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[August 31, 1968] The Sound and the Fury (September 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

In the backround (and sometimes the foreground) of my reading of this month's issue of Analog was the Democratic National Convention held over four tumultuous days in the Windy City.  This was not four days of politicians patting themselves on the back, as we saw in Miami Beach for the GOP Convention—amid the citywide busdrivers and telephone workers strike, there was tumult, walk-outs, protests, and a general breakdown of the democratic process.


Il Duce, Mayor Daley, intent on turning his town into a police state in the pursuit of Law and Order: 12,000 cops plus a contingent of National Guard were on hand last weekend.

The writing was on the wall that first day when Julian Bond arrived with his alternate set of Georgia delegates, the group that broadly represented the demographic makeup of the Georgia Democratic Party.  First, they were not even allowed in; then they were grudglingly placed in the cheap seats of the balcony.  All while Daniel Inouye, Senator from Hawaii, gave a stirring, unprecedented keynote speech in which he decried the anarchy and violence occurring outside the convention halls, but nevertheless put on the assembly the responsibility of rectifying the racial injustice that led to such agitation.

Eventually, the delegates prepared to vote on the certification of the Georgia delegation that had been approved by the party—the less integrated one.  Actually, first they voted on if they were going to vote on it that evening.  It was during this battle that the Michigan delegation offered their seats to the alternate Georgia delegation, a move that enraged members of the "official" delegation.

With regard to who was going to get the Presidential nomination, by the end of the first night, it was clear McCarthy was a dead duck, and few were mentioning McGovern.  However, there was a rising "draft Kennedy" movement that peaked on Day 2 despite Ted repeatedly saying he wasn't interested.  More dramatically, Day 2 marked the day police evicted 1,000 protesters from nearby Lincoln Park, CBS correspondent Dan Rather got punched by plainclothes security for not wearing his credentials prominently, dozens of delegates, mostly Black, walked out, and Georgia Governor Lester Maddox took his ball and went home, saying he was going to stump for segregationalist independent candidate, George Wallace.


Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…

And that night, I'm pretty sure they still hadn't certified the Georgia delegation.

On the third day, 10,000 protesters gathered at Grant Park, a terrific anti-War demonstration broke out on the floor of the convention, and the minority position tried in vain to make an end to bombing North Vietnam a part of the party plank.  By the time Humphrey was anointed the candidate (a foregone conclusion by that point), it was an anti-climax and anything but a triumphant coronation.  And what a change twenty years has wrought: the Southern delegations that walked out on the convention in '48 are now behind Humphrey, where the liberals who admired the fiery populist now reject the man they view as Johnson's stooge.

Discontent was rampant.  Delegates were frustrated that they were not listened to, that the motions they were voting on were not sufficiently explained, and that Mayor Daley was strong-arming them into voting the way he wanted them to.  Not to mention that there wasn't enough food to feed everyone in the convention's vicinity, and the hot dogs on site were terrible. Many said 1968 marked the death of the party convention, at least in its current incarnation.

But the political strife was as nothing compared to the rivers of blood that were shed as blue-helmeted cops clashed with protestors.  "The Whole World is Watching" and "Fuck LBJ" intertwined with shouts and screams, and all of it was televised in full color (but not live, as that was impossible due to the strikes and Daley's security efforts).

The only bright spot of that third evening was the nomination of D.C. and Black native son the Rev. Channing Phillips, the first American of African descent to be nominated by a major political party for President.

By the fourth day, I was exhausted, yet I tuned in anyway.  I'm glad I did.  That evening, the convention played a retrospective on RFK.  It was too hagiographic, and frankly, the wounds too fresh to bear close watching, at least for me.  But when it was over, something amazing happened.  Virtually the entire audience of delegates, excluding just the groups from Texas and Illinois, rose to its feet and began clapping.  Louder and louder, and then they started singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Over and over, "Glory Glory Hallelujah, His truth is marching on."  Daley's henchmen tried to impose order.  They gaveled.  They called out the Sergeants-in-Arms.  Nothing deterred the delegates.  All of the anger, all the discontent, all of the frustrated might-have-beens boiled over in that moment into this display of singing, of shouting, of clapping.

It was only defused when a moment of silence was called for the memory of Dr. King, and then the convention could continue.  The business of the moment was the nomination of a Vice President.  That morning Humphrey had already tapped Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, and there was no serious opposition.

Yet, and in a truly touching moment, Julian Bond's name was advanced as a candidate (so, the first Black VP nominee of a major party in history), and he garnered 27 and a half votes before voluntarily withdrawing his name.  Humbly, self-effacingly, he noted that he was too young to accept.


Bond withdraws his name from consideration.

Muskey and Humphrey gave their acceptance speeches that night.  There was a lot on their shoulders—the need to deliver speeches that thread the needle, knitting the party back together, both addressing and condemning what had happened in Chicago.

That didn't happen.  What we got was a limp flatness of platitudes.  When I woke up, I learned that 20 delegates, supporters of McCarthy, had been beaten up in their hotel and arrested.  The charge pelting the cops with sardines.  McCarthy pointedly did not congratulate Humphrey that morning; the Vice President, now the newly christened candidate, had made no comment on the incident, tacitly endorsing it.

So that's that.  HHH is our bulwark against Nixon.  Muskie is his backstop.  Wallace just got a shot in the arm, and I can only think that's a blow against Democratic hopes.  Americans are disunited as we have not been for many decades.

It is hard to go on with my assigned task after all that, but the job remains, and I'm the one who has to do it.  The convention was four days of Hell.  Accordingly, the September 1968 issue of Analog was a slog, too, though of a different kind.


by John Schoenherr

The Tuvela (Part 1 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

The ocean planet of Nandy-Cline is in the sights of the Parahuans, a rapacious race of aliens that was beaten back by the Federation seventy years ago, and wants another try at the apple.  They're being cautious.  The humans beat them once, which is almost heresy to the arrogant Parahuans.  To justify losing to the inferior homo sapiens, they decide there must be a secret cabal of superhumans that leads and coordinates our species.  They must know more in order to sway political power from those supporting the Voice of Caution to those in favor of the Voice of Action.

To that end, they have set up a submarine base on the planet and abducted the human, Ticos Cay.  Why?  Because he is nearly 200 years old and seems to have found the secret of immortality.  It is clear to the Parahuans that he must be in the employ of the "Tuvelas", our putative ubermenschen.  They torture him, at length, but he resists because the same disciplines that have extended his life also grant him the ability to blot out pain.  Nevertheless, he will succumb—unless he can get outside help.

Enter Nile Etland, a young biologist living on Nandy-Cline.  She and her two giant mutant otters, sapient and clever, are looking for Cay, who has disappeared from the floating island where he was doing research.  Cay's only hope is that the Parahuans will take Etland for a Tuvela and treat her with comparative kid gloves, testing her abilities, rather than killing her outright.

Etland, to her credit, is up to the challenge…

The premise for this one is excellent, and something I love about James H. Schmitz is his ability with (indeed preference for) featuring heroines over heroes.  That said, the writing in this piece is often plodding and explanatory, and I found my momentum frequently flagging.

So, three stars for this installment.  Now that all the pieces have been set up, perhaps the next half will be more exciting.

The Powers of Observation, by Harry Harrison


by Leo Summers

The Soviets have developed a new kind of super spy.  He looks just like a man, but for some reason weighs over 400 pounds.  If that leads you to guess that he's the Communist version of Hymie the robot from Get Smart, give yourself a cigar.

But the American agent tasked to pursue him through the back roads of Yugoslavia has a few gimmicks up his sleeve, too…

Well-written, but nothing spectactular.  Three stars.

Steamer Time?, by Wallace West

As America grapples with its oppressive smog situation, some are calling for a return to the good ol' days—the days of the Stanley Steamer.  I'm just a little too young to remember when steam cars battled internal combustion vehicles for supremacy, so I don't have the nostalgia for them that Wallace West infuses his piece with.  The arguments for steam are largely that it burns clean, with its only waste gas being carbon dioxide (of course, while not strictly a "pollutant", there are other problems with it; viz. our 1958 article on the potential for industry-caused global heating).  Steam engines were also more fuel-efficient, though I don't know if that's still the case.

The arguments against steam, to me, would be the long time to develop a head of steam.  In the old days, waiting for your boiler to heat up was acceptable since the alternative was cranking up your IC car, and risking breaking an arm when the crank snapped back.  With the invention of the electric starter, that became a non-issue.  Perhaps the steam folks have a plan, too.

Anyway, the piece is readable, if a bit gushing.  I'm sure the auto industry will never allow an IC competitor to emerge, although as we speak, two electric cars are racing across the nation, so who knows?

Three stars.

Hi Diddle Diddle, by Peter E. Abresch


by Leo Summers

A harried reserve USAF captain, assigned to the UFO division, gets tired of all the cranks and reporters and spins a yarn for them: the cigar-shaped "ships" are really space cows feeding on the gasses of our upper atmosphere.  His creation is recounted credulously, and hysteria sweeps the nation.  Eventually, even Soviet agents are involved.

But what if the captain actually guessed too close to the mark?

This is a tedious story, and it just goes on and on.  Analog rarely does humor well.

Two stars.

A Flash of Darkness, by Stanley Schmidt


by Leo Summers

Mars Rover (MR) Robot is having a bit of trouble on Mars.  The autonomous machine uses a holographic laser rather than a camera for navigation (apparently it's lighter; I don't buy it).  When night falls, the rover finds its vision fogged and then blinded by something beyond its ken.  It's up to the technicians back on Earth, and maybe a little intuition in MR Robot's mechanical brain, to solve the problem.

This could have been an interesting piece, but I felt the ending was a let-down.  You'll see why.

Two stars.

Parasike, by Michael Chandler


by Leo Summers

A fellow pretending to use numerology to make guaranteed stock picks turns out to be a quack of a different duck.  He is promptly recruited by America's super-secret psi corps.

