Tag Archives: analog

Magazine/Anthology

[May 14, 1961] Friendly disputes (June 1961 Analog)

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I've got a long-running feud going on with Mike Glyer, editor of the popular fanzine, File 770.  Well, feud is probably too strong a word given that we're good friends and avid mutual readers.  In fact, we usually get along quite well.  All fans are united by love for the genre and our status as oddballs, after all.  But Mike and I just can't seem to agree on Analog, a monthly science fiction magazine.

Here are the indisputable facts: Analog is the elder statesman of the digests; it pioneered real sf back when all the other outlets were pushing pulp adventure.  Analog has the biggest circulation of any of the current digests, somewhere around 200,000 per month. 

Now for the disputable ones.  Analog is the most conservative of the mags.  It's generally Terran-centric, with Earthlings portrayed as the most cunning, successful beings in the galaxy (which is why, of course, most aliens look just like us).  While the serialized novels in Analog are often excellent, the accompanying short stories tend to be uninspiring.  The science fact columns are awful.  Editor John Campbell's championing of psionics and reactionless engines (in real-life, not just fiction), crosses into the embarrassing.  All these factors make Analog the weakest of the Big Three magazines, consistently lagging in quality behind Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

Of course, Mike disagrees.  He's even wagered that Analog will take the Hugo award for Best Science Fiction Magazine this year.  I think he's dreaming.  F&SF has won three years in a row, and barring some unexpected decline in quality, it will do so again. 

I'll take that bet, Mike Glyer!  Two beers to your one.

As evidence for my case, I present this month's Analog, dated June 1961.

I will give Campbell credit where it is due.  While women are rare in Analog (as they are everywhere in published sf lit), Campbell does make an effort to "discover" female authors.  That's how we got the delightful Pauline Ashwell, and now we have the promising Leigh Richmond.  Her first story, Prologue to an Analogue, involves a coven of witches that solves world crisis after world crisis with their televised incantations.  Is it sorcery, technology, or something entirely different?  A story that manages to be both Campbellian yet also pretty neat.  Three stars.

I'm not sure why L. Sprague de Camp's Apollonious Enlists was included.  Normally, Sprague writes fun, light fantasy.  This piece is non-fiction, an essay on the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Ptolemaic Egypt, with some pointed parallels drawn with our modern methods of government.  I guess there weren't any fiction vignettes handy to fill the 8-page slot.  Two stars.

Fallen Angel shows us a far future in which the Terran dominion is but a small corner of a larger Galactic Federation.  We have something of an inferiority complex as, compared to the blond, perfect Grienan, leader race of the Federation, humanity seems barely out of childhood.  In fact, we have only made it as far as we have thanks to "Experiment," an anarchistic enclave in which humans express their base impulses until they are thoroughly tired of them.  Only a small proportion of the population are truly incurable, and they become permanent residents.  It's a program that seems barbaric to the rest of the civilized galaxy and is ridiculed accordingly.

In Angel, the aristocratic Grienan are taken down a peg when its ambassador volunteers to go through Experiment and loses all of his highfalutin culture and manners, almost losing his very humanity (Grienanity?) See?  Terrans really do know best!

High is a prolific writer who's hitherto stayed on the British side of The Pond.  His latest work does little to recommend that he emigrate.  Two stars.

Lloyd Biggle Jr. is like a Cepheid star – highly variable.  His latest, Monument, may be the high point of his career to date.  I wasn't optimistic.  The set-up involves a backward paradise planet, populated by (of course) completely human aliens, a marooned Terran who vows to protect the natives from a rapacious Earth Federation, and the inevitable coming of the representatives of said polity.  There's no real science fiction in this tale of classic exploitation – you could transplant the "aliens" to an island in the Pacific Ocean and replace the Federation with the United Nations (and, perhaps, that's the point; I prefer my analogies slightly less direct).

And yet.  It's a well-told story, engaging throughout, and it's fundamentally an honest one.  There are no gimmicks or silly twists.  Just a series of interesting scenes, compelling characters, and a problem to be solved.  Four stars.

