by Gideon Marcus
Scenes from abroad
And so, our longest Japan trip to date has wrapped up. We're still developing the many rolls of film we took, but here are some highlights from our vacation that included the cities Fukuoka, Amagi, Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo:
Nanami and The Young Traveler zoom down a slide in an eastern suburb of Nagoya
Nanami and her husband perform at a Nagoya jazz club
This is Nanami's baby, Wataru, and her mother-in-law, Haruko!
Lorelei poses in front of Ultraman, one of Japan's newest superheros
Lorelei has become smitten with kimono and yukata. We had to buy a new suitcase to fit them all (and the model trains Elijah bought)
The trouble back home
On the doorstep to my house was a big pile of mail that my neighbor has kept for me. In addition to sundry bills, the latest FAPA packet, and a handful of independent 'zines (including the latest from the James Doohan International Fan Club), there was the latest issue of Analog. Interest piqued by the lovely (as always) Freas cover, I tore into the mag before unpacking. Sadly, it was all downhill from there…
by Kelly Freas
… And Comfort to the Enemy, by Stanley Schmidt
When an exploration ship lands on a seemingly uninhabited planet, its rapacious, by-the-book commander rubs his hands with glee at the prospect of colonizing plunder. But it turns out there are intelligent natives—it's just that their "technology" is actually the fine control of all of their fellow creatures creating a sort of artificial Deathworld. When the invaders refuse to leave, they take a hostage, who they use as a communications go-between. And then they unleash a deadly plague which ravages first the explorer ship and then their entire race. How the colonizers get out of the predicament is somewhat clever.
by Kelly Freas
This one starts a bit slowly, and the explorers are all too human, even though they're supposed to be aliens. However, once it gets moving, it's pretty good, and you can sympathize with both the planet dwellers and the decimated invaders.
Three stars.
The Great Intellect Boom, by Christopher Anvil
by Kelly Freas
A pharmaceutical company stumbles upon a brain-booster pill. Unfortunately, it promotes eggheaded learning, but not application of this learning. As a result, the nation's economy stumbles as more and more citizens would rather discuss than do.
This is a pretty thinly veiled attack on academia and the intelligentsia, which surely must have tickled editor Campbell's reactionary heart.
One star.
The Mind-Changer, by Verge Foray
by Kelly Freas
Boy this one was a disappointment. We last saw Verge Foray in a nice little piece called Ingenuity, which featured a post-atomic world where humanity was divided into psionically adept but primitive and regressing "Novos" and scientific, but conservative, "Olsaperns." Starn was the hero of that story—a Novo with a rare gift of insight and intuition who managed to get in good with the technical Olsaperns.
This sequel story involves Starn's attempts to develop technology that will augment psionic powers such that they can rival or exceed the technology of the Olsaperns. Fine and well, but really, this is just one of Campbell's "scientific" articles on psionics with a fictional coating. I already find psi to be a pseudoscientific bore, but to try to add a veneer of respectability to it by invoking scientific trappings is distasteful in the extreme.
It's also a really boring tale. One star.
The Choice, by Keith Laumer
by Kelly Freas
A three-astronaut explorer team from Earth is abducted by mysterious aliens who offer each of them a choice of fates—all of them some form of execution. The two military members of the crew meet their fate boldly; the third is a far out civilian cat who doesn't cotton to his own extinction. As a result, the story has a happy ending.
There is serious Laumer and there is funny Laumer. Funny Laumer is usually the more trivial, and this is trivial funny Laumer.
Two stars.
The Man from R.O.B.O.T., by Harry Harrison
by Peter Skirka
A couple of years back, Harrison brought out the droll The Man from P.I.G., about a secret agent who goes undercover as a pig farmer. The twist was that the pigs weren't his livestock but his accomplices. In a similar vein, here we have the story of an agent who goes undercover as a robot salesman, but the robots are his accomplices. Of course, given that the robots are intelligent, and one of them is even designed to look like the agent, one wonders why there needs to be human involvement at all in this case.
Anyway, the agent is dispatched to a rancher planet whose women folk all seem to be locked up, and whose men folk are all paranoid violence freaks. Is it genetic? Or is it in the cattle?
I always get "funny" Harrison (frex "The Stainless Steel Rat") and "funny" Laumer (e.g. "Retief") mixed up. And here they're back to back! Now I'll never disentangle them.
Two stars.
The Empty Balloon, by Jack Wodhams
by Peter Skirka
Last up, a throwaway story about a diplomat who thwarts a telepathic interrogation machine. There's no real explanation as to how he does it, really, and most of the story exists to set up the lame ending.
Two stars.
Wow. What a wretched month for magazine fiction! With the exception of the atypically superlative New Worlds (3.6 stars), everything else was mediocre at best. IF managed to break the three star barrier, but just barely (3.1), same as Fantasy and Science Fiction. Amazing scored 2.6—which is a good month for that mag, while Galaxy got the same score, which constituted a bad month.
Indeed, all of the better-than-average fiction would fill just one decently sized digest. Incidentally, we had exactly one (1) short story produced by a woman, and the one woman-penned nonfiction this month was a biography…of a man.
It just goes to show that all the good stuff seems to be happening overseas these days. I hope the next month of mags reinforces my decision to come home!
The Schmidt was a decent story. I'm not sure it needed the framing device, but I understand authors wanting to pad out their word count at Analog's rates.
The Anvil was terrible. I think it was also a sequel. There was a story last year, year before, where a pharmaceutical company came up with a drug whose side effect made everyone overly friendly, resulting in nothing getting done. Same idea, different technique, but they're both Anvil.
"The Mind-Changer" was a huge disappointment. The previous story (which I think was called "The Infinity Sense," not "Ingenuity") moved along at a good pace and was fun for all its flaws. This one was just turgid.
The Laumer was also disappointing. I never would have guessed it was by him if his name weren't on it. The protagonist is nothing like a typical Laumer protagonist, and it's hard to imagine Keith taking those jabs at the military mindset.
The problem with the Harrison is that was the exact same gag as "The Man from P.I.G." I hope Harry doesn't have any more acronyms up his sleeve.
The Wodhams went on far too long. It might have been acceptable as a three page joke story. Instead the whole thing went round and round, and I figured out the ending long before the punchline was delivered. I still don't think I've read a Wodhams story I liked.
Whenever I see Stanley Schmidt, I get excited, and then I remember that he's not James Schmitz…
I had to yank the page out of my typewriter and toss it on the scrap paper pile because I typed Schmitz instead of Schmidt the first time. Good thing it was only the second word.
"James Doohan International Fan Club"
Hey! I'm a member of that organization, too! Some good stuff therein!
That's great! And yes—there's a terrific story of young Montgomery Scott in the journal that I've been reading over the party line when it's come out. In a Scottish brogue, no less!