by Gideon Marcus
The modern world is wonderful. There's so much luxury at our fingertips that it boggles the imagination of those of us who remember living even a few decades ago. Back when then were things we just couldn't get our hands on, no matter how much time or money we had.
These days, we can cross the world in half a day, thanks to jets. Supermarkets are filled with aisles and aisles of national and local products. Television lets us view events as they happen, from Mercury launches to Macy's Parades.
Most importantly, not only do our newsstands have all of the latest science fiction books and magazines, but now they've also got the classics of our childhood. Yes, all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books we grew up on are finally being reprinted. Tarzan's Africa, John Cartner's Mars, Innes' Pellucidar, Billings' Caspak — such a bounty! (You can bet that I'll be spending the next several weekends reliving the joys of my youth.)
If this trend continues, we can assume that our children and grandchildren will not only have Burroughs, Wells, Verne, Shelley, and Baum to read, but also reprinted copies of our present-day science fiction, as well as the SF of the future (their present). Perhaps they'll all be available via some computerized library — tens of thousands of volumes in a breadbox-shaped device, for instance.
The question, then, is whether or not our children will remember our current era fondly enough to want reprints from it. Well, if this month's Analog be a representative sample, the answer is a definitive…maybe.
Observational Difficulties, by George W. Harper
This month's non-fiction article is as dry as lunar dust, but the subject matter is fascinating. Harper talks about how difficult it is to tell much about a planet when all you've got to examine is some fuzzy telescope pictures, a few spectrographs, and the vivid imaginations of thousands of observers.
From the evidence he's collected, Harper concludes that the Red Planet has an atmosphere about 10% as thick as Earth's, mostly made of nitrogen. He conjectures that erosion and a lack of active geology has created a landscape of smooth plateaus and gentle valleys.
Most interestingly, he is certain that Mars will be riddled with craters, like the Moon. After all, Mars must have been subject to the same early bombardment as Earth and its satellite, and there's not a lot of weather to break down impact sites. Harper goes on to say that it is these craters which we on Earth have mistaken for "cities" at the junctures of the Martian "canals" (which he thinks are probably ejected residue from ancient impacts).
I've never read this hypothesis advanced by any anyone else, but it makes a lot of sense. I guess when the Soviet "Mars 1" reaches its destination next month, we'll finally get a definitive answer. Three stars.
The Dueling Machine, by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis
In the far future, personal disputes are resolved by a telepathic dueling machine. It recreates perfectly any setting, any agreed-upon weapons, and participants can battle until one suffers a simulated death, safe in the knowledge that no one actually dies in the process. But when one unscrupulous government learns how to use the device to assassinate duelists, its up to the inventor to find out how it's being done and, more importantly, how to stop it.
This exciting premise is dragged down by an overlong and, frankly, boring presentation. And the fact that Ellison did this idea much better in his The Silver Corridor, which came out in the September 1956 Infinity. Two stars.
Oneness, by James H. Schmitz
It is the future. Sixty years before, the scientists of the Martian penal colony had invented a stardrive, enabling the escape of nearly 20,000 exiles to a host of other worlds. Now, one of them has returned to face the "Machine," Earth's autocratic government, and negotiate a peace treaty. The proud leaders of Terra capture the emissary with the intention of torturing the secret of star travel out of him, but the star people have learned the secrets of "Oneness," the psychic bond, and the Machine soon learns that hurting the prisoner means hurting themselves. Under such conditions, can a meeting of the minds occur?
It's an old-fashioned story, as one might expect from a pulp-master like Schmitz, but I liked its vividness and brisk pace. Four stars.
Expediter, by Mack Reynolds
A young citizen of the Peoples Republic of the United Balkans is brought before the Supreme Leader for a special duty: he is to find out why, in an age when the factories report record output, and the farms produce vast surpluses of food, there are still shortages of commercial goods as well as surly discontent amongst the people. To accomplish this task, the fellow is given a blank check and infinite power.
It's a silly fairy tale of a story, and of course, it turns out that the problem is the short-sighted, self-interested politicians who simply don't have the technical knowledge to run a modern state. "Technological society should be left to the engineers!" is the unconvincing moral of this tale.
Still, as flat as the story's premise may fall, Reynolds still does his excellent job of rendering an alien society, particularly one behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps, instead of writing SF, he should become a travelogue writer. Three stars.
The Ming Vase, by E. C. Tubb
A clairvoyant breaks out of a secret government facility to steal art of great beauty. Has he turned criminal? Flipped sides? Or simply cracked? And how do you catch someone who sees the future…unless he wants to be caught?
A perfectly decent potboiler, perfectly suited to Analog, the magazine about psychic science fiction. Three stars.
The Last of the Romany, by Norman Spinrad
Spinrad hits it out of the park with his first tale, portraying a nomad bohemian's efforts to find (or make) more of his kind in a mechanized, homogenized, stultified world.
It's a beautiful piece that I'd expect to have been published in a more fanciful, literary venue like F&SF. In the mag that Campbell built, it just stands out all the more starkly for its quality and lack of psionic silliness. Five stars.
Analog thus garners a solid, if psi-tinged 3.2 stars this month. Compare that to New Worlds and Worlds of Tomorrow, which beat Analog with 3.5 and 3.3 scores, respectively. On the other hand, Analog beat F&SF (3 stars), Fantastic (2.9), IF and Amazing (both 2.4), and it had (arguably) the best story.
Women wrote just four of the fifty pieces that came out this month. Four and five-star stories, if printed on their own, would fill two good-sized magazines (out of the seven that came out).
On the one hand, this record hardly suggests that our children and their children will regard May 1963 as a Golden Age of SF. On the other hand, Sturgeon's Law says 90% of everything is crap, and this month, 28% of what was published was not-crap. Maybe our grandchildren will rejoice at the reprints after all…
