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Book, Magazine, Movies

[February 1, 1964] The Vast Wasteland (February 1964 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Every Silver Lining has a Cloud

What an exciting month January was!  From President Johnson's declaration of war on poverty to the launching of the Ranger 6 moon mission, not to mention this week's premiere of the amazing satire/horror, Dr. Strangelove, this year is shaping up to be a good one.

But while real life and the silver screen may offer superlative pleasures, this month's written sf , at least on this side of the Pond, has been rather lackluster.  This month's Analog is no exception.  In fact, it rests near the bottom of the pack.  That said, it's not a complete loss — so long as you know what you're getting into:

The Issue at Hand

Secondary Meterorites (Part 2 of 2), by Ralph A. Hall, M.D.

Dr. Hall returns to tell us more about the hypothesis that the majority of meteors that hit our planet are actually pieces of other planets knocked off when they were hit by meteorites.  It is, if anything, less comprehensible than the last article.  And that's coming from a fellow who studied astrophysics in college and reads journal articles for fun.

One star.

The Permanent Implosion, by Dean McLaughlin

When a bunch of Colorado eggheads blow a hole in the fabric of the universe, all of Earth's air starts whistling to nowhere like water draining from a bathtub.  Mick Candido, an oilman with a talent for capping blown and burning wells, is called in to plug the hole.

This is a smartly written tale whose obvious solution is obscured by deft authorial misdirection.  It's not a story for the ages, but it's solid Analog fare.  Three stars.

Crackpots, Inc., by Richard L. Davis

On the other hand, Crackpots is uniquely Analog fare.  A rural hayseed has purportedly invented perpetual motion, but his feat cannot be duplicated by scientists.  Turns out, it's because the machine is powered by the hick's psychic energies.  The only way this piece could have been more to Campbell's taste is if it included dowsing.

One star.

Dune World (Part 3 of 3), by Frank Herbert

I'm going to spare some inches for this one since I know this has been a popular serial.  In the far future, humanity has spread out among the stars.  Civilization is a strange mix of the advanced and the primitive. There are faster-than-light ships, electro-magnetic shields, and laser guns, On the other hand, computers are outlawed, with savant "Mentats" filling the role.  Society runs along feudal lines, its politics Machiavellian to the extreme.  To wit:

Baron Harkonnen, lord of the desert planet, Arrakis, is ordered by the Padishah Emperor to give his fief to Duke Leto Atreides.  On the face of things, this is a boon.  Arrakis is the only source of the anti-geriatic spice melange, control of which makes one very rich.  However, the transfer is a baited trap.  Not only is a legion of the Emperor's troops poised to seize the fief should Leto stumble, but one of Leto's lieutenants is a traitor in the pay of Harkonnen.

Added to the mix: Leto's mistress, Lady Jessica, member of the female-only Bene Gesserit order, who has keen perception and the ability to control others with her voice.  Her son, Paul, who may be the satisfaction of a prophecy that predicts a male possessor of Bene Gesserit powers.  The "Fremen" natives of Arrakis appear to be primitives yet there is evidence that suggests they possess a great technology.  Finally, we have Kynes, an Imperial surveyor who seems to know the secrets of Arrakis but refuses to play his hand openly.

Not much happens in Dune World.  There are lots of conversations where people reveal the history of Arrakis.  There is an attempt on Paul's life.  Leto saves some spice miners from a sandworm.  There is a feast in the Atreides stronghold with more exposition.  The traitor's plan comes to fruition, with the Duke put in mortal peril and his family forced into exile.  There is no real resolution; I suspect Herbert plans a sequel.

Author Herbert has an intricate grand plan, and he's certainly not stinted on world building.  The various cultures are richly detailed.  There is a refreshing abundance of foreign language and concepts, particularly from Arabic.  What keeps Dune World from being a masterpiece, or even especially enjoyable, is that Herbert's writing chops just aren't up to turning this byzantine mess of a plot into a story.  There are more swaths of italicized text than in the footnotes of a legal contract, and the viewpoint shifts constantly, often every other sentence.  A typical example from page 49:


"Now I know you remain loyal to my Duke," she said.  "Therefore I'm prepared to forgive your affront to me."

