a floating "fetcher" car, hauled before a detective, thence to a judge, and capital sentence is rendered.

Malec writes as if he was taking a break from technical writing and could not shift gears into fiction writing. Compound that with a lurid presentation that betrays an almost pornographic obsession with the subject matter (both the technological details and the grinding of the gears of justice), and it makes for an unpleasant experience.

Two stars.

Prototaph, by Keith Laumer

And lastly, a vignette which is essentially one-page joke story told in three.  Who is the one man who is uninsurable?  The one whose death is guaranteed.

Except they never explain why his death is guaranteed.

Dumb.  One star.

Tallying the scores

And so Analog limps across the finish line with a rather dismal 2.6 rating.  Indeed, it is the second worst magazine of the month (although that's partly because most everything else was excellent). To wit:

• Fantasy and Science Fiction: 3.5
• Impulse: 3.4
• Fantastic: 3.2
• New Worlds: 3.2
• Worlds of Tomorrow: 2.9
• New Writings: 2.6
• IF: 2.5

Ah well.  At the very least, Campbell took some chances with this issue, which I appreciate.  And the first two thirds are good.  There was just a lot riding on the mag this month.  The perils of getting one's hopes up!

As for the statistics, I count 8.5% of this month's new stories as written by women, which is high for recent days.  If you took all of the four and five star stories from this month, you could easily fill three magazines, which is excellent.

Always focus on the positive, right?

---

---

The Journey is once again up for a Best Fanzine Hugo nomination — and its founder is up for several other awards as well!  If you've got a Worldcon membership, or if you just want to see what Gideon's done that's Hugo-worthy, please read his Hugo Eligibility article!  Thank you for your continued support.