A lot of talking, a lot of fatuous acceptance of psi as science—in short, the perfect Campbell story.

Two stars.

Counting off

August has been one of the roughest months of one of the roughest years in recent history.  Analog finished at 2.5, which is lousy, but not that far removed from the rest: Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.5), Amazing (2.6), If (2.9).  Only Galaxy finished above the three-star barrier (3.1)

You could take all the 4/5 star stuff, and you wouldn't even fill a single issue.  That's awful.  Women were down to their usual publication rate, producing 6.5% of all new fiction this month.

It's going to take bold new leadership to change that trend, just as it will take bold new leadership to fix the country.  That new leadership doesn't seem to be near in coming.  I just hope we can withstand another Long Hot Summer…




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[July 31, 1968] No easy answers (August 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Hard reality

"Fans are Slans", or so the legend goes.  Inspired by the psychic supermen in A. E. Van Vogt's Slan, the notion is that SF fans are a breed apart.  Better than the average Joe, who are comparative Palookas.  And why not?  We're obviously smarter, given our intellectual proclivities, and our favored choice of fiction has all the answers.  A problem is presented, our brilliant heroes hatch a solution, and we live happily ever after.

How else to explain Fred Pohl's call for Galaxy readers to submit solutions (in 100 words or fewer!) to the Vietnam war?  Never mind that the problem has occupied our greatest minds for two decades, with no solution in sight.  Indeed, ever since the Tet offensive, things have gotten more complicated.

You see, according to the Pentagon (per Aviation Weekly and Space Report), we won the Tet offensive.  Handily.  And that onslaught was actually a desperate 'Hail Mary'–Soviet and Chinese advisors had told the North Vietnamese that they were losing, big-time, and they had to do something to shatter American and South Vietnamese morale, no matter the cost.

And it worked!  It induced LBJ to throw in the towel, declare a bombing holiday, and start a peace process, the only tangible effect of which has been to allow the communists to resume logistical deliveries down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to offload shipments of Soviet materiele in the port of Haiphong, which had been interdicted by the U.S. Air Force.

That's not the only setback to the Allied cause–Khe Sanh, that forward Marine base that held out against siege for a full season, has been abandoned.  No good explanation has been forthcoming.

Now, I'm not defending our presence in Vietnam, and I'm not arguing against the peace process.  I'm saying no science fiction writer, no matter how brainy, is going to have an answer.  Not even an easy one.  I don't think there is one.

But so long as easy solutions exist in our science fiction, we Slans will keep thinking there is.  Certainly, this month's issue of Analog is chock full of solvable problems, a bunch of scenarios that might well have been developed by high school or college professors as logic puzzles for their students.These are the kind of stories you find most often in Analog, which aims at the clear-thinking, black-and-white engineering set.

Now, that's fine.  Analog's job is to make money, and it has the most readers of any SF mag, so it must be doing something right.  It's certainly not editor Campbell's job to disabuse fans of their Slan aspirations.

Nevertheless, as someone who isn't an engineer, I find Analog often to be a slog.  I like to have more story in my stories.  Sometimes Campbell lets a compelling tale slip into his pages; more often he does not.  The proportion of story types usually determines whether I give an issue more or fewer than three stars.

Given the tone of this preamble, you can probably guess what kind of issue this will be…


by Kelly Freas

Logic Puzzles

The Baalim Problem, by Bruce Daniels


by Kelly Freas

Problem posed: the human race has spread throughout the stars, setting up all sorts of empires, nations, and leagues.  They have never encountered evidence of aliens–until now: a putatively nonhuman distress beacon has gone off over an independent human world.  Two polities, an extremely libertarian nation and a group-thinking bureaucracy, have, at their computers' recommendations, sent single representatives to investigate.

The beacon leads them both to a hostile world, one beyond the means of either of scouts to handle alone.  So, these adversaries must work together to escape the planet and bring back news of what they've found.

And what they find is that the "alien" evidence is an obvious hoax, developed by…someone…for…some purpose.  Who might have hatched the scheme and why is the puzzle to be deciphered by the reader.  Or, if the reader be lazy, to simply read about as the characters in the story explain the answer to each other.

The sentiment is nice, but I'd rather have had the thing play out narratively rather than in narration.

Three stars.

The Fuglemen of Recall, by Jack Wodhams


by Leo Summers

Problem posed: a number of people seem to have lost their minds, convinced they are someone else.  The Feds investigate and determine the common factor was that each had just had an engagement with Lidlun Spacial Electronic Enterprises.  Some kind of mind/memory transfer hocus pocus is clearly afoot.  But when they apprehend the President of Lidlun for interrogation, is he really who he seems?

I suppose the lesson of this tale is that cops should always have a picture of the person to prevent a false arrest.

Unfortunately, Wodhams had to write a bit too obliquely and clumsily, and also had to make the investigators morons, to make this puzzle a challenge for the reader.

Two stars.

How the Soviets Did it in Space, by G. Harry Stine

Problem posed: how did the USSR so handily beat us to orbit, and why did they keep scoring space spectaculars earlier than us?

If you've got a subscription to Aviation Weekly, you know the answer, but rocketry popularizer Stine does an excellent job of summarizing all the tidbits that have been leaked over the last few years.  Now we know that the Soviets had a Saturn-class rocket from the beginning while we were still piddling around with Thors, Jupiters and Atlases.

So why didn't the Russkies keep their lead?  Well, we don't know that another Soviet spectacular isn't around the corner.  But assuming it isn't, I would guess it's because our Saturn 1 was the beginning of a family of superboosters whereas their Vostok/Luna/Zond launcher has already topped out its potential.

On the other hand, their new Proton rocket seems to be operational, and something launched Soyuz 1…

Great schematics, and I appreciated the strong line drawn between the development of ICBMs and the almost incidental exploitation of the rockets for civilian applications.

Four stars.

Appointment on Prila, by Bob Shaw


by Leo Summers

Problem posed: a gray terror, an alien being that can mimic anything perfectly, is trapped on a hostile cinder of a world when a Terran survey team arrives.  Six self-contained pods leave the human mothership to conduct a geodetic survey; seven return.  Worse still, the alien has the ability to take over any organic mind that it finds.  Is there anything the team can do to withstand this menace?

Well, as it turns out, no.  Indeed, the humans do precious little, and salvation relies on factors already baked into the scenario.  I will confess that I had the ending spoiled for me before I started, so that might have diminished things.

That said, Shaw is a sensitive and evocative author, and this work is the highlight of the issue.

Three stars.

Satan's World (Part 4 of 4), by Poul Anderson


by Kelly Freas

Problem posed: Serendipity Inc., a knowledge broker for the loose knit Polesotechnic League of stars, is actually an intelligence-gathering front for the Shenn, an up-and-coming race of rapacious beings.  Plenty of stuff happens as a lead up to this, the fourth installment in the serial, but most of it is inconsequential.  This particular instance is concerned with the following questions:

1) Who are the Shenn, and how, with their frankly primitive, impulsive, and aggressive mindset, did they get control of an advanced, robotic civilization?
2) How can one reconcile their above racial habits with the fact that they are herbivores, who tend toward peaceful, communal societies?
3) How did the six human members of Serendipity's board end up in thrall to the Shenn, and how is that the linchpin to dealing with the seemingly implacable aliens?

These are all fine questions, and they are all answered tidily, in pages and pages of explanation that might well have been copied from a 30th Century encyclopedia.  As often happens with Poul's work, he's created an interesting universe, only developed a plot for half of his story, and employed uninteresting caricatures to carry it out.

I'm sick of Nicholas van Rijn and his lusty Dutch oaths.  I'm tired of the Buddhist dragon-centaur Adzel and the irritable (though admittedly adorable) Chee Lan, and the callow Davy Falkayn.  Again, I want stories, not historical tracts of Anderson's future universe.

Two stars for this installment and 2.5 for the book as a whole.

Specialty, by Joe Poyer


by Kelly Freas

Problem posed: Tupac Araptha is an Alto Plano Peruvian, adapted to low pressure from birth.  As a result, he is uniquely qualified to work on the moon.  He can operate his suit at lower pressures, which means less resistance to movement, meaning he can work eight hours a "day" (twenty-four hour cycles are arbitrary on the moon) whereas lowlanders can barely manage three.  How does Kelly, the local mining boss, handle the interpersonal jealousy that springs from this issue?

This story would be better served if it weren't set in the same timeline as "Spirits of '76", in which a dozen moonshiners (pun intended) establish a libertarian "republic" on the moon; it makes the context sillier, when the story is rather serious.  I was also annoyed that Kelly's first solution was to suggest that Tupac beat up his rival in a manly display (on the moon?  Surrounded by high vacuum?!), and when Tupac demurs, Kelly's next solution is to…take a leave of absence.

There could have been an interesting story here, but there ultimately isn't.

Two stars.

Harsh reality

Doing the math, Analog finishes at a mediocre 2.7.  As uninspiring a finish as this is, it actually consitutes a median: Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.4) was worse, as were Fantastic (2.3) and Orbit 3 (2.3).  IF (2.8) was a near tie.

The saving graces of this month were Famous Science Fiction (3.5), though that was mostly reprints, and Galaxy (3.9), which I seemed to like more than everyone else.  Well, that's my privilege!

Despite the low aggregate ratings, there was actually enough good stuff to fill two decent sized magazines.  Women contributed 10.5% of the new fiction this month, which sounds better than average, but all but one of the tales was in Orbit, which is technically a paperback rather than a magazine.

Bringing things full circle, the issue of getting more women in print has been a perennial one, one that has defied solution (or even the notion that it's a problem that needs solving).  Since the magazines won't or can't fix the situation, women have moved to other media.  So we see women in anthologies like Orbit.  We see women like A. M. Lightner and Madeleine L'Engle writing "young adult" (the new term for juvenile) series.  We see women prominent in the writing and production of science fiction shows like Star Trek.