The science fact this month, George Willard's The Complex Problem of the Simple Weather Rocket starts well enough, describing the armada of radio balloons deployed daily by meteorological agencies, but it quickly degenerates into a fannish gush, recommending a switch to little sounding rockets based on the machines currently employed by model rocket enthusiasts.  Kind of a pointless article, especially given that weather balloons are cheap, and now they are augmented by the TIROS weather satellites with their hourly photos.  Two stars.

That leaves the third installment of Cliff Simak's very good serial, The Fisherman, which I won't review until it's all done next month.  Running the numbers, Analog clocks in at a straight three of five stars: acceptable, but not astonishing.  Certainly not Hugo material.  At least not this year…

Sneak preview: Last night, the Young Traveler and I went to the drive-in to take in George Pal's latest, Atlantis: the Lost Continent.  It was a hoot, and we'll tell you all about it next time…on Galactic Journey!

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Magazine/Anthology

[April 18, 1961] Starting on the wrong foot (May 1961 Analog)

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Gideon Marcus, age 42, lord of Galactic Journey, surveyed the proud column that was his creation.  Three years in the making, it represented the very best that old Terra had to offer.  He knew, with complete unironic sincerity, that the sublimity of his articles did much to keep the lesser writers in check, lest they develop sufficient confidence to challenge Gideon's primacy.  This man, this noble-visaged, pale-skinned man, possibly Earth's finest writer, knew without a doubt that this was the way to begin all of his stories…

…if he wants to be published in Analog, anyway.  One might suggest to John Campbell that he solicit stories with more subtle openings.  To be fair, the May 1961 isn't actually that bad, but every time a piece begins in the fashion described above, I feel like I've discovered a portal to 1949's slush pile.

Case in point is Chris Anvil's Identification.  I know Chris has got a good story in him somewhere, but not when he submits to Campbell.  This tale is about the use of actual bugs, psychically linked to a human operator, to eavesdrop on and prevent potential instances of crime.  It's not a bad premise, but the story is too padded at the beginning and end, and too clunky in the middle.  Two stars.

Arthur C. Clarke's Death and the Senator, on the other hand, is very good.  What evil irony for an anti-space politician when it turns out that space offers the cure to a fatal heart condition.  An intense, personal story, with some plausible speculation on the world circa 1976.  Four stars.

I can perhaps forgive Join our gang? for being Sterling Lanier's first piece.  It is the distillation of all that is wrong with Analog — not only is the Terran Empire the strongest force in the universe, but the animals of Earth are the toughest in the universe.  And preventative genocide is acceptable diplomacy.  I can't make this up, folks!  Two stars.

The teeter-totter goes up again with James Schmitz's Gone Fishin', as one might expect given his quite good Summer Guests from a couple of years back.  It starts out with the same hoary formula, but where it goes is quite surprising.  It's basically the The Door through Space concept done right.  Three stars; there's gold in there, but it gets docked for the slow beginning and the somewhat know-it-all air at the end.

There's a G. Harry Stine "non-fiction" article.  It's not worth reprinting, this piece about how science fiction writers are too conservative in their predictions given how fast everything is moving these days.  He includes a bunch of asymptotic curves that indicate, among other things, that we will have hyperdrive by 1980 and crushing overpopulation by the end of the century.  I believe that one should not interpret the trends of the last two decades as representative of a sustainable pace; rather, they represent a quantum jump to a new plateau.  In support of this observation is Enovid, the new "birth control" pill that will, mark my words, blow a hole in Malthusian population growth predictions.  Two stars.

The rest of the magazine comprises Part II of Cliff Simak's promising The Fisherman, which I won't spoil at this time.  All told, it's a 3-star mag — imagine how much higher it could be if Analog's authors could figure out a better way to start their stories!

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Magazine/Anthology

[March 18, 1961] Bad Luck of the Non-Irish (April 1961 Analog)

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Happy St. Patrick's Day!  It's a banner year for Irishmen, particularly with one having reached the top spot in the country, if not the world.  And did you know that the phrase, "Luck of the Irish," actually referred to the knack of Irish immigrants and Americans of Irish descent for becoming wealthy in the Silver and Gold Rushes of the last century?  Though the term was often used derisively by folks who thought the fortune was ill-earned.