"Is there something to forgive? he asked.

Jessica scowled, wondering, Shall I play my trump?  Shall I tell him of the Duke's daughter I've carried within me these two weeks?  No, Leto himself doesn't know and this would only complicate his life, divert him when he must concentrate on our survival.  There is yet time to use this.

And Hawat thought: She's even beautiful when she's angry.  An extremely difficult adversary.

The traitor is revealed early on; the mystery is why he's betrayed Duke Leto.  That said, the identity of the betrayer could have been handled as a double mystery, which would have been more interesting. 

At serial's end, Paul has a soothsaying dream and learns several secrets of Arrakis and spice.  It's all very arbitrary and unsatisfying. 

Herbert has created something like a well researched but dry encyclopedia article on a fascinating topic.  I wanted to know more about Arrakis and Paul's prophecy, but getting through the (half) novel was often a slog. 

Maybe a good editor will help Herbert polish this up before its inevitable publication as a book.

Three stars for this installment and for the book as a whole.

Rx for Chaos, by Christopher Anvil

Another entry in the "Unintended Consequences of Science" department: Hangover-killing "De-tox" pills become bestsellers, but they also inhibit creativity and give rise to a fascist, anti-intellectual movement.  It's typical Analog Anvil, written with tongue firmly lodged in cheek.  It rates three stars, barely.

Names for Space Plants, by John Becker

Lots of words in these three short pages, but I've no idea what Becker is actually trying to say.  One star.

The Analytic Laboratory

Add it all up, and Analog scores a limp 2.1 stars, only beaten for badness by this month's Amazing (2 stars even).  F&SF is barely better at 2.2; Fantastic gets 2.6 but at least it's got a good Dick in it.  Galaxy's 3 stars is also, in part, thanks to its Dick story.  The only unalloyed triumph is the February New Worlds, which garnered 3.6 stars.

Women made up just two of the 38 authors who wrote fiction for magazines this month. 

As for books, again, it was the British stuff that stood out.  Brian Aldiss' new fix-up got four stars, per Jason Sacks, whereas neither this month's Ace Double nor Laurence Janifer's second effort stunned.

Next month is my birthday month, though, and I'm certain the writers in my favorite genre wouldn't let me down on my 39th birthday.

Right?

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Book, Magazine

[January 2, 1964] All's well that ends well (January 1964 Analog science fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Auld Lang Syne

Greetings from 1964!  Given the challenges we faced in the latter part of last year, it was proper and cathartic to wrap up 1963 with a bang.  Here are some snapshots from our gala (and weren't we lucky to find a film developer willing to work on New Year's Day?)

Speaking of wrapping up, the last magazine of the old year, though dated January 1964, was the January 1964 Analog.  This is usually among the lesser science fiction magazines I read, but this time around, I was pleasantly surprised.  Come take a look!

Ending Well

Secondary Meteorites (Part 1 of 2), by Ralph A. Hall, M.D.

Could that black chunk of meteorite actually be from Mars?  There is an increasing body of evidence that the meteorites that hit the Earth were, themselves, bits of other planets blasted away by their own meteor strikes.  The subject matter is fascinating, but Dr. Hall manages to make it nigh incomprehensible.  It's too technical and presented all out of order (even Dr. Asimov learned early in his career that you have to define your terms first).  And this is only PART ONE!

Two stars.

The Eyes Have It, by Randall Garrett

My disdain for Mr. Garrett has been a constant of the Journey, ever since the offensive and just plain bad Queen Bee.  Over time, he has occasionally written decent stuff, and when he teams up with others, his rough edges get smoothed a bit.  Still, his name in the Table of Contents has always made me less eager to read a magazine.