I think it's fandom's loss when the SF mags become stag parties.  I remember the salad days of Galaxy and F&SF back in the early '50s, and part of what made them great was the diversity of stories, the range of viewpoints and styles.  I'd hate to lose that to other venues (though the mags' loss is obviously other media's gain).

How do we get more women back into the mags? How do we get folks to recognize the value of women in the mags?  I wish I knew.  After all, I'm no Slan, just a man…




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[June 30, 1968] Hawk among the sparrows (July 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

It's all in who you know

This month, the legendary Earl Warren, former governor of my state of California, and Chief Justice during one of the Supreme Court's most dramatic eras, announced that he was stepping down.  No sooner had he done this that President Johnson tapped Abe Fortas, Associate Justice since 1965, for the chief position among the top black-robes.

Fortas and LBJ go way back, all the way to 1948's Texas Democratic primary for Senator, when the young lawyer successfully won a legal challenge to LBJ's victory.  Since then, their stars have been interlinked.  Some of Fortas' fellow justices (and many newspapers) suggest that the Justice and the President's relationship is a bit too chummy.  Still, Fortas has been a good, liberal judge, and he'd probably be a fine Chief Justice.  Sometimes the good ol' boy network doesn't hurt anybody.

This segues nicely into my review of this month's issue of Analog.  Campbell, like many SF magazine editors, has a stable of reliable authors.  This means he always has work of a certain quality to fill his issues.  It also tends to crowd out new talent.  This results in a kind of conservatism, and often a bit of mediocrity.  This month, however, things work out a bit better than average.

Let's take a look!


by Kelly Freas

Familiar faces

Hawk Among the Sparrows, by Dean McLaughlin


by Kelly Freas

Howard Farman is the pilot of the Pika-don, a cross between the SR-71 hypersonic recon plane and the VTOL "Harrier" (which is about to enter British service).  On a mission to monitor a French weapons test, some scientificish gobbledegook happens, knocking Farman back in time to 1917–the midst of The Great War.  Sort of a reverse of the Twilight Zone episode, The Last Flight.

Once there, he finds himself ensconced with a French fighter squadron.  They are being trounced by a German Ace.  Eighty men died trying to break his spree, but no one can stop the bloody Red Baron of Germany.  Actually, it's not Richtofen; it's a fictional(?) #2, for whom there is no canine counterpart.

Farman is convinced that he can turn things around if he can just get his advanced fighter off the ground, something that will require building a whole industry of jet fuel production.  And even once he manages that, his missiles and radar won't track the wood-and-canvas Fokkers of the enemy.  What to do?

This is a very pleasant story, quite readable.  It does have a few holes big enough to ram a Nieuport through.  For one, it is most unrealistic that a man from 1975 with ten thousand flight hours would have no understanding of propeller planes.  You can't get Air Force wings today without first racking up dozens of hours in simple prop aircraft, and Farman must have first gotten commissioned before or around 1968.  Maybe if the jet came from some time in the 21st Century, it'd be more plausible (though I can't imagine ever starting fighter jocks on jets–that's a recipe for disaster).

The second hole is that Farman is oblivious for far too long of the effects of the jet wash, something with which he should be intimately familiar.

Finally, while I appreciate the nod to logistics, what with Farman needing to manufacture kerosene for his plane, it strains credulity that a super-advanced jet could reliably fly after several months in a field with no maintenance.

Four stars, but it is clear that McLaughlin (who has been AWOL from Analog since 1964) does not have a strong aviation background.

Null Zone, by Joe Poyer


by Kelly Freas

How does one stop the Ho Chi Minh trail, when it is really a vast network of mini-trails with far too many branches to interdict?  By building a highway of nuclear waste across it, of course!

Joe tells an engaging story, with the spark of color with which he always imbues his technical pieces.  But I can't imagine the logistics of transport/production make this a feasible possibility, never mind the humanitarian aspects.  Does editor Campbell ever mind the humanitarian aspects?

Three stars.

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream … ", by W. C. Francis


by Kelly Freas

Alright, there's always an exception that proves the rule.  I've never heard of Francis before, so I guess Campbell did save a slot for a novice.

On the way to the stars, a spaceman in stasis finds himself lost in an increasingly convoluted nightmare.  Is this part of the process, or has something gone off the rails?

Reading this story was akin to hearing someone tell you about the dreams they had last night.  It's usually fascinating for the teller and dull for the audience.  The ending to the tale, however, pulls this piece into the low three star range.

Winkin, Blinkin and πR²?, by R. C. FitzPatrick


by Kelly Freas

I think this one takes place in the same setting as The Circuit Riders from six years back.  Cops are using emotion detectors to track down a gang of bank robbers.  For the most part, the criminals keep their cool, but every so often, their ring-leader blows his stack, and it pops up as a blip on a scope at police HQ.

Kind of a dull tale, this police procedural, with a lot of casual grousing and bickering in lieu of characterization.  Probably the worst piece in the mag.

Two stars.

Icarus and Einstein, by R. S. Richardson

Analog's resident astronomer offers up a science fact piece about the Earth-grazing (comparatively) asteroid of Icarus.  The bulk of the piece is on how the mile-long hunk of rock could be used to test General Relativity, in the same way Mercury has been.

It's a fascinating topic, though Richardson fails to explain why General Relativity affects orbits. This is a common failing of all works on the topic, mainly because the explanation is not particularly simple to relate.  Well, maybe it's not.  Let me try:

There is a Special Relativity variant of Newton's law of motion, in which a bit (expression) is added to the equation to factor for an object's proximity to the speed of light.  It can generally be omitted at the low speeds we're used to since the speed of light is on the bottom of that fraction, and thus, it comes out pretty close to zero most of the time.

Similarly, with General Relativity, in addition to the effect of gravity being equal to the proportion of the masses of two objects divided by the square of their distance, there's an additional expression that factors in the warping of space by the gravity of a mass, which gets higher the closer one gets to it.  As in the Special Relativity equation, the value of this expression is usually close to zero.  But when the object is as massive as the Sun, and the other object gets really close, it becomes significant.

There.  That wasn't so hard.

Anyway, the problem with the article isn't the content, but the presentation.  I understood it, but I also majored in astrophysics.  I suspect most people will scratch heads in confusion.  Which is a little weird; Richardson is usually better than that.

Three stars.

Satan's World (Part 3 of 4), by Poul Anderson


by Kelly Freas

If you recall the last installment of this serial, merchant captain David Falkayn and his raccoon-like associate, Chee Lan, had arrived at the mysterious world of Satan.  The planet had been in a deep freeze for eons, but now it is approaching its hot sun, and its cryosphere is evaporating, uncovering a bonanza of valuable minerals.  But 23 alien warships have suddenly also appeared, and a confrontation is inevitable.

When it occurs, Falkayn is surprised to find that Latimer, one of the five shareholders for Serendipity Inc. (the knowledge brokers that have become a linchpin of the galactic economy), is working for Gahood, a member of the minotaur-like race of aliens called the Shenn.  The Shenn are using Serendipity as a kind of fifth column, and they are the first real threat to the Galactic Commonwealth.

Some genuinely thrilling scenes ensue.  I particularly liked the evocative bit where Falkayn's ship, the Muddlin' Through, careens through the stormy atmosphere of Satan, 19 robotic destroyers in hot pursuit.  I kept thinking, "You can't find this kind of imagery anywhere but in books.  Movie technology just can't capture such magic the way the printed word can."

But just as I was about to give this segment a four on the Star-o-meter, the last five pages brought back the bawdy merchant Van Rijn and the collossal bore, Adzel, along with five pages of expositional writing.

Back to three it goes!  Conclusion next month.

Leveraging human capital

I don't say this too often, but thank goodness for Analog!  Clocking in at 3.1 stars, it and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.3) are the only mags that ended above the 3 star line.

The other mags included IF (2.9), New Worlds (2.7), Galaxy (2.6), and Amazing (2.5).

You could fit all of the above-3 stuff in a single magazine (wouldn't that be nice?) And women accounted for just 2.6% of all the new material–that is to say, thanks to Carol Emshwiller and F&SF from keeping this month from being a stag shut-out.

Another reason to look beyond plowed pastures for talent–we might get more stories by women-folk in our mags!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[May 31, 1968] Euler's Issue (June 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Constants

The universe is based on a host of magic numbers.  Without them, the cosmos would be entirely different and probably uninhabitable.  Some of these "constants" are familiar to the layman, Pi perhaps being the most so.  Engineers are familiar with electron-Volts and atomic masses.  Chemists know Avogadro's number, the relationship between atomic mass and metric mass.  Mathematicians know e.

e is a truly fascinating number.  Roughly equal to 2.71828, it is the fundament of exponential growth. For example, if you have a $1 compounded annually at 100% interest, at the end of a year you'll have $2. If you have $1 compounded monthly at 100% interest, at the end of the year you'll have $2.62. If you have $1 compounded continuously (i.e. over an infinite number of instants), you will have $2.71828 at the end of the year.

In calculus, if you integrate the function e to the x power, you get… e to the x power!  Conversely, of course, the derivative of e to the x is e to the x.  That means that e to the x is the one function whose rate of change is the same as its position is the same as its acceleration.

What does this have to do with Analog Science Fiction, particularly this latest issue?


by Kelly Freas

Well, when you have the same editor for 30 years, and he hires the same writers every issue, and he has a rigid editorial policy that eschews innovation and prioritizes certain pseudo-scientific fetishes, you end up with a certain kind of consistency.  Not necessarily a desirable consistency, but consistency nevertheless.  Read on, and you'll see what I mean.

e gad

The Royal Road, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

You know you're in trouble when Chris Anvil gets the cover.  Actually, this continuan of the saga of Captain Roberts and his crew of two isn't so bad.  Previous installments had the trio serendipitously developing a mind-control ray and using it to wrest a planet from a despotic computer.  Then the three posed as nobility to sway said planet further.  It was all very glib and distasteful, and I didn't like it.