My luck with Analog, deserved or not, ran out this month.  With the exception of the opening serial installment, The Fisherman, by Cliff Simak (which I have not yet read but look forward to), the April 1961 Analog has been singularly unimpressive.

One wonders if John Campbell deliberately alternates good issues with bad ones—I'd think he'd be better served by ensuring each magazine had at least one worthy tale!  Perhaps he plum ran out.

Take J.F. Bone's brief A Prize for Edie, for example.  A trio of teeth-gnashing members of the Nobel Prize committee agonize over giving the honor to a computer.  Disappointingly silly, and, as seems to be a theme this issue, it misses the opportunity to make a deeper point.  Two stars.

Lloyd Biggle, Jr's Still, Small Voice had some promise: A Cultural Service agent is sent to an alien world to succeed where the Interplanetary Relations Bureau had failed, namely, to convert a centuries-old absolute monarchy into a democracy.  In particular, I appreciated how the aliens were depicted as an artistic race, and that music was the key to progress.  But the thing is sloppily written with a number of duplicated phrases, the alien race is utterly human, and the story a bit too condescending in tone.  The first betrays too light an editorial touch, and the others spotlight a lack of editorial discrimination.  Two stars.

Interestingly enough, John Campbell's nonfiction piece is the most engaging part of the issue.  Normally, the stuff he writes himself is dreadful; he often shills for one kind of junk science or another.  This time, he's back to his hobby of photography, but on an interesting tangent.  He showcases a new kind of light source, an electroluminescent panel that looks for all the world like a thick sheet of paper.  Pretty neat stuff—I could see it becoming a feature of future science fiction stories.  Three stars.

Back to the dreary stories, Pandora's Planet, by Chris Anvil (whose best work always appears outside of Analog), is another "Earthmen are just plain better at everything than everyone else" story.  In this case, some fuzzy humanoids can't seem to win a war to subjugate a planet's native race without the help of some plucky, original Terrans.  The point of the piece seems to be that unorthodox war is just as valid as "real" war, and stuffy rigidity will only lead to failure.  That's fine so far as it goes, but the canny Terran tactics aren't that innovative, and the stodginess of the fuzzies is insufficiently explored.  Two stars.

That leaves us with Next Door, Next World by lesser magazine perennial, Robert Donald Locke (often writing under the pseudonym, Roger Arcot).  The premise is great: A hyperdrive makes travel to the stars a matter of weeks rather than millennia, but with the side effect that one never returns to quite the same time track one left.  The execution is lousy, however, with plenty of insipid dialogue, stupid characters, and lots of padding.  Again, the impression I got was that Campbell was in a hurry and took what he could get without requesting revision.  And it's yet another piece with a beginning along the lines of, "Clint Hugearms stood near his trusty spaceship, tanned and sturdy features marking him as the protagonist of the story."  I'm starting to think Campbell inserts these openings into all of his submissions.  Two stars.

I apologize to my readers who want only to hear about the good stuff; however, by jingo, if I have to read the drek, you have to read about it!  Perhaps the Simak will yet knock my socks off.  It is not uncommon that a given Astounding's stories are bad, but its serial is good (e.g. The High Crusade and Deathworld, for instance).

I've a surprise for my readers—guest columnist Rosemary Benton will be writing the next article, and she's graciously agreed to contribute one piece per month!  Like you, I will eagerly look forward to what she has to offer.

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Magazine/Anthology

[February 10, 1961] Two for two!  (March 1961 Analog)

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Analog (my errant fingers keep wanting to type “Astounding”) was even better than last time.  This particular copy is a seasoned traveler, having ridden with me to the lovely shores of Kaua'i and back.  At long last, I've finished reading, and I can tell you about it.  A sneak preview: there's not a bad piece in the book!

In lieu of a serial, nearly half of the issue's pages are taken up with Mack Reynold's novella, Ultima Thule.  My nephew, David, was so enamored with this one that he specifically recommended it to me in a recent letter.  It's the story of Ronny Bronston, an agent employed by the mysterious Section G, responsible for maintaining mutual non-interference between the 2000 member planets of the Galactic Federation.  Bronston is sent on the trail of “Tommy Paine,” an elusive agitator who travels from planet to planet, upending the various status quos.  Can you figure out who Paine really is?  I particularly liked Bronston's 'assistant,' the highly capable, and delightfully reproachful Tog Lee Chang Chu.  Reynolds never has trouble writing good female characters.  Three stars.

