But first, please read this brief interlude!
As you know, in addition to Galactic Journey, I also run Journey Press, devoted both to republishing classics discovered while on this trek through time, but also to publish new works of science fiction in fantasy that (I hope!) live up to the quality and tradition of the classic works we offer.
If anyone would enjoy these works, we know it will be you. This holiday season, pick up a title or three from Journey Press! It's the best present you can give yourself, a loved one…and us!
by Gideon Marcus
Bogged down
With more than half a million American troops in Vietnam now, the South Vietnamese are starting to feel like they're living under occupation. There's no doubt who's calling the shots these days. The question is, is this surge of military force going to be enough to drag Ho Chi Minh to the bargaining table?
Despite the flow of optimistic figures from the Pentagon, it doesn't look like peace or even peace overtures will happen any time soon. The closest we've gotten is securing a pair of holiday ceasefires. So, expect a long slog and nightly death counts on the evening news for the forseeable future. Better dead than Red, right?
American soldiers enjoy a Thanksgiving respite before heading off to combat again. They may end up taking as long getting to Hanoi as it's taking Saunders and Kelly to get to Berlin.
In the trenches
Meanwhile, the December 1966 Analog constitutes a landmark of sorts — it's the last magazine of the year! And, like Vietnam, it's often been a tedious, dragging affair. This month is no different, though the magazine starts better than it ends. Let's get our report from the front, shall we?
A quick note on the inside cover this month. Yes, the one editor whose editorials I skip every month has bundled his loony screeds together and is offering them in book form. Or as Tom Lehrer put it:
Now there's a charge for what she used to give for free…
He even got Harry Harrison to shill for him. I have to disagree with Harrison, though: while Campbell indeed may be "idiosyncratic, prejudiced, and annoying", he also is usually quite boring.
Don't fail to miss!
Amazon Planet (Part 1 of 3), by Mack Reynolds
by Kelly Freas
Mack Reynolds once again sets a tale in his loosely knit United Planets. Humanity has sprawled across hundreds of stars, and one of the primary tenets of this community is that each colony expresses itself as it likes so long as it harms no other world.
As might be deduced from the title, this latest novel features a matriarchy planet, one where the "traditional" (read mid-20th Century) gender roles are reversed. Well, not so much features, as this first third of the novel takes place not on "Amazonia", but on a freighter headed toward it. There are only two passengers: Terran Guy Thomas, a deceptively mild trader with plans to open Amazonia up to the niobium trade, and Patricia O' Gara, refugee from the exceedingly puritanical colony of Victoria.
There's not a lot of action in this section. Mostly crew mates talking about how terribly men are treated on Amazonia, Pat (and later a troop of Amazons) explaining how they're wrong, and Guy acting as something of a catalyst for discussion. It's all rendered rather broadly, but simply the fact that this subject is even being discussed, and a matriarchy is not being played for laughs, is interesting.
I'm waiting to see where it goes; this could be an awful, sexist piece or it could be an enlightened one. Only time will tell (though Reynolds has a good track record on this front).
Three stars.
The Weathermakers, by Ben Bova
by Leo Summers
Hurricane season is hotting up, and it's up to Ted, Jerry, Tuli, and Barney (the last a woman) of Project THUNDER to ensure none of these storms hits the Atlantic seaboard. To accomplish this, they'll use cloud seeding planes and orbital lasers to increase the equilibrium of the systems, smoothing them out before they become rotating furies.
But when these methods prove insufficient, only true weather control on a national scale can save Washington D.C. from a devastating cyclone.
The Weathermakers is actually an excerpt from an upcoming novel, presumably the climax. It's exciting enough, and the technology is interesting, although I have to wonder if pumping extra heat energy into the Earth's atmosphere isn't ultimately a dangerous thing.
It's all a bit gung ho and simplistic, more what I'd expect from a juvenile. This is not a bad thing, of course. We can use more juvenile authors of merit.
Four stars.
Cytoplasmic Inheritance , by Carl A. Larson
The nonfiction article this issue is an extremely abstruse, but not unreadable, piece on the role the cytoplasm plays in genetics. Apparently, it's not all governed by DNA in the nucleus.
Biology's not my bag, and a lot of it went over my head, but I did read it and found interest in it.
Three stars.
The Blue-Penciled Throop, by L. Edey
It's all downhill from here. First, we've got another in the epistolary Throop series, basically an excuse for Campbell to tell us how hard his job is as editor having to deal with a bunch of nincompoops.
Two stars.