This story spends two thirds of its length rehashing the events of those stories for new readers and then bringing the trio back, making it a quartet (with Bergen from a story in the December 1967 issue), and unleashing them on a new problem.  A somewhat primitive planet is fractured into more than a dozen petty kingdoms, and the Interstellar Patrol needs a majority of them to agree in order to establish a base.  In the last third of Royal Road, we get the solution to this conundrum. It mostly involves creating an economic catastrophe that only kingdoms favorable to the Imperial Patrol are equipped to address, thus putting these kingdoms on top.  Anvil does note that the gambit could have killed millions, so at least things aren't quite so glib as before.

At least now the quartet of Captain Roberts has been transformed into a sort of Retief series.  Anything's an improvement.  Anyway, I didn't hate it.  A low three stars, I guess. 

No Shoulder to Cry On, by Hank Davis


by Leo Summers

After the vastly superior alien federation shows up on Earth, a sociologist is brought back to see what he assumes will be their advanced technology.  Instead, it turns out that humans have been quite a bit more successful than the ee-tees, at least in one vital field.

A Twilight Zone episode writ small, but inoffensive.  Three stars.

Duplex, by Howard L. Myers


by Kelly Freas

Kent is a person with a literal split personality.  His left half is under the control of a silent partner, dubbed "Pard", while Kent, nominally the "dominant" personality, runs the right half.  Together, they lead a pleasant life as an extremely successful concert pianist.  That is until Pard gets them both tangled up in a spy conspiracy that threatens not just the world…but themselves!

I liked the story's handling of mental handicaps, and it's a pleasant piece overall.  Three stars, but the highest three stars in the issue.

It's RIGHT Over Your Nose!, by Ben Bova


by Kelly Freas

In this science-ish article, Bova suggests that quasars, highly red-shifted quasi-stellar radio sources, may in fact be Bussard ramjets run by aliens.  Thus, rather than being natural phenomena of tremendous power far outside the galaxy, they are artificial phenomena of middlin' power within.

I tend to prefer natural over artificial solutions to problems.  Plus, why is every star-drive in the galaxy going away from us?

Still, it's readable, if breathless.  Three stars.

The Mind Reader, by Rob Chilson


by Leo Summers

Robot mini-planes prove to be decisive in the next Southeast Asian war.  This story is told mostly in dialogue between two people in a sort of "As you know, Bob…" fashion.

The concept is interesting and unique.  The story is not compellingly told.  Two stars.

Satan's World (Part 2 of 4), by Poul Anderson


by Kelly Freas

Finally, we have the next installment in Satan's World, which started last month.  The crew of Muddlin' Through was split up when David Falkayn was abducted by Serendpity Inc., a galactic information clearing house.  This provoked Polesotechnic League magnate Nicholas Van Rijn to take a personal hand in things, sending Adzel the saurian centaur to retrieve the poor lad. 

Turns out Falkayn (predictably) had been brainwashed.  It also turns out that Serendipity is working with, perhaps in the thrall of, a race of mysterious aliens known as the Elders.  The ulterior motive of this ostensibly neutral organization suggests some new power may be planning some kind of galactic conquest.

Meanwhile, Chee Lan the foul-mouthed Cynthian and Falkayn head to the world Serendipity told him about in part one–the frozen world in a cometary orbit that is closing in on its star, Beta Crucis.  This will cause its cryosphere to melt, revealing a mother-lode of precious metals.  But Van Rijn's team isn't the only one interested in the world, aptly dubbed "Satan".  Twenty UFOs have just dropped out of hyperspace in the vicinity, and they don't look friendly…

Anderson has a lot of tics I don't like, particularly his drawing of characters as…well, assemblages of tics.  Adzel is a placid Buddhist, Falkayn is a cipher, Chee Lan is a salty Little Old Lady from Pasadena, and Van Rijn is a lustier, more Dutch version of Raymond Burr's Ironside.

The author also devotes lots of ink to the physical descriptions of his astronomical creations, which I'm sure are fascinating to some, but perhaps are most gratifying for the three cents a word they earn him.

That said, just as I start to get bored, I find myself turning the page and reading on.  So, another three star segment.

Less than Three

So, just like the constant "e", Analog clocks in at just under three.  Indeed, that's how I feel about the magazine as a whole lately.  Sure, there are better issues than others, and sure, there are some standout pieces, but for the most part, I find myself doing anything–cleaning the bathroom ceilings, cataloging my 45s, sorting stamps–rather than read Analog.  Not that I hate the experience when I get to it.  It simply doesn't give the thrill of anticipation that Galaxy still gives me after all of these years.  Even F&SF, which hasn't been terrific since 1962, retains residual goodwill.

Of course, this month's Analog clocks in at 2.9 (rounding up 2.85), which is better than Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.6).  But it's worse than Galaxy (3.1) and IF (3.3).

It was a really thin month for magazines, and out of the four that were published, the better-than-three-star stories would barely fill one of them.  At least women wrote 11% of new fiction pieces, which is on the higher end lately.

Well, here's hoping that next month's Analog picks a different constant to ape, if it can.  And let's hope it's not Planck's Constant!




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[April 30, 1968] (Partial) success stories (May 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Chertona Dyuzhina (Baker's Dozen)

Luna 14 is the Soviet Union's latest space success story.  Launched April 7, it slipped into lunar orbit a couple of days later and began relaying data.  Per TASS, the spacecraft is still working fine, returning space weather reports and mapping the moon's hidden contours through the wobbling of its path due to lunar gravity.

No pictures have been returned, nor has there been any mention of an onboard camera.  However, since Luna 12 (launched October '66) did have one, it is generally believed that Luna 14 has one too–and it broke.  We'll probably never know.

Campbell's Seven

The latest issue of Analog is also not an unmixed bag.  However, it's still the best issue of the mag by a long shot since January.  That's something worth celebrating!


by Chesley Bonestell

Satan's World (Part 1 of 4), by Poul Anderson

David Falkayn is back!  The fair-haired protoge of Polesotechnic League magnate Nicholas van Rijn has been sent to Earth to find untold fortune.  More specifically, to inquire at Serendipity Inc., storehouse of all the universe's lore, for the quickest route between Point A (Falkayn) and Point B (wealth).  It's amazing what can be done with computers in the Mumblethieth Century!


by Kelly Freas

To do so, he puts himself at the mercy of the board of Serendipity, becoming a guest on their lunar estate.  His crewmates, Adzel the monastic saurian who talks like Beast from The X-Men, and Chee, who talks like Nick Fury from Sgt. Fury, stay behind…and worry.

With good reason, for Falkayn has been shanghaied, purportedly in love with one of the Serendipity board, but probably brainwashed or something.  Van Rijn gives Adzel and Chee the green light to investigate.

Falkayn stories are always somewhere in the lower middle for Anderson–serviceable but unexciting.  Once again, the author utilizes some cheap tricks to move things along, even calling them out in text in an attempt to excuse them (the long explanation of Serendipity's modus operandi; the sudden coincidence of a call by a critical character, etc.) None of the characters is particularly interesting, perhaps because of the extremely broad brush with which they're described, particularly Van Rijn.

Nevertheless, mediocre is pretty good for a Falkayn story, and I'm kind of interested.  Plus, Anderson's astronomy is always pretty good.

Three stars so far.

Exile to Hell, by Isaac Asimov


by Kelly Freas

This story is remarkable for being the first time Isaac has appeared in Analog (the magazine was Astounding when wrote for Campbell).  It is otherwise unremarkable–this vignette is written in '40s style, with a hoary "twist" ending, which was already incorporated as one of many elements in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Two stars.

Conquest by Default, by Vernor Vinge


by Kelly Freas

This one surprised me: alien anarchists, who by their law are forbidden to have polities larger than 10,000 people, take over a recovering post-nuclear Earth.  The Terrans are worried that they will suffer a fate similar to that of the Cherokees–annihilation, assimilation, relocation, or a combination of all three. 

Told from the point of view of one the conquerers, it very much seems like this will be one of those fatuous Campbellian tales where it turns out that free enterprise and libertarianism are the superior forces, and that the solution to "the aboriginal problem" has a neat and obvious solution.

But the story has a sting in its tail.

I had not expected to find an anti-capitalist, anti-libertarian screed in the pages of Analog, much less an acknowledgement of the American genocide…yet there it is!  And because the viewpoint character is an alien (and a comparatively sympathetic one, at that), the full impact of the story is saved for the end.

Four stars.

His Master's Vice, by Verge Foray


by Kelly Freas

Prox(y)ad(miral) Elmo Ixton lands his patrol ship, the sentient craft, Rollo, on the planet of Roseate on the trail of a rebel proxad who has gone to ground and recruited a network of criminal accomplices.  The agoraphobic and irritable Ixton ingratiates himself with very few people, but he does get his man…in time for the tables to be turned when the renegade takes over his ship.

Luckily, Rollo is not about to become an unwitting accomplice.

Not bad.  I didn't much like the Gestapo methods with which the "good guys" extracted the truth from suspects, though.

Three stars.

Fear Hound, by Katherine MacLean


by Kelly Freas

In late 20th Century New York, the city seethes with a despair so palpable, it almost seems the echoes of one person's broadcast pain.  Indeed, that is exactly what it is.  And the Rescue Squad, a corps of intellectual empaths, are on the case to find the source before s/he perishes in anguish, and in the process, telepathically pushes hundreds, maybe thousands more, to the brink of insanity or even death.

There's a lot of neat stuff in this one.  Obviously, you have to buy telepathy as plausible (something Campbell obviously does).  Given that, the idea of a group of people tracking down injured folk by their subtle telepathic emanations, and the unconscious mass effects these have on others, is pretty innovative. MacLean writes in the deft, immediate style that has made her one of SF's leading lights for two decades; the dreamy, choppy execution fits the circumstances of the story.

