by Gideon Marcus
Good and bad medicine
Yesterday saw a major milestone in the journey toward President Johnson's "Great Society": Medicare is now a reality, though it won't take effect until July 1 of next year. This offshoot of Social Security puts the U.S. government in the insurance business, ensuring health care for our nation's elderly. It's a first step toward the universal health care endorsed so fervently by Harry Truman nearly twenty years ago.
Of course, the legislation has its detractors, most vocally the American Medical Association, which has been against medical insurance in general for decades and against government involvement therein specifically. They certainly don't like the idea of their fee being in any way mandated from above. Medicare currently has a provision that the fee a doctor charges the program must be “customary, prevailing and reasonable.” On the other hand, there is a loophole in that provision, put in to appease the AMA, that says doctors don't have to accept what Medicare pays them as payment in full.
I wonder if that provision will be abused…
It is perhaps only coincidence that this month's issue of Analog is fronted by pieces inspired by the health industry. One can but admire editor John W. Campbell Jr. for his perspicacity in timing. However, since Campbell is the editor, the conclusions his pieces arrive at aren't necessarily in concordance with my views. You can let me know what you think:
Say Awwwww
by Kelly Freas
Half a Loaf, by R. C. FitzPatrick
by Kelly Freas
Children with severe mental disability beyond the possibility of treatment are being sent to Sunnyvale, a terminal home. Comfort is the priority for the kids as their maladies appear incurable; they are to simply live out the rest of their lives being cared for.
This bleak outlook isn't good enough for Sylvia, a social worker who has become attached to Tommy Magee, an eight year old child with a fine mind but no control of his body. When Tommy is sent to Sunnyvale, she heads there, too, to investigate. It turns out that there is some kind of treatment going on after all, and children are being sent home, apparently in full command of their faculties.
Loaf is thus something of a detective story, with the reader following Sylvia along until she, with the help of her doctor friend, Morecai, learns Sunnyvale's secret.
FitzPatrick is a relatively new author with few titles to his credit. There is no question but that he can write compellingly, and Loaf sucks you in immediately. But the author waits too long to reveal the twist, reducing the piece to something of a gimmick story. Moreover, the treatment process has, shall we say, profound moral implications that are left virtually unaddressed. FitzPatrick could have cut to the chase much sooner and explored the ramifications of his tale more thoroughly, to the greater satisfaction to this reader, at least. As is, the author ends with a conspiratorial wink as the curtain drops. It's got Campbell's editorial fingerprints all over it. By now, we all know his stance on eugenics, after all.
Anyway, three stars — an average of a four-star start and a two-star finish.
Positive Feedback, by Christopher Anvil
by Kelly Freas
Chris Anvil can write, honest. I've seen it. But never when he publishes in Analog. Feedback is a tale in epistolary about the dangers of universal auto insurance. It's really an indictment of medical insurance, arguing that 1) insurance just leads to folks getting unnecessary procedures and 2) people should eschew the experts and just learn a little more self care.
Never mind that insurance allows for preventative maintenance that can head off expensive procedures. And never mind that, despite what Campbell may think, trained medical doctors…er…certified auto mechanics know a bit more about what they service than individuals.
I'm not saying that we might not benefit from learning to change our own oil (or moderate our diet) but the straw insurance man Anvil presents is a ludicrous way to try to make that point.
Two stars.
Microminiature Industry, by Carl A. Larson
Apparently, yeasts and other microorganisms have been and can be used to synthesize all sorts of useful chemicals. I say "apparently" because this meandering, subheadingless article was pretty much unreadable.
Two stars for actually being science, at least.
Sleep No More, by James H. Schmitz
by John Schoenherr
The prospect of a Telzey Amberdon story always fills me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, tales of a 15-year old brilliant telepathic girl should be right up my alley. On the other hand, Schmitz (who has written great stuff but often doesn't) has increasingly managed to leach any character or color from these stories.
Last time we saw Telzey, she had psychically enfeebled the mind of the murderous Robane, a powerful telepath in a crippled body who lured people to his estate to be mauled by his pet beast. When Telzey goes back to make sure Robane is truly harmless, she is set upon by a teleporting monster.
Telzey, in this story, has absolutely no personality. She simply goes through the motions of evasion and planning to come out alive, and the reader will not know anything more about her by the end than they did at the beginning. Schmitz also manages to never say in one word what he can say in two.
It's really a shame that I cannot give this tale more than two stars.
Fighting Division, by Randall Garrett
by Leo Summers
We have a slight uptick in this short Garrett piece, about a President who hoaxes an alien invasion to unite the normally hostile superpowers. It's an old plot, but Garrett gives it a fresh twist.
Three stars. Probably the best story in the magazine; certainly the one sweet spot in a bitter brew.
Trader Team (Part 2 of 2), by Poul Anderson
by John Schoenherr
And finally, we conclude the adventures of Falkayn, the Terran assigned to the one-face world of Ikrananka (last issue) to try to establish trade relations. While on the planet, the local human population, warrior descendants of a crashed starship, revolt and try to seize control.
Though this second half of the story is as long as the first half, virtually nothing of consequence happens in it. There are attempts at a rollicking story with vignettes involving the foul-mouthed, monkey-like Chee, the centaur saurian Buddhist, Adzel, and the rather hapless but ultimately triumphant human, Falkayn. But the whole thing falls flat, much more akin to the author's A Bicycle Built for Brew than his Three Hearts and Three Lions or his The High Crusade.
Sorry I don't have more to say about it; it's utterly forgettable. Two stars for this installment, two and a half for the total.
Diagnosing the Patient
The medicine is good deal more castor oil than grape cough syrup this month, that's for certain. Only Worlds of Tomorrow (3.3 stars) and Science Fantasy (3 stars) finished above the mediocre line.
New Worlds clocked in at 2.8 and Fantasy and Science Fiction scored 2.6. IF was a dismal 2.3.
But the bottom of the month is reserved for Analog and Amazing (a tie at 2.1) and the putrescent Galaxy (1.8).
Out of 50 stories, just one (1) was written by a woman. Not only does science fiction appear to be dying, but we are retrogressing in terms of demographic equality.
Do we pull the plug, or is there hope for resuscitation?
(come join us in Portal 55, Galactic Journey's virtual lounge!)
"Half a Loaf" was rather disturbing, perhaps especially because the author didn't address the moral and ethical ramifications of his idea. And he definitely took far too long to get to the point.
Somebody has got to get Chris Anvil away from Campbell. Even his last couple of forays in other mags have been subpar. This one might have been written by Campbell himself. You could practically hear him cackling with glee over sticking it to doctors or insurance companies or whatever point he thought was being made.
It may have meandered, but the science article was still a cut above the usual Analog article. There does seem to be a slight uptick in the science writing here lately. Last month's article was quite good, and its been several months since the "fact" article was sheer crackpottery.
I agree that Telzey was rather flat as a character this time out. One could, I suppose, put that down to her lack of sleep. The biggest problem for me is that this is clearly the middle part of a novel. Everything that happens stems from "Goblin Night" and makes little sense without that story. The ending also is less an ending and more a preparation for the next story. Schmitz would have been much better served by writing all three (or four) stories as a single piece and serializing it.
"Fighting Division" was all right, though a lot of my interest flagged pretty quickly. Still, it is a fresh take on an old trope. It's also further evidence that Garrett has matured as an author and can push back or overcome Campbell's editorial dictates. He's always been roughly this good in the other mags, it's just in Analog that his work has suffered.
I don't even really remember much of what happened in "Trader Team". All right, I just went back and checked. Anderson was clearly more interested in the ending with the ship's computer than in the rest of it. Falkayn's handling of the problem of the humans on the planet is rather morally dubious. I'm sure van Rijn will be very proud of him.
I was actually intrigued by "Half a Loaf" most of the way through. Maybe it was the unusual subject matter, or the offbeat writing style (for Analog, anyway.) Despite the very questionable ethics of the thing, it kept my interest, and raised some controversial points.
"Positive Feedback" was way too long for a heavy-handed satire, and the analogy between car repair and medicine breaks down in too many ways for the concept to have any real impcat.
"Sleep No More" was just a monster story. As said, far too dependent on the previous story.
"Fighting Division" was all talk, and the basic idea was old hat, with a minor twist.