Well, never let it be said that I can't keep an open mind.  Garrett's latest work is a tour de force.  If Asimov perfected the science fiction mystery with The Caves of Steel, Garrett has created the genre of magical mystery with The Eyes Have It.

The year is 1963, the place, France.  But this is no France we know.  Instead, it appears to be in a timeline that diverged nine centuries prior, one in which the Angevin Empire remained ascendant…and in which the use of magic developed. 

Lord D'Arcy is Chief Criminal Investigator for the Duke of Normandy, summoned to investigate the murder of the fantastically lecherous Count D'Evraux.  With the aid of his assistants, Sorcerer Sean O Lachlainn and chirurgeon Dr. Pately, he must find out how and at whose hand the Count met his untimely demise, and he has just twenty four hours to do it.

The attention to detail, the world-building, the characterization, the writing — all are top notch.  This is the sort of work I'd expect from Poul Anderson (and only when at the top of his game).  For Garrett to pull this off is nothing short of miraculous.

Dammit, Randy.  It's going to be hard to keep hating you.

Five stars.

Poppa Needs Shorts, by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond

The last piece by the Richmonds was an utterly unreadable book-length serial.  This one, on the other hand, is a cute vignette convincingly told from the view of a 4-year old child who just wants to know about "shorts."  Leigh and Walt have a pretty good idea how kids learn, I think.

Three stars.

Subjectivity, by Norman Spinrad

The pages of our scientific journals offer a wealth of ideas that can be turned into SF stories.  New author Norman Spinrad seizes on Dr. Timothy Leary's paean to LSD in technical clothing, Psychedelic Review as inspiration for his second story:

Though humanity has invented an engine that will propel spaceships at half the speed of light, the heavens remain out of reach.  It's not the endurance of the ships that's the problem — it is that of the crew.  No matter how well-adjusted they are, all of them go crazy in less than half the time it takes to get to Alpha Centauri.  After twelve failed attempts, the powers that be assemble a crew of misfits with a twenty-year supply of hallucinogenics to keep them sane (if potted) and open up the stars.

Mission #13 succeeds…but not in a way anyone could have predicted.  A fun, slightly acid (no pun intended) little piece.  Four stars.

See What I Mean!, by John Brunner

In this disappointing outing from Brunner, a deadlock in negotiations between East and West is resolved when the four foreign ministers involved are psychoanalyzed, and it turns out the British and Russian officials have more in common with each other than with their ideological partners (from the U.S. and China, respectively).

Not much here.  Two stars.

Dune World (Part 2 of 3), by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert's epic in the desert, a kind of Lawrence of Arabia in space, continues.  After the assassination attempt on his son, and with warnings that he has a traitor in his midst, Duke Leto of the House of Atreides attempts to shore up his position on Arrakis, sole source of life-extending "spice".  The planetology and culture bits are pretty interesting, particularly the depiction of the forbidding dune world of Arrakis and the spice-mining operations thereon.  I continue to get the impression, though, that Herbert is still too raw for this project.  The viewpoint jumps from line to line, much is conveyed through exposition, and the incessant use of italics is really trying to read.

Three stars again.

Crunching the numbers

So how did the first batch of magazines dated with the new year fare?  There are definitely some surprises.

  • Analog, came in first with a respectable 3.4 star rating.  Moreover, Randall Garrett of all people had the best story.  These must be the end times.
  • Fantastic came in a close second at 3.3.  New World tread water at 3.  IF got 2.8.  F&SF scored a disappointing 2.5.  Amazing dragged through the muck at a miserable 1.9.
  • All in all, there were nearly 200 pages of good-to-excellent stories.  Not a bad haul.
  • Women only wrote one and a half of the 31 fiction pieces this month, and theirs were short ones.  No surprises there.

Next up: the first book of the new year!

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Conventions/Performances, Magazine, Science / Space Race

December 1, 1963 Last stop (December 1963 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

LosCon in Los Angeles!