Cliff Simak is back with another rustic-themed story, Horrible Example.  Can a robot programmed to be the town drunk rise to be more than the sum of his code?  A sensitive piece in that inimitable Simak style.  Four stars.

G. Harry Stine used to be a professional rocketeer—until his calls to action in response to Sputnik rubbed his superiors the wrong way.  Now, he is a technology evangelist.  In his latest piece, Sub-Mach Rockets, he explorers the much neglected field of rocketry at speeds below the speed of sound.  Makes me want to build a baby missile or two!  Three stars.

The next piece was written with tongue firmly in cheek, a bit of engineering fluff by Maurice Price descriptively entitled, An Introduction to the Calculus of Desk-Cleaning.  See Price illustrate the correlation between engineer output and desk-based chaos; it's surprisingly informative!  Four stars.

Next, we've got one of those “non-fact” articles, though it's just billed as fiction.  The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel, by Arthur W. Orton, is a science fictional interpretation of the biblical book of Ezekiel.  It's as good an explanation for that bizarre book as any!  Three stars

Now, I admit it.  I am biased toward stories of interstellar travel with ships and captains and interesting situations.  Poul Anderson's Hiding Place is a wonderful puzzle cloaked in all the trappings I like: a refreshingly multi-racial starship crew finds itself trapped in deep space between a pirate fleet and a quickly diminishing provisions supply.  Only by making contact with a friendly alien ship do they have a hope of seeing the fires of home.  Unfortunately, said alien ship, a zoological vessel with a menagerie of beasts for its cargo, takes the humans for pirates and hides in the animal cages.  Can the terrestrials discern the sentient creatures from their beasts and plead their case in time?  Five stars.

That all adds up to a 3.5 star issue—well worth the half dollar you'll fork over at the newsstand (less if you buy a subscription, which, if the quality continues to be this good, might be a fine investment).

Aloha!

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Magazine/Anthology

[Jan. 25, 1961] Oscillating circuit (the February 1961 Analog)

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John Campbell's science fiction magazine continues to defy my efforts to chart a trend.  Following on the heels of last month's rather dismal issue, the February 1961 Analog is an enjoyable read.  Let's take a look, shall we?

It took me a little while to get into Everett Cole's lead novella, The Weakling, but once I understood what he was doing, I was enthralled.  Cole paints a world in which people with psi powers dominate those without.  It is a planet of slave-owning aristocrats who can force people to do their bidding through mental will alone.  The viewpoint character is Barra, scion of a noble family.  His ascension to lordhood was accidental, caused by the premature deaths of his father and brother.  Without the aid of an array of potent psychic enhancers, he would be barely more powerful than the "pseudo-men" he controls. 

Weakling is the account of this bitter, cruel man, contemptuous of the slaves he resembles, jealous of his psychically more powerful peers, who entices rich merchants to his estate, murdering them for plunder.  The story can be hard to read at times, but it is an excellent insight into the mindset of the 19th Century slave-owner (and thus an indictment of the sentiment that still prevails over much of the modern South).  Four stars. 

Teddy Keller's short, The Plague, is more typical Analog fare.  When a sickness sweeps the nation, with no apparent rhyme or reason to its epidemiology, one doctor must race against time to find a cure.  The solution is contrived and rather silly.  Two stars.

Freedom, the latest in Mack Reynolds' slew of stories set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, is a horse of a different color.  Once again, Reynolds expertly conveys the character of life behind an Iron Curtain where Communism has achieved its economic goals, but not its social ones.  In this tale, we see how difficult it is to extirpate a desire for intellectual freedom once it has taken root.  I appreciate the evenhandedness with which Reynolds evaluates both the East and West.  I also liked the romantic element, portrayed as between two equals unencumbered with conservative moral values.  Four stars.