On the other hand, the bits about smart people essentially providing the brain for dozens of sub-average IQ types through unconscious telepathic links was something I found distasteful. There are also a few, lengthy explainy bits that could have been better worked in, I think.

A high three stars.

Project Island Bounce, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

The alien Ysterii arrive on an Earth not unlike that depicted in Conquest by Default.  Here, the crisis is that the blobby amphibians prefer the archipelagos of Asianesia to the dry expanses of Eurica.  This is causing a trade imbalance that will ultimately not only destabilize the world, but potentially lead to a cut-off of peaceful relations with the galaxy altogether.

Perkins doesn't tell the story very well, especially compared to Vinge's writing, and the "solution" is dumb. Two stars.

Skysign, by James Blish


by Leo Summers

Carl Wade, a Berkeley radical type finds himself trapped on an alien vessel floating above San Francisco.  As memory returns to his headachey brain, he recalls the he was the one "lay volunteer" among dozens of men and women chosen as ambassadors for their various technical expertise.

Now, Carl and a hundred-odd humans are prisoners in the gilded cage of the ship, offered all manner of food and a fair bit of recreation.  But they are nevertheless under the control of the alien crew, humanoids in skintight suits, with the ability to teleport and put the human captives to sleep at any time.

That is, until Carl, with the help of the Jeanette Hilbert, a brilliant meteorologist, figure out how to wrest control of the whole system from the aliens.  That's only half the story, since Carl and Jeanette have differing ideas on what to do with absolute power.

I liked this story, and Blish does a good job of putting us in the boots of a not-entirely savory character.  I find it particularly interesting that our radical protagonist is something of a jerk; I originally thought that this might be a subtle, anti-leftist dig, but Blish is an outspoken peacenik, so I think he just wanted to create a nuanced character.

Four stars.

Batting Average

Analog thus ends up at a reasonable 3.1 stars–not stellar, but certainly worth the 60 cents you pay for it (less if you have the subscription, of course).  That puts it at the bottom of the new mags (vs. IF and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.5), but better than the reprints (Fantastic (2.7) and Amazing (2.0)).  The magazine average for the month was 3.1.

All told, if you took the four and five star stories of this month and squished them into one mag…well, you'd need one and a half. That amounts to about 40% of all new fiction this month. Again, not bad.

The sad news is only one story this month was woman-penned, making up for 4.3% of the newly published works.  And that one was MacLean's, meaning Analog wins this month's pink ribbon in a mass forfeit.

Well, I suppose you take your victories where you find them.  At least we ended up on the positive side of the ledger this month…




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[March 28, 1968] Design for effect (April 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

There are all kinds of science fiction stories.  Some explore the human condition, prioritizing people and how they might be affected by emerging technologies.  Others are space or planetary adventures, utilizing an exotic locale as backdrop for classic derring-do.

Analog (formerly Astounding) has always emphasized technological pieces.  They are stories of gadgets, of scientific implementations, not people.  Even better is when the story underscores the libertarian, rather reactionary politics of one editor John W. Campbell Jr.

Sometimes, a skilled writer can get a story into Campbell's mag without that kind of tale.  In this issue, virtually none of them did…

The issue at hand


by Kelly Freas

Secret Weapon, by Joseph P. Martino

The interstellar war against the Arcani is going badly.  Now that the Terrans have doubled their Patrol Corvette fleet, suddenly their losses have quadrupled.  Somehow, the alien enemy is tracking down their gravitational signatures as they zoom through their patrol lanes at four times the speed of light–and even when the human crews manage to intercept the enemy warships, somehow they elude destruction.

Two ships are dispatched to find the answer to this crisis, equipped with a new nucleonic clock that allows the ships to communicate even at superluminary speeds.  Now they can cover each other in case of attack.  When attack inevitably comes, they discover the secret to the enemy's success.

Joe Martino probably enjoyed writing this novella, and John Campbell obviously enjoyed reading this novella, so I suppose the story must be called some kind of success.  However, if you don't enjoy things that read like the centerfold to a particularly dry issue of Popular Gravitics, I suggest you give this one a skip.  This probably could have been a great novel, with time devoted to, you know, characters and prose, as opposed to a thinly dressed up engineering problem whose solution is implied to be beyond the comprehension of the alien foe.

Two stars.

Handyman, by Jack Wodhams


by Leo Summers

A married couple, trapped on a muddy world with virtually no trappings of civilization, try to make even the most basic rudiments of technology to ease their plight.  Eventually, they figure out how to make ceramics, and when a rescue party finally appears, they are now happy to stay on their private world and even to start an export trade of their new kind of china.  Chalk up a win for enforced entrepreneurialism!

I kept waiting for Wodhams to explain how the planet-wrecked pair figured out how to make their ceramic, given that all the ways that didn't work were so lovingly detailed.

Still, the story is at least readable. A low three stars.

Phantasmaplasmagoria, by Herbert Jacob Bernstein


by Kelly Freas

According to the scientists, power from nuclear fusion, harnessing the union of hydrogen atoms to produce boundless electricity, is just twenty years away.  This story details the meandering road to the technology's serendipitous development.

It's a silly piece, and I'm not sure who thought it a good idea to put a fourth of the story in endnotes that one has to constantly refer to.  They aren't worth the pay-off.

Two stars.

Is Everybody Happy?, by Christopher Anvil


by Leo Summers

A hay fever drug has the unfortunate side effect of making everyone extra-friendly.  Society breaks down as folks would rather kibbitz than work.

It says something about Analog and its editor's beliefs that too much friendliness will obviously lead to economic ruin, as opposed to increased efficiency through greater cooperation. Call me crazy, but I work better when I like my co-workers.

Anyway, this is another "funny" piece by Anvil for Campbell, and it's as good as you'd expect it to be.

Two stars.

Incorrigible, by John T. Phillifent


by Leo Summers

A naval officer is up for treason, having facilitated the transfer of technical knowledge to the Drekk, potentially Earth's most dangerous foe.  The implacable lizards, inhabitant of a Venus-type planet (nicknamed "Wet" for its torrid, humid conditions) are incredibly quick studies, and interstellar spaceflight is only a few developments away.

But, the officer notes, at the end of a very long dialogue with his attorney (the sole point of which is to build to the punchline conclusion) the information leak was ultimately to humanity's benefit.  For it involves the ability to teleport water, which the Drekk will use to colonize the nearby planet, "Dry".  And once enough mass is teleported from Wet, the core will explode, destroying the evil aliens.

Well.

I can't imagine this is particularly sound science, this notion that Venus-type planets are at a critical point such that the lost of a few million tons of water can destabilize them, especially coming from a fellow who still characterizes Venus as "wet" five years after Mariner 2.  That notwithstanding, I might have been more tolerant, given the decent writing in this piece, if the author (under his pseudonym) had not used the exact same gimmick to end his recent novel, Alien Sea!

Two stars.

The Horse Barbarians (Part 3 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

Jason dinAlt's adventures appear to have come to an end with this third Deathworld novel.  By the end of the story, the Pyrran city has been destroyed by the planet, the horse barbarians of Felicity have been defeated, and Meta and Jason have finally professed their love for one another.

How is Temuchin, highest chief of the Felicitan nomads defeated?  After Jason is found out for the outworlder he is, the barbarian tosses him into a deep pit to die.  Instead, Jason finds his way through a maze of caves, discovering a passage from the frozen steppes to the rich lowlands.  All other methods of toppling Temuchin having failed, Jason tells the warlord the secret of the caves so that the barbarians can finally conquer the whole continent.

Almost immediately, Temuchin realizes his victory is really defeat, for taking all the cities means the inevitable death of the nomad way of life.  The nomads collapse within weeks, and the Pyrrans set up shop.

There are a lot of problems with this book.  Temuchin is supposed to be this awful, violent savage for slaughtering foreign invaders, and for wanting to take out the lowlanders.  Does this justify the Pyrrans in killing and facilitating the killing of far more people than Temuchin ever could have managed on his own?

Beyond that, the historical "lesson" at the end of the story is specious.  Sure, the Chinese sinicized the Mongols, but not all of them, and not in a matter of weeks.  And as for the Goths and Huns (also cited), the former were invited to settle the Roman Empire rather than becoming Roman after conquering, while the Huns were simply defeated in fight after fight.

Thus, I find Jason's actions and motivations more ruthless and inhuman than Temuchin's; they are also out of keeping with the peacenik environmental message so beautifully expressed in Deathworld.

All that said, there's no question that Harrison is a terrific writer (he almost makes you accept the unrealistic extents to which Jason pushes his body).  I turned to this serial first each of the last three months, and I finished each installment in a sitting.  As a result, while I give this segment three stars, and even though I find the premise repugnant, I still am giving the novel as a whole three and a half stars.

Local Effect, by D. L. Hughes


by Leo Summers

An alien space drive discarded near Earth's moon has drastic effects on human scientific development.  It turns out that the speed of light is not a constant…except around Earth.  Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity only describes a local phenomenon, not the universe as a whole.  Alien anthropologists from a faraway star survey humanity and note this local aberration with interest.

This is an interesting premise, but Hughes, knowing his audience (a certain editor named Campbell), turns it into an anti-scientific-establishment polemic, noting that, if only humans were a little more broad minded, they might not have gotten stuck in their rut.  After all, how dare we assume that the rules that hold locally apply to the whole universe?

Except, of course, that is the very soul of the scientific method.  Moreover, observations this century make it clear that relativity does hold throughout the universe–as early as 1919, just four years after the publication of General Relativity, light was seen to have been deflected around the sun's gravity well, pursuant to theory.

This could have been a fascinating story of aliens assuming that all beings should follow an "obvious" course of scientific development, deluded by their own understanding of all the facts.  Instead, we get…this.

Two stars.

Doing the math

If it's a race to the bottom, Analog has won handily, scoring just 2.3 stars this month.  This accomplishment is all the more sad when one realizing that this is a better score than it got last month!