It's been an exciting November for the Journey.  After a sad interlude on the East Coast, which saw the untimely death of our President, we flew back to Los Angeles for a small science fiction convention put on by the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.  It was great fun, a real class act.  Not only did we get to put on a show (in which the assassination, of course, featured prominently), but we also met Laura Freas, wife of Kelly Freas, the illustrator who painted Dr. Martha Dane.  As y'all know, Dr. Dane graced our masthead until very recently, and she remains the Journey's avatar.

And for those of you who missed the performance, we got it on video-tape.

At last, success for NASA

I read an article in Aviation Weekly that noted that 1963 just hasn't been a great year for NASA space shots.  There have only been eight successful missions thus far.  Unlike in the old days (you know, five years ago), when satellites didn't fly because of balky rockets, now missions are more likely to be delayed for lack of funding on the ground or for thorny technical issues as mechanisms get more complicated.

But successes do happen, and on November 27, Explorer 18 soared into orbit.  Also known as the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP), it is essentially a deep space explorer.  At the closest point in its orbit, it zooms at an atmosphere-scraping 160 kilometers in altitude, but at its furthest, it flies up to a quarter million kilometers out — more than halfway to the moon.

IMP is the first of seven satellites that will monitor the sun's output over a long period of time, measuring its ups and downs over the course of its 11 year activity cycle.  It will also measure interplanetary magnetic fields, the speed and composition of the solar wind, and the strength of the cosmic rays that shower the solar system from intergalactic space.

In many ways, Explorer 18 continues the missions of Explorers 10 and 12, spacecraft that made incredible discoveries about our local space environment.  What makes IMP so special is its size and endurance: it will be in space much longer than its predecessors, and its more advanced instruments are capable of more refined measurements. 

It is also hoped that IMP will be for interplanetary space what TIROS is for Earth — a weather satellite providing up to date information on the environment "up there."  Thus, Explorer 18 will not only expand our knowledge of interplanetary physics, it will also be an early warning system, alerting astronauts as to upcoming solar flares and other potentially dangerous events. 

Pretty neat!

Last magazine of the year

Every month, the Journey does its level best to review every science fiction magazine that gets published.  As far as I can tell, we cover all the regular American ones plus the British New Worlds (only Science Fantasy, also British, escapes our coverage).  By tradition, Analog is the covered last, and thus, the December 1963 Analog is the last magazine of the year.  Once this one is reviewed, we can finally get down to the fun business of determining the stats: which mag had the best stories, the most consistent quality, the most women published, and so on.  Call it SFnal baseball.

So how was this last issue?  Read on!

The Nature of the Electric Field, by John W. Campbell

In addition to a nonsensical editorial, Editor Campbell wastes several oversized pages with the reprint of a century-old treatise on electricity.  I guess it's to show how times change, and therefore, we shouldn't be so quick to denounce things like Dianetics, reactionless drives, psionics, dowsing, and other pseudo-sciences.

One star.

Cracking the Code, by Carl A. Larson

Larson's article is on DNA and scientists' attempts to understand how a sequence of amino acids can be the blueprint for all of life's manifestations.  It's a subject that would have been better handled by Asimov…or really, anyone else.  On the other hand, some of Larson's poetical turns of phrase are cute, like analogizing cells to an alien race whose environment is so utterly foreign to our ken, and that's why it's taken so long to decipher their language.

Two stars, I guess.

Dune World (Part 1 of 3), by Frank Herbert

I was mistaken when I called this new serial Herbert's first novel.  He had a serial back in 1956 called Under Pressure that I must have read some seven years ago, but I couldn't tell you what it was about if you put a gun to my head.

Anyway, this new one seems to be generating a lot of buzz, and I can see why.  It features Paul, 15 year-old scion to House of Atreides, whose father, the Duke of Atreides, has been granted the fiefdom of Arrakis.  Arrakis — desert planet — Dune.  This barren wasteland, where water is worth its weight in platinum, offers but one export: Melange, the geriatric spice that affords immortality, cures ailments, and tastes really good, too.  As Arrakis is the only source of melange, control of the planet is a sought plum, indeed.