Campbell trumpeted his expanded coverage of science fact in his magazine, and it seemed a worthy experiment at the start.  I'm always happy to see more Asimov articles, after all.  But recently, the "non-fiction" portion of the magazine has been devoted to self-penned articles on the editor's hobbies or favorite crackpot inventions.  We get a blessed break from these with a short photo-feature showing rockets of the past and present.  Too short to garner a rating.

I don't think I quite got H.B. Fyfe's The Outbreak of Peace, a short short that takes place at an interstellar peace conference.  I even read it twice.  Would someone explain it to me, please?  Two stars (for now).

At last, we have Chris Anvil's latest, The Ghost Fleet.  A space fleet commander is forced to ignominious flight when the enemy strikes with an unbeatable weapon.  Can he recover his honor (and save the day) with an audacious gambit?  It's good, if something of a one-trick pony.  Three stars.

The issue finishes off with the conclusion to Occasion for Disaster, which I previously covered.  All told, the book clocks in at a slice over three stars, which is perfectly acceptable for 50 cents of entertainment. 

Now let's see if this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction can top that.

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Magazine/Anthology

[Jan. 15, 1961] Greater than the sum (Mark Phillips' Occasion for Disaster)

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Illustrated by Van Dongen

Sometimes one plus one is greater than two, and sometimes, two authors produce a substantially better product than either of them might individually.

Take Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg, for instance.  Here are a couple of fellows whose personal output tends toward the uninspiring, at best, and the downright offensive, at worst.  Yet, together, they wrote the Nidor series, which was solid reading all the way through.  Now, Laurence Janifer, on the other hand, writes some pretty good stuff on his own, so perhaps he is not helped by his pairing with Randy.  On the third hand, Randy sure as heck writes better stuff when working with Larry (under the pen name of Mark Phillips)!

Case in point: A couple of years ago, the two teamed up to produce a serial novel in Astounding (now Analog) called That Sweet Little Old Lady.  It followed the travails of FBI Agent Ken Malone as he tracked down a gaggle of insane telepaths in the early 1970s.  His main partner, aside from the Garrett stand-in, Agent Boyd, is a charming grandmotherly telepath whose primary quirk is that she believes herself to be Queen Bess, herself.  Not a reincarnation, mind you–the real deal.

The G-Man and Her Majesty teamed up again for another serial, Out Like a Light, where the subject of interest was a gang of teleporting juvenile car thieves.  By the end of this novel, Malone has picked up some psychic skills of his own, including a sense of precognition and the ability to teleport.

Three months ago, installment one of the latest Mark Phillips novel debuted in Analog.  This one is aptly titled Occasion for Disaster, and it is Malone's most ambitious outing to date.  In fact, I think it makes it rather difficult to write any more in the series given the extremely conclusive nature of its ending.  Not that I'll tell you about the ending.

I will tell you about the beginning, however.  It is two years after Malone's first introduction, and the FBI is in a tizzy.  Society seems to be going to hell in slow motion, the rate of errors, accidents, and just plain-dumb decisions having recently risen above the statistical.  Of course, psionics is the suspected culprit. 

Follow Malone's meandering course as he first determines what's happening, then who is causing it, and finally why it's being done.  It's a good mystery, as fun as the rest of the series, and Queen Elizabeth (i.e. Rose Thompson) is always a hoot. 

Three stars.

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Magazine/Anthology

[November 19, 1960] Saving the Best for Last (December 1960 Analog)

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As the year draws to a close, all of the science fiction magazines (that is to say, the six remaining–down from a 1953 peak of 45) scramble to publish their best fiction.  Their aim is two-fold: firstly, to end the year with a bang, and secondly, to maximize the chances that one of their stories will earn a prestigious award.

By which, of course, I refer to my Galactic Stars, bestowed in December.  There's also this thing called a Hugo, which some consider a Big Deal.

And that's probably why the December 1960 Astounding was actually a pretty good ish (for a change).  I'll gloss over Part 2 of Occasion for Disaster, co-written by Garrett and Janifer, and head straight into the stand-alone stuff.

First, you've got an editorial foreward with Campbell whinging about the Dean Drive again.  But this time, he promises never to talk about it again.  This ostensible reactionless drive has finally gotten a review from some government agency or another, which is all Campbell says he really wanted.  But even Campbell seems doubtful that Dean's work will be vindicated, probably on account that the thing is a fraud.

The first piece of actual fiction is Poul Anderson's novelette, The Longest Voyage.  It's an atmospheric gem featuring the first circumnavigation of a globe.  I say a globe because it becomes clear early on that this sailing vessel, even though it be crewed by men, and men who speak an archaic dialect of English, is not plying the oceans of Earth, but rather some colony world where technology has regressed only to rise again.  The Captain's destination, aside from his port of origin, is an island where (it is rumored) a spaceship crashed decades ago. 

There is a real richness to this tale, which borrows liberally from the argot Anderson showcased in his excellent The High Crusade.  And then there's the deep theme–if given a chance to leapfrog one's culture from the Renaissance to the Interstellar, skipping the centuries of investigation and discovery, would one, should one do it?  What's more important when solving a problem: The answer or the process?

Four stars.  It's what Garrett wishes he could have done with Despoiler of the Golden Empire.

Harry Harrison is back with The K-Factor.  Sociometry is perfected such that human cultures can be reduced to a set of variables, the most important being our K-Factor or propensity for war.  But what happens when someone deliberately stimulates a world's violence factor?  An interesting premise marred by being told largely through exposition.  Three stars.

The Untouchable, by Stephen A. Kallis, a fellow I've never heard of before, is a tiny thing that was probably included to fill a space rather than on its merit.  Oh, it's not bad, this story of an invention that makes objects intangible, but it feels like the beginning of something rather than a complete piece.  Three stars.

Campbell writes the science-fact article this issue: They do it with Mirrors.  Either Astounding's editor is too cheap to pay for outside help, or he thinks too much of himself to let anyone else write the column.  Perhaps both.  In any event, this one is on Project Echo, and Campbell spends a dozen pages writing what I managed to convey in two (in my article on Courier).  I did appreciate him pointing out, however, the the world's first communications satellite is as much a triumph of rocketry as it is ground-based computer signal processing.

Gun for Hire is another Mack Reynolds piece that features some element of violence in the title.  It's actually a lot of fun, this story of a hit man transported to the future by pacifists who want him to rub out a would-be dictator.  I was particularly impressed with the assassin's characterization.  Four stars.

Finally, we have Donald E. Westlake, another unknown author (though come to think of it, I might have seen his name in a table of contents of a lesser mag last year).  He gives us Man of Action, again a case where a 20th Century fellow is abducted by folks from the future.  In this instance, the man is not a thug but an effete interior decorator.  He is compelled by his robotic captors to play a sort of 20 Questions game to determine why the future has stagnated, and how to put some pep back into it.  The execution is very nice, though the solution is a bit pat.  Three stars.

Wowsville.  For the first time in memory, Analog has delivered an issue with no clunkers, and with some genuine sparklies to boot.  Well done, Mr. Campbell.  More of this, please.

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Magazine/Anthology

[Oct. 20, 1960] Fiction > Non-fiction… sometimes (the November 1960 Analog)

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Each month, I lament what's become of the magazine that John Campbell built.  Analog's slow decline has been marked by the editor's increased erratic and pseudo-scientific boosting behavior.  Well, I just don't have the heart to kick a dog today, and besides, the fiction is pretty good in this month's (November 1960) issue.  So let's get right to it, shall we?

"Mark Phillips" (Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer) have a new four-part serial in their Malone series.  Set in the 1970s, the series details the adventures of a couple of federal agents, who are helped in their cases by a telepath who believes herself (and may actually be) Queen Elizabeth I.  I won't spoil the details of this one, Occasion for Disaster, but I've liked the previous novels, so I suspect Occasion will also be pleasant reading.

Heading off the magazine's short stories is a fun piece by Theodore L. Thomas, half of the pseudonymous duo that previously brought us a fascinating study into the world of copyright, The Professional Touch.  Crackpot continues in that vein, featuring a brilliant old scientist (Prof. Singlestone… get it?!) who convinces the world that he's gone senile.  His aim?  To make his work so disreputable that no government agency will want it, so that no university will employ him, so that he can for the first time in his life enjoy working as a truly free agent.  So that when his invention proves to be utterly unignorable, he will be the master of its fate.  Cute stuff.  Three stars.

Next up is E.C. Tubb's The Piebald Horse.  It starts out well enough with a Terran spy trying to escape a repressive alien world with his brain full of sensitive knowledge.  The jig seems up for him when the aliens employ telepaths as mind-screen agents, but they are foiled when the protagonist pickles himself continuously until he can depart the planet.  I'm pretty sure I just saw this tactic in Fred Pohl's Drunkard's Walk.  2 stars.

These two stories are followed by a pair of execrable "non-fiction" articles.  Captain, MSC, US Navy H.C. Dudley, PhD (he must be authoritative–look at all the titles!) has the first: The Electric Field Rocket.  He maintains that the Earth's electrostatic field can be used to assist rocket launches; he implies that the Soviet's lead in the Space Race is attributable to their taking advantage of said phenomenon.  Not only is the article unreadable, but I suspect the science is bunk.  Time will tell.  1 star.

Speaking of which, Editor Campbell contributes the second article: Instrumentation for the Dean Drive.  I'm not even going to dignify with a review this next piece in an endless series on Dean's magical inertialess engine.  He needs to knock it off already.  1 star.

Blessedly, the rest of the issue is quite good.  The reliable Hal Clement is back with Sunspot, an exciting, if highly technical, account of a group of spacemen who ride a comet around the Sun.  What better shielding exists for a close encounter with a star than billions of cubic tons of ice?  Four stars.

At last, we come to H. Beam Piper's Oomphel in the Sky.  The set-up is great: a Terran colony world in a binary star system courts disaster when the planet makes a close approach to the usually far-away sun.  This triggers unrest amongst the natives, threatening Terran and native interests alike.  I'm an unabashed fan of Piper, and this is a good tale, although he does get a little patronizing toward the do-gooder but ineffective Terran government.  I like the strong anthropological bent, and I appreciate the respect with which he treats the natives and their interests.  Four stars.

In sum, the November 1960 Analog (I almost typed "Astounding") is quite decent, fiction-wise.  Campbell needs to do what Galaxy's Gold has done and hire a ghost editor, and a real non-fiction author.  I can't believe there isn't another budding Asimov or Ley out there champing at the bit to be published…

The fourth and last Kennedy/Nixon debate is tomorrow night!  I hope you'll all watch it with me, but if you can't bring yourself to sit through another hour of sparring, I'll give you the full details the following day.

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Magazine/Anthology

[September 10, 1960] Analog, Part 2 (The October 1960 Analog)

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The October 1960 Analog is a surprisingly decent read.  While none of it is literature for the ages (some might argue that the Ashwell-written lead novella is an exception), neither is any of it rough hoeing.  Interestingly, it is an issue devoted almost entirely to sequels.  It works, I think.

The first story after the Ashwell is H.B.Fyfe's Satellite System, and it's the best of the three I've seen from him thus far.  An interstellar trader is ejected from his ship by hijackers.  But will orbital mechanics allow him to have the last laugh?  I liked the idea that trade between the stars is so expensive that only the exchange of ideas is profitable.

Mack Reynolds offers up the thoughtful and enjoyable Combat.  It's another of his Cold War stories set in the mid 1970s, a la Revolution and (maybe) Pieces of the Game, where the Soviet Union is ascendant despite all of our current predictions.  It's not a utopia, mind you, but it's definitely something of a success story.  In Combat, advanced extraterrestrials appear, and to the West's consternation, pick Moscow as their first stop. 

What makes this story compelling is the rather even-handed way with which Reynolds portrays Communism and the world behind the Iron Curtain.  There's a lot of good political discussion, but it never gets too preachy or bogged down, as in some of Heinlein's work.  Of course, I don't buy Reynolds' predictions, even with Jack Kennedy's recent statement that Sputnik and Lunik were "twin alarm bells in the night."  Some of Reynolds' statements don't even make sense.  For instance, in his story, both superpowers spend half of their GNP on the military.  Fundamentally impossible. 

But it's worth seeing the tale through to the end, even if that end is a slight let-down.

Randall Garrett, under the name of "Darrel T. Langart," wrote the next tale: Psichopath.  It's a direct sequel to What the Left Hand was Doing and features the same psionic secret agency.  This time around, they are investigating what appear to be acts of sabotage at an antigravity research facility.  Given the two-page screed about scientists' reluctance to acknowledge attacks on cherished scientific axioms (a thinly disguised paean to the much-abused Mr. Dean and his "drive"), I suspect Campbell had a strong hand in its editing.

Wrapping up the fiction is Isaac Asimov's latest non-fact article on Thiotimoline, the a fictional substance that dissolves in water before its insertion!  Thiotimoline and the Space Age discusses some of the technological advances the substance allows.  For instance one can use it to send messages back in time to determine the success of a space mission or missile launch before it happens.  It's a cute piece.

Finally, Campbell has yet another report on one of his home science projects.  In this case, it's an overlong treatise on his attempts to grow crystals called The Self-Repairing Robot.  It would have been nice had he discussed at further length the concept behind the article's title, that self-repairing crystals could be a pretty neat technological advancement.  Rather, we get to ooh and ahh at the descriptions of brightly colored inorganic growths–accompanied by drab black-and-white photos. 

All in all, its a solid three-star issue.  That's pretty good for Analog.  Plus, it looks like "Mark Randall" will be back next month with another Malone and Boyd story.  Their last one was pretty good, so there's something to look forward to. 

In other news, Hurricane Donna has made landfall in Florida.  This massive storm is a serious menace, and the folks at Cape Canaveral are taking no chances.  Both stages of the Atlas Able, which was deployed for a Pioneer Moon lshot ater this month, have been towed to protective hangars.  Antennas and cables have been disconnected from buildings and vehicles.  All of the large transport aircraft based at Patrick Air Force Base departed like a flock of frightened birds.  Their destination was San Salvador and other downrange islands.  The base personnel evacuated the base by noon after securing the hangars.  I understand that they had a harrowing ride back to their Cocoa Beach hotels as blinding rain lashed against their windshields and gusts of wind threatened to knock their cars off the road.

I suspect there will be another rough couple of days, not just for the engineers, but for all the residents of the Eastern seaboard.  Stay safe, my friends. 

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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race

[September 9, 1960] Willingly to Sequel (October 1960 Analog, lead novella)

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Analog, formerly Astounding, has a reputation for fielding the fewest female authors.  Perhaps its because Campbell's magazine is the most conservative of the science fiction digests, or maybe its because of the conception that women's STF is somehow softer than the "real" deal.  You know, with characterization and such.

So you can imagine my delight when I saw Pauline Ashwell once again has the lead novella in this month's Astounding, the second in her tales starring the spunky Lysistrata Lee.  You may have caught the fun Unwillingly to School a couple of years ago in which Lee wins a scholarship to study on old Earth (after a bit of adversity, of course).  The Lost Kafoozalum, which takes place after Lee graduates, and covers her first field mission, has that same unusual first person storytelling style as the earlier story. 

I like the plot, and Lee is hard not to love, but I found there was a little too much set-up for the payoff.  I would have liked more showing than telling during the expository first half.  The end is a bit pat, too.  I don't mind romance (actually, I like it a great deal), so I'd have enjoyed more development leading to the reveal.

Read it, and tell me what you think!

I'll be covering the rest of the October 1960 Astounding tomorrow.  In the meantime, here's an update on Hurricane Donna.  It apparently began forming on August 29 off the coast of West Africa, and we've been tracking its swath of destruction via radar and TIROS 2 ever since.  It's already pummeled the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, swamped the coast of Cuba, and it's currently gathering strength just 150 miles southeast of Miami. 

It's not certain yet whether the track of the storm will take it over Cape Canaveral, but Air Force and Space Technology Laboratory personnel are taking no chances.  They've already set up evacuation plans for personnel and vital equipment related to the upcoming Pioneer Moon mission.  Let's hope the inclement weather doesn't jinx things.  The last failure was heartbreaking enough.

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