Luckily, the other magazines of the month were somewhat better, including New Worlds (2.8), New Writings 12 (3.1), Famous Science Fiction #4 (2.9), Famous Science Fiction #5 (2.5), Famous Science Fiction #6 (2.7), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.7)
IF (3.1), and the best, Galaxy (3.3).

Women penned just 4% of the new fiction this month, and even with all the issues of Famous (lumped due to logistics into this one month), there was still only 2.5 to 3 issues' worth of superior stuff.

I guess we'll see if the Pohl mags continue to reign, or if all fortunes oscillate.  I think it's safe to say, though, that Analog could definitely use a loosening of its editorial prescriptions.  Hope springs eternal!




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[February 26, 1968] Stormy Weather (March 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

There's no sun up in the sky

Out in the vastness of space, a constellation of man-made moons keeps watch on the Earth below.  Unlike their brethren, the military sentinels that look out for rocket plumes and atomic blasts, these benign probes monitor the planet's weather with a vantage and a vigilance that would make a 19th Century meteorologist green with envy.

In addition to the wealth of daily data we get from TIROS, ESSA, and Nimbus, the West is now getting aid from an unlikely, but no less welcome, source: behind the Iron Curtain.

Two years ago, the Soviets rebuffed the idea of exchanging weather satellite imagery.  "No need," was what they said; "no sats," was probably the real story.  For in August of 1966, all of a sudden, the USSR activated the "Cold Line" link between Moscow and Washington for the exchange of meteorological data.  This action coincided with the recent launch of Cosmos 122, revealed to be a weather satellite.

This constituted a late start in the weather race–after all, TIROS had been broadcasting since 1960.  Nevertheless, better late than never.  Unfortunately, the Soviets first sent only basic weather charts with limited cloud analysis.  Not much good without the raw picture data.  When we finally got the pictures, starting September 11, 1966, the quality was lousy–the communications link is just too long and lossy.  Our ESSA photos probably didn't look any better to them.

By March 1967, however, the lines had been improved, and Kosmos 122 was returning photos with excellent clarity.

We also got infrared data.  The resolution was much worse, but the Soviets maintained they did first discover a pair of typhoons bearing down on Japan.

Since then, the USSR has orbited at least two more weather satellites, Kosmos 144 and Kosmos 184, both returning the same useful data, often from different orbital perspectives than we can easily reach.  For instance, the Soviet pictures offer particularly good views of the poles and northern Eurasia.

It's a little thing, perhaps, this trading of weather data between the superpowers.  But anything that promotes peaceful exchange and keeps the connections between East and West ready and friendly is something to appreciate.  Sometimes the Space Race is more of a torch relay!

Raining all the time


by Kelly Freas

In sharp contrast, Analog remains an island unto itself, and like all inbred families, often produces challenged offspring.  Such is the case with the March 1968 issue, which ranges from middlin' to awful.

The Alien Rulers, by Piers Anthony


by Kelly Freas

We start with the awful.

Fifteen years ago, the blue-skinned Kaozo engaged our space fleet, destroyed it utterly, and became the benevolent masters of Earth.  They created a working socialist society, implementing tremendous public works projects, and humanity proved remarkably complacent under their rule.  Nevertheless, a revolution of sorts has been hatched, and Richard Henrys is tasked with the stickiest assignment–assassinate the Kazo leader, Bitool.

Henrys is quickly captured, but instead of facing execution, Bitool offers him a deal: protect Seren, the first female Kazo on Earth, during the next three days of the revolution, and he can go free.

Sounds like a decent setup.  It's actually a terrible story.  For one thing, the author of Chthon has all of his off-putting tics on display.  Seren is a straw woman, whose vocabulary is largely limited to "Yes, Richard," and "No, Richard."  The social attitudes of this far future world seem rooted in the Victorian times, with passages like this:

"You'll pose as my wife.  Hang on to my arm and–"

"Pose?" she inquired.  "I do not comprehend this, Richard."

Damn the forthright Kazo manner!  He had five minutes to explain human ethics, or lack of them, to a person who had been born to another manner.  Pretense was not a concept in the alien repertoire, it seemed.

He chose another approach.  "For the time being, you are my wife, then.  Call it a marriage of convenience."  She began to speak, but he cut her off.  "My companion, my female.  On Earth we pair off two by two.  This means you must defer to my wishes, expressed and implied, and avoid bringing shame upon me.  Only in this manner are you permitted to accompany me in public places.  Is this clear?"

And this one:

"I promised to explain why this subterfuge was necessary.  I didn't mean to place you in a compromising situation, but–"

"Compromising, Richard?"

"Ordinarily a man and a woman do not share a room unless they are married."

And then, there's the scene where the feminine disguise Richard puts together for Seren falls apart because her body lacks mammalian contours.  Why doesn't he then dress her in male clothes?  And when her stockings start to fall off her legs, I couldn't help wondering how they'd somehow uninvented Panty Hose in the 21st Century.

But then, I'm not sure if Piers Anthony has actually ever talked to a woman, much less seen her in her underthings.

On top of that, the final revelation that the Earth fleet was never destroyed, but instead went on to conquer Kazo, and the two planets have swapped overlords (both governments populated only by the very best technocrats) is so ridiculous as to beggar belief.  That Henrys is invited to become one of the ruling class largely for his novel ideas on how to cut a cake fairly, well, takes the cake.

One star.

Uplift the Savage, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

Members of an interstellar agency learn that the best way to increase the technological sophistication of a primitive race is not to give them expertise, but allow them to steal it.  The two-page point is hammered in using fourteen pages of digs at women, higher education, and educated women.

One star.

The Inevitable Weapon, by Poul Anderson


by Harry Bennett

A scientist discovers teleportation.  Useless for interstellar travel, at least for a while, it's great for beaming in concentrated starlight–as a weapon at first, but potentially, to provide energy.

This would be a decent, one-page Theodore L. Thomas piece in F&SF.  Instead, it's fourteen pages of bog-standard detective/secret agent thriller.

Two stars.

Birth of a Salesman, by James Tiptree, Jr.


by Kelly Freas

Jim Tiptee's freshman story is an Anvilesque tale of breakneck pace and nonstop patter.  T. Benedict of the Xeno-Cultural Gestalt Clearance (XCGC) has got a tough job: making sure the trade goods of the galaxy not only take into account the taboos or allergies of alien customers, but also the transhipment longshorebeings. 

Tedium sets in by page two, which, coincidentally, is how many stars I rate it.

The Horse Barbarians (Part 2 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

A lot and very little happen in this installment of Jason dinAlt's latest adventure.  Last time on Deathworld III, Jason offered up his fellow Pyrrans as mercenaries to wipe out the horse barbarians on the planet Felicity.  It's fair play, after all, since these barbarians (absolutely not the Mongols, because they have red hair!) slaughtered the last attempt at a mining camp on their frozen plateau.

So, Jason accompanies "Temuchin", the warlord, on an expedition down a cliffside to the technologically advanced civilization on the plains below.  There, they steal some gunpowder, kill a lot of innocent people, and come back–in time to link up with the rest of the Pyrrans for a raid on the Weasel clan.  More slaughter ensues.

Jason feels kind of bad about his part in the killing, but it's all a part of a master plan to someday, eventually, pacify the warriors with by opening up a trade route with the south (as opposed to setting up off-world trade, since the barbarians hate off-worlders).  So whaddaya gonna do?

Well, personally?  Pick a different career path.  Even if the nomads are the biggest savages since the Whimsies, Growleywogs, and Phantasms, what right do the Pyrrans have to kill…anyone? 

Setting aside the moral concerns, Harrison is still an effective writer.  I wasn't bored, just a bit disgusted.

Three stars.

Practice!, by Verge Foray


by Kelly Freas

A shabby little private school for problem children is suddenly the subject of a set of accreditation inspectors.  There's nothing wrong with the kids or the staff–the problem is that the snoops might discover it's really a training ground for junior ESPers!  Luckily, the tykes are on the side of management, and the inspectors are snowed.

I went back and forth on whether this very Analogian tale deserved two or three stars.  On the one hand, I'm getting a little tired of psi stories (the headmaster in the story even says there's no such thing as something for nothing–and that's what psi is), and I resented the smug digs at public school.

But what swayed me toward the positive end of the ledger (aside from the unique and lovely art) was the bit at the end whereby it's suggested that the reason for the school, and the reason psi is so unreliable, is because, like music or language, it's something that needs to be practiced from an early age.  It's a new angle, and pretty neat.

So, three stars.

Can't go on…

Wow.  2.1 stars is bottom-of-Amazing territory, and it easily makes this month's Analog the worst magazine of the month.  Compare it to Fantastic (2.2), IF (3), New Worlds (3.3), and the excellent Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.6), and the contrast is even stronger.

Because of the paucity of magazines, you could fit all the really good stuff into, say, one issue of Galaxy.  On the other hand, women wrote 12% of new fiction this month, which is decent for the times (not to mention the episodes of Star Trek D. C. Fontana has been penning).

It's 1968, an election year.  Maybe this is the year Campbell hands the reins over to someone else.  It certainly couldn't hurt the tarnished old mag.

And then, maybe the sun will come out again!

Speaking of election news, there's plenty of it and more on today's KGJ Weekly report.  You give us four minutes, and we'll give you the world:



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 31, 1968] Too much and too little (February 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Too much

Last week, we watched the evening news with mounting dread and anxiety as President Johnson ordered 15,000 reservists into action in response to the seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo by North Korea.  The U.S.S. Enterprise was already in the Sea of Japan ready to initiate a retaliatory strike.  It looked like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again.  Lorelei turned to me and worried that things couldn't possibly get any worse.

Then the North Vietnamese launched an all-out assault on seven provincial capitals in South Vietnam.  Fighting reached the streets of Saigon, and the America embassy itself was overrun for six hours.  The conflict is still raging.  So much for the Tet holiday week of peace.  So much for armistice overtures.