Except, the Duke knows it is a trap set by the planet's former masters, the Barony of Harkonnen.  In collusion with the Padishar Emperor, Harkonnen has hatched a complicated plan to humiliate and discredit (and probably kill) the Duke, a scheme which whose intricacy might even give Machiaveli pause.

There is a lot to admire in this new work.  It's a fresh universe, highly developed, with a lot of attention to detail and inclusion of many foreign cultural influences.  Women play a prominent role, with the genders being apparently somewhat segregated, each having their own spheres of power.  There are at least two important female characters, something I'm always delighted to find in my science fiction.

One of the aspects of Herbert's world is the conscious disdain for, and even ban on, the use of computers.  Instead, human "mentats" have been bred for the ability of calculation.  This not only creates an interesting new class of person, it neatly relieves the author of predicting the development of electronic brains.

Dune Planet is not, however, an unalloyed success.  In the hands of Cordwainer Smith or even Mack Reynolds, folks who have a deep grounding in other cultures as well as the writing chops to convey them, it would be a masterpiece.  Herbert, on the other hand, is a pretty raw writer.  His stuff can be creaky and dull, the viewpoint shifts from paragraph to paragraph, and his use of ellipses dots is…exuberant (they say we hate most in others what we dislike about ourselves; Herbert writes a bit like I did not long ago before certain editors whipped me into shape).

So, three stars so far, but I'm still reading and look forward to more.

Conversation in Arcady, by Poul Anderson

In George Pal's The Time Machine, Rod Taylor arrives at the far future and discovers humanity living under (seemingly) idyllic circumstances.  They no longer need toil for food, shelter, or clothing.  They do not fight each other nor feel the need to rule.  At first impressed, the time traveler is dismayed to find that the desire to advance, the struggle to improve has been lost.  In perhaps the most effective scene of the movie (at least, it was for me), Taylor finds shelves of books that crumble to dust at the slightest touch.

Poul Anderson's latest is a note for note copy of this scene with the exceptions that 1) Anderson's Eloi are not so simple and childlike, 2) there are no Morlocks fattening up people for supper, and 3) the time traveler can see nothing positive about the situation whatsoever.

I think Anderson is trying to say something poignant, that our race is nothing without the need to better itself.  Or perhaps he's striving for a subtler point — that those who only find meaning in struggle can never find peace, and maybe peace isn't a bad thing.  Or maybe he's saying both things at the same time.

I think he was going for just the first, though.  Three stars.

The Right Time, by Walter Bupp (John Berryman)

John Berryman's series is set in the current world but where psionics are common (but secret).  It's a perfect fit for Analog what with Editor Campbell's peculiar pseudo-scientific beliefs, yet somehow Berryman's stories manage to be good.  This one, about a telekinetic precog with the ability to predict and potentially heal a fellow's heart attack, is my favorite yet.  Four stars.

Thin Edge, by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie

Author Randy Garrett is back under the pseudonym he prefers when he writes about life in the asteroid belt.  This latest piece is about a Belter who is killed by Earthers for the secret of the super strong cording used for rock towing, and about the other Belter who comes to Earth looking for revenge.

It's written with some facility, but the Belters are always too clever and the Earthers too dumb.  A low three or a high two, depending on your mood.

All right!  It's time to tabulate the data for December!

Analog finished in the middle of the pack with 2.8 stars, above F&SF (2.1) and Fantastic (2.2), but below Galaxy (3.2), Amazing (3.2), and New Worlds (3.2), not to mention last month's issue of Gamma, which I didn't get to until this month (3.3).

There were 44 pieces of fiction between the seven magazines, four of which were written by women.  9% is fairly standard these days, sadly.  I'm not sure what's causing the decline, though the numbers were never that much better.

Next up, we'll be covering the UK's newest SF TV show, and beyond that, 1963's Galactic Stars!

Stay tuned.

[The party's still going on at Portal 55.  Come join us for real-time conversation!]

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