The Price of Simeryl, by Kris Neville
by Leo Summers
The colony of Elanth has got itself in a bind. The local government bought too much of the addictive Simeryl drug to pacify the indigenous Elanthians, who both are having trouble meeting their farm quotas and are spending too much time fighting the Coelanths, a vicious species that has enjoyed a recent resurgence. Third Foreign Secretary Raleigh is sent to the planet to fact-find pending a solution.
Wow, that didn't take me long to write at all. The story, on the other hand, is presented as a set of interminable interviews with various government officials, none of them pleasant or particularly distinctive from each other. And in the end, there is no revelation. The story is perhaps five times longer than it needs to be. Even at its best, it's pointless.
Also, I'm getting a little tired of putative future governments with nary a woman to be found in them. From Ann Rosenberg Hoffman to Margaret Chase Smith to Indira Gandhi, we've had many prominent female lawmakers and cabinet leaders. It's time to feature women in our science fiction at least to the degree they are represented on 1966 Earth, and not just in extreme cases as depicted in the Reynolds this month.
One star.
Under the Dragon's Tail, by Philip Latham
by Leo Summers
Finally, "Philip Latham" (Dr. Robert S. Richardson, who writes great nonfiction), turns in a piece that's basically the day-to-day dreariness of an assistant planetarium manager. That an asteroid is going to smack down in Griffith Park at the end is a mostly extraneous detail.
Two stars.
Looking Back
Well, that wasn't very good, was it? Indeed, Analog sets a record of sorts: at 2.5 stars, it is the worst magazine of the month. Slightly better, though still dismal, was Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.6). Amazingly enough, Amazing beat out both of them with 2.9 stars.
Above the mediocrity line lie siblings Galaxy (3.1) and IF (3.2) The British mags top out the list with Impulse at 3.3 and New Worlds at a whopping 3.6!
There was exactly one story by a woman this month. I had thought '66 would be better than '65 in this regard, but no dice. To paraphrase Mrs. Rosenberg Hoffman, Assistant Defense Secretary under Truman, science fiction without women is an industry half-idle. I hope things get better soon.
I guess we'll continue to mark time until then…
Did you remember to check out Journey Press?
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the only conceivable use I can imaging for a collection of Campbell's editorials would be in a college class on logic and rhetoric. Let the kids get in there and tear them apart, finding all the logical fallacies and cheap tricks he uses. That or for someone suffering from low blood pressure.
I liked "Amazon Planet" a little less than you did. All of the men seemed rather too unwilling to accept the idea of women in any sort of authority role. The Amazonian treatment of men is something of a shoe-on-the-other-foot approach ratcheted up a notch or two. (We know how well that approach worked for Heinlein in "Farnham's Freehold".) Still, Reynolds can usually be relied on for reasonable handling of touchy issues (as long as he's not writing about Indians), so I'll wait and see.
The Bova was pretty good, though I'm not sure I'd go all the way to four stars. The writing was a bit dry for my tastes. It's possible that it will all hang together better in the complete novel, though.
I do know something about biology, though I may not be completely up to date. I was able to follow Larson's article, and he makes some interesting observations, but eventually I just got bored by it all. Like most Analog science writers, he fails to put some zing his work to keep the lay reader interested.
The less said about the Throop series, the better.
The Neville was just awful. It went on and on, covering the same ground over and over again. It also relied on everyone in the Elanthan government behaving like a complete idiot.
"Dragon's Tail" was all right. Better than two stars makes it sound, but certainly not a full three stars either.
Honestly, it seems like everybody in this issue was grumpy and annoyed at everyone around them. I think they all need to eat something and take a nap.
Bad ANALOG issue, even by Campbell's current failing standards. Even that Freas interior illustration for 'Amazon Planet' is cartoonish –which Freas can do well, but not here because this was just crude. Freas's cover for the Reynolds story is better and it's a pity you couldn't have shown that.
F& SF was poor, too, this month.
If these are the supposed big dogs of the American SF magazine field, I'd say right now Fred Pohl is scoring fairly consistently ahead of both of them with his GALAXY and IF. The most recent issue of the former had a decent Poul Anderson novelette, a Niven, and an episode of a Jack Vance novel. The most recent IF had a great Budrys novella and a Niven.
The British mags sometimes score high, too, but being more experimentally orientated are more variable.
And you'd have to pay me serious money to read a book full of Campbell's deranged troll-like rants.
They talk about artists having Early and Late periods. Campbell is well into his Late Senile Period. Pretty progressive in one sense, since he's managed to arrive there while still being a mere 56 years old.
I remember liking the novel version of "The Weathermakers" in the far future year of 1977 or so. I won't spoil anything but you've got an interesting few years ahead of you with great highs and lows.