So, 1968 is already shaping up to be a scary year in the mundane world.  Let's see how we're doing in the SFNal realm.  The latest issue of Analog starts off strong, from its Kelly Freas cover, to Harrison's name on the masthead.  But does it deliver on its promises?

Too little


by Kelly Freas

The Horse Barbarians (Part 1 of 3), by Harry Harrison

Don't let the title or the cover throw you–this latest serial is, in fact, the third installment in Harrison's Deathworld series.  In the brilliant first story, we are introduced to Jason dinAlt, a psychically adept gambler and roustabout who comes to Pyrrus, the most hostile planet in the galaxy.  Using his ESP talents, as well as his fine brain, he deduces that the reason the world is so antagonistic to humans is due to a kind of psychic positive feedback loop: as the colonists came to regard the planet as their enemy, the planet's flora and fauna responded in kind.  The key to living at peace with the world is a change in mindset, to work with the planet rather than try to conquer it.  It was a lovely ecological message, predating Silent Spring by two years.

The second dinAlt story, The Ethical Engineer is a Deathworld story only in name, with dinAlt captured and taken to another world in Chapter One.  This novel, more than any other, caused me to confuse Harry Harrison for Keith Laumer (as dinAlt and Retief are rather similar in nature and tone) everafter.

This third piece is a little more closely bound to the original.  The premise: all of the city-dwellers of Pyrrus who could make peace with the planet have already left the original settlement for the countryside.  What's left is the hard-core who cannot change their mindset.  Eventually, the planet must defeat them.

Jason has a proposal that may appeal to this remainder.  The planet Felicity has resisted all attempts at establishment of a mining colony.  Specifically, the northern half of the planet's sole continent is peopled by savage horse barbarians who steadfastedly resist any attempt at civilization.  dinAlt suggests that the Pyrrans form a planetary exploration and pacification company; after all, who in the galaxy could be tougher than a Pyrran?  About 400 city-dwellers agree to the plan.

Upon landing on Felicity, Jason is immediately konked on the head and made a captive of Temuchin, leader of the dominant barbarian tribe.  This chief has slowly gained the vassalage of all of the other tribes, cementing his control over the windswept northern steppes.  dinAlt manages to escape, making a trek across the barren wastes.  But the trip back to his ship, the Pugnacious, is only the beginning of his worries.  In order to topple Temujin, Jason and his fellow Pyrrans will have to playact at being a new barbarian tribe, and subvert the chieftain from within…

The tone flipflops between light and deadly serious, and the horse barbarians are a thinly disguised retread of the Mongols (look in your encyclopedia for the birth name of Genghis Khan), though made redheads for some reason.  That said, I read the whole thing in two quick sittings, and I'm enjoying it more than Engineer so far.

Four stars for this installment.

To Make a "Star Trek" by G. Harry Stine

You know our favorite TV SF show has made the big time when Analog makes it the topic of the nonfiction science article!  Stine, a model rocket enthusiast, offers up a fascinating bit of background on the program, including praises of its implementation of technology, and some behind-the-scenes information that must have come straight from show-runner Roddenberry (indeed, this schematic of the Enterprise has been reprinted in current Trekzines.

Four stars, and a must read for Kirk/Spock buffs.

"If the Sabot Fits … " by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond


by Kelly Freas

The psychic man-and-wife author team returns with this mildly diverting piece.  A series of catastrophic computer failures in a Midwest town coincides with a particular broadcast at a public education station.  Could there be a connection?

I'm not sure if the science is sound, but it might be–Walt is an electrical engineer (Leigh, reportedly, just types his mental emanations, but I suspect she is actually the storytelling talent of the pair).

It's not bad.  Three stars.

Peek! I See You! by Poul Anderson


by John H. Sanchez

A freelance helicopter pilot spots a flying saucer out in the southwest desert.  The aliens, who have already made contact with a local population, do their best to avoid widening their diplomatic contacts.

I appreciate the idea of alien relations with individual nations/groups as opposed to with planets as a whole.  Science fiction writers tend to forget that planets are big places, and they can house more than one embassy/colony/climate.

But.

The story is twice as long as it needs to be, and Poul really doesn't do "light and funny" competently, certainly not in the same league as Laumer, Harrison, or Sheckley.

Two stars.

Dowsers Detect Enemy's Tunnels, by Hanson W. Baldwin

"American soldiers find tunnels in Vietnam, a country riddled with underground passageways.  ONLY DOWSERS CAN BE THE REASON!"

Seriously, John?  One star.

The God Pedlars, by Jack Wodhams


by Kelly Freas

The ugh continues.  An interstellar corporation is selling computers to primitive tribesmen.  The pitch: they are actually idols representing a great and wise god.  These "gods" tell the indigenes how to live their lives, build technology, etc.  Of course, it's all for the good of the natives.

In addition to being a rather specious premise, this isn't really a story.  It's a mouthpiece and a straw man having a conversation such that the point is beaten into the reader with a mallet.

Editor Campbell would give this story five stars.  I give it one.

Optimum Pass, by W. Macfarlane


by Leo Summers

Last up, a sequel to Free Vacation, in which Layard and his fat partner (he never gets a name, but his girth is an important aspect of his character) manage to get themselves thrown in the pokey again such that they can get another free trip to an alien world.  Their official mission is to tough out 30 days to determine the suitability of the planet for colonization.  Their personal mission to look for evidence of "The Prodromals", the original galactic civilization.

More light fun, albeit a bit less coherent than the last tale.  Still, three stars.

Unbalanced scale

Despite the auspicious beginning, this month's issue of Analog finished at 2.7 stars, making it the least of the February 1968 magazines.  Even Amazing scored slightly higher (still 2.7 when rounded), followed by IF (2.8), Fantasy & Science Fiction (3.1), New Worlds (3.3), and Galaxy (a slightly higher 3.3)

It was actually a good month for good fiction: out of six magazines released, one could fill two, possibly three with exceptional (four and five star) stuff.  Women, on the other hand, continue to be underrepresented, with just 7% of published new fiction.

So, while Analog was a mixed blessing this month, all in all, the pages of the digests made for much more pleasant reading than the newspapers.  Would that we could have good news in both.  I guess we'll see how February fares.  It is my birthday month; surely that counts for something!

If you want to see more of my beautiful face (made for radio!) tune in for the latest edition of KGJ news!



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 31, 1967] Surprise, surprise!  (January 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Evitability

There are some things you can count on in life: death, taxes, the North Vietnamese violating their own Christmas truce more than a hundred times.

But sometimes, life deals you surprises.  For instance, who knew that Hubert Humphrey was still alive?  Yet he must be kicking for he is currently in Africa on a goodwill tour of the continent.


And, as a fellow exclaimed when I gave him a preview of my thoughts on this month's issue of Analog, "A five star story in Analog?  Really?"

Well, it's true.  Read on and find out how it happened!

Expect the unexpected

The Bugs That Live at -423°, by Joseph Green and Fuller C. Jones

First off, a very long article on the teething troubles faced by the developers of the Centaur rocket.  This powerful second stage is used atop Atlas and Titan missiles to send big payloads to Earth's orbit and beyond.  To do so, it uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, which entails a whole host of problems.

There is a lot of good information in here, but as is often the case in Analog science articles, its presentation is confusing.  There are no section breaks, so the whole thing runs together such that even I, a professional space historian, found my eyes glazing over.

I've no idea if "Joseph Green" is the same one who writes science fiction for UK magazines.  Probably not.

Anyway, three stars.

There is a Tide, by R. C. FitzPatrick and Leigh Richmond


by Kelly Freas

A couple of years ago, R. C. FitzPatrick started a series of stories about a surgeon who has perfected the technique of human brain transplants.  The first story was mildly interesting but prolonged, and the second veered heavily into the uncomfortable zone of eugenics.  After all, the transplant of a healthy brain requires a donor body…and it's hard to find ones that aren't inhabited, and don't even the feeble minded have the right to their own corpus?

Tide is the third story in the series, and by far the best.  There are two parallel, intersecting plots.  One involves a brilliant young physicist with inoperable cancer, who comes to the surgeon's sanatorium to wait for a suitable "transplant" candidate.  The second pertains to a self-styled "Duke" of organized crime.  Intelligent, ruthless, and aging, the mob boss wants a healthy body to get a new lease on life.  Surprisingly, the surgeon is willing to take the Duke's case, even before the mafioso breaks out the threats.

There are some important distinguishing characteristics between Tide and its predecessors.  For one, it is now stressed that only the truly brain-dead are eligible "donors".  It's not a matter of finding more value in a smart brain and a moronic one; only a virtually untenanted body is acceptable.  The writing is far more compelling in this piece, too, with lots of interesting asides that flesh out the characters and the world they inhabit.

But most importantly, the ethical issue is confronted head on.  It doesn't matter if the AMA or politicians or ethicists oppose the technology of brain transplants.  Once that genie is out of the bottle, someone will take advantage of it–if not the scrupulous, then the unscrupulous.  As the first (somewhat) successful human heart transplants of this month have shown, this technology is no longer a pipe dream.  We will someday have to face this issue.  I felt this story did a better job of addressing this problem than Niven's (still pretty good) The Jigsaw Man, which came out a couple of months ago.

So how did FitzPatrick manage to write such a good story when his others were middling or worse?  You'll notice the second name in the byline.  I have a strong suspicion that Leigh Richmond is responsible for most of this piece.  Certainly, she's the new variable.

Five stars.

… And Cauldron Bubble, by Bruce Daniels


by Kelly Freas

Of course, what goes up…

Bubble is a piece in epistolary form about a near future in which the United States has scientifically developed dowsing and other hocus pocus into a full cabinet department.  This would be a frivolous but diverting piece in F&SF, but knowing as I do that Analog's editor, John Campbell, actually believes in the efficacy of dowsing, well, it reads like propaganda.

Two stars.

The System, by Ben Bova

Bova offers up this two-page cautionary tale about the dangers of overdirection of scientific development.  It kind of steps on its own toes to make its message, though.

Two stars.

Such Stuff As Dreams …, by Sterling E. Lanier


by Kelly Freas

A dashing young space navy commander signs up to join a top secret spy organization that has the real power in the galaxy.  He is subjected to a number of tests, mostly to try his patience, before being given the final exam: a test of survival on an alien world.  The dangers are of monstrous, almost unbelievable proportion, and the candidate wonders why.

Of course, the title of the piece gives it away.

Competent but forgettable.  Three stars.

Dragonrider (Part 2 of 2), by Anne McCaffrey


by Kelly Freas

Lastly, the conclusion to what will likely be a three-part fixup novel.  The planet of Pern is faced with deadly peril: the Red Star approacheth, and with it, onslaughts of deadly rhysome "threads" that despoil all living things that they touch.  The only defense is fire-breathing, telepathic dragons flown by specially selected riders.  The problem is only one of the six dragonrider weyrs is still in operation, and that one is woefully understaffed.

F'lar, the head rider, thought he had a solution to this problem when he learned that Lessa, the rider of the dragon queen Ramoth, discovered the ability to ride her mount through time.  Last installment, the weyrleader sent his brother and a team back in time ten years to raise a new crop of dragons.  Unfortunately, living more than once in the same time is detrimental to one's health, and the endeavor was largely a failure.  Now, the only hope lies in the past, and an historical ballad about the wholesale departure of five weyrs some four hundred years ago–to destinations unknown…

There are the bones of an interesting novel here, although the gratuitous use of time travel as a plot point usually creates more problems than it solves.  Also, By His Bootstraps stories tend to be dull since you already know what's going to happen.

But the biggest problem here is that McCaffrey just isn't quite up to the story she's trying to tell.  A fine teller of short stories (The Woman in the Tower and The Ship Who Sang being standout examples), she struggles with the longer format.  Her characters are shallow and unpleasant.  The "romantic" relationship between Lessa and F'lar is disturbing when it isn't annoying.  Lessa's theme song might well be, "He Shook Me, and It Felt Like a Kiss", and the only ones privy to F'lar's love for Lessa are the readers since the weyrleader is determined never to show affection for his lady.  Ugh.

The doggerel that prefaces each chapter completes the mask of mediocrity on this promising tale.  Perhaps a combo of Jack Vance and Rosel George Brown (R.I.P.) could have done Dragonrider justice.  And maybe, as my colleague David suggests, a story between the first and second parts could have smoothed the transition (something to be fixed pending novelization?)

It really is a shame since it's rare to get a sweeping epic from the perspective of a woman, and the first part made me hopeful.  As is, this last segment, and the three-part story as a whole get three stars.

Doing the math

When you put it all together, the January 1968 issue of Analog ends up at 3.1 stars, just on the positive end of the ledger.  That actually puts it at the #2 spot for the month, just edging out IF (3.1), and losing to Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.3).  The rest of this month's mags finished below the middling mark, with Fantastic at 2.9, New Writings at 2.8, and the abysmal new Beyond Infinity garnering just 1.5.  As a result, though six magazines were released, you could fill just two of them with four and five star stories.

The big surprise, though, is the resurgence in feminine participation.  Women contributed 13% of the new short fiction produced this month.  While still a low number, it is comparatively enormous.  And more surprisingly, the bulk of the woman-penned work (at least by pages) was published in Analog.

If even fuddy duddy Campbell can produce a progressive mag, I think we've got good times in store as the calendar turns to 1968!  Happy New Year indeed…



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 30, 1967] One door closes… (December 1967 Analog and Australia joins the Space Race!)

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by Gideon Marcus

Mags or paperbacks?

The latest issue of Yandro has got a nice piece from Ted White reviewing the latest (and best?) tome on science fiction by Alexei Panshin.  The best part of White's article is his gentle but lengthy disagreement over the status of magazines versus paperbacks.  Both White and Panshin agree that the paperback novel format is The Next Big Thing (indeed, it's already here), but they disagreed on their role and prospects.

Panshin sees the science fiction digests as a continuation of the pulps, with all the negative connotations attached thereto.  He thinks they will eventually die.  White strongly disagrees.  Firstly, he notes that pulp does not equal bad–many extremely talented authors got their start cranking out a half million words for the old mags.  Indeed, White says magazines are now populated by a stable of established writers who have perfected their trade while the paperbacks, since they are a buyer's market, will publish anything.  Essentially, the books have taken the role the magazines had in the glut days of the early '50s.

White goes on to say that paperbacks are great, but 1) mags are the main outlet for short stories, and some authors are just better at the short form, and 2) editors keep mags going for the love of it.  This means they are likely to survive longer than purely economic considerations would suggest.

It's a good piece.  I'd give it a read.

The issue at hand

Speaking of which, should you give the strikingly covered latest issue of Analog a read?  Well, if you're one of the 30,000 subscribers who gets it delivered, sure go ahead.  If you're eyeing it at a newsstand, you'll want to read further…


by John Schoenherr

Dragonrider (Part 1 of 2), by Anne McCaffrey

In Weyr Search, the first installment of this serial-in-all-but-name, we were introduced to planet Pern.  It is a fraught former Earth colony, severed from its homeworld for thousands of years and ravaged periodically by rhizomic attacks from a nearby world.  The only defense against the "threads" are fire breathing dragons ridden by telepathically connected humans.

The problem is it's been four centuries since the last attack and the "weyrs" of dragronriders have been allowed to go fallow.  Only Benden Weyr is left, and it is woefully undermanned and underdragoned.

This latest installment in the saga of Pern opens up sometime after the last.  Lessa, heir to the Hold of Ruatha and now Weyrlady by virtue of her communion with the dragon queen Ramoth, has shacked up with the F'lar, head of the dragonriders.  Not because the two like each other, but because that's the law: Weyrladies and Weyrleaders must get hitched.

The thread has begun to fall, and the dragons are sorely taxed to meet the challenge, teleporting in and out of the frigid between to intercept the alien spores.

(Note: What do you call it when a dragon relieves itself between?  An ICBM!)

Despite the perseverence of F'lar's crew, the thread has the upper hand–until Lessa accidentally discovers that dragons not only can teleport and telepath, but they can also time travel, too!  (telechron?) As one might expect, this changes the whole equation…but maybe not for the better.


by John Schoenherr

I dunno.  I was expecting a rousing Battle of Britain story, with never so much being owed by so many to so few.  The thread would start gradually, the brave fighters would fight to their limits, and through ingenuity and tenacity, eventually win.  The story would get extra points for being by and from the viewpoint of woman, a rare thing in science fiction, particularly in the mag that Campbell built.

Instead, the story is badly paced, lurching from scene to scene.  There is no build-up to the thread strike, no mounting of tension; it is just suddenly upon them.  McCaffrey throws psionic conceits against the wall to see which ones stick (Lessa not only discovers time travel, but she is the only one who can communicate with all of the dragons–unlike the other riders, who can only communicate with their bonded dragon).

Beyond that, the two main characters are thoroughly unlikeable, by turns yelling and sardonically sniping at each other.  An element of violence suffuses their interactions, with F'lar and Lessa's couplings being referred to as not less than rape.  It all feels very Marion Zimmer Bradley.  I've said before that Lessa feels like a wish-fulfillment character for the author.  This hypothesis is only becoming more concerning.

What's frustrating is I feel there could be an interesting story here in the hands of someone else.  Jack Vance has already written a thematically similar tale with his The Dragon Masters.  It's clear that Campbell wants Pern to be the next Dune, complete with striking Schoenherr covers.  Thus far, I'd say McCaffrey isn't up to the task.

I was originally going to give the installment a bare three stars, but I think I've talked myself out of it.

Two stars.

The Destiny of Milton Gomrath, by Alexei Panshin

In this short short, an orphaned garbage collector spends his life convinced that his existence of drudgery is a mistake, and that someone, somehow, will rectify the mistake some day.

Turns out he's right, but that may not be a good thing.

This could be the start of a mildly entertaining Laumer novel.  Instead, it ends right after the first punchline.

Blink and you'll miss it: three stars.

Whosawhatsa?, by Jack Wodhams


by Kelly Freas

Picture a world where a sex change is as complete and easy as an appendectomy…and reversible, to boot!  Now picture the most complicated legal case possible involving a married couple seeking a divorce, both parties of which have swapped genders.  And there are children involved, multiple paramours, probate issues, and a Strong Public Interest.

On the one hand, this story is a drag.  The attempts to make it "funny", mostly consisting of endless scenes in which the judge assigned the case contemplates suicide rather than attempt presiding, are a flop.  Also, one gets the feeling that if women's lib had advanced in the story as much as medical science, most of the legal issues and many of the social ones would be irrelevant.  Particularly if 1) we could extend the legal rights currently afforded women in the federal government to all women, and 2) we could approach homosexuality with a less than medieval attitude.

That said…

There is very interesting exploration of what it means to change genders and the motivations that underly the desire to make such a transition.  While the situation is made as ludicrous as possible, the subjects, for the most part, are taken seriously.  I actually found the piece remarkably progressive, especially for Analog.  Certainly, I've never read anything like it before.

Three stars.

Beak by Beak, by Piers Anthony


by Kelly Freas

An alien spacecraft orbits the Earth, neither communicating nor responding to communications.  Meanwhile, a red parrakeet arrives at the home of a bird-keeper and joins his avian pet family for a time.

This is a pleasant pastoral piece that tries a little too hard to get its message across.  Still, I'll read something like this a thousand times before I'll read Chthon again.

Three stars.

Venus and Mercury—Locked Planets? by R. S. Richardson

Dr. Richardson writes so-so science fiction, but I generally quite like his science fact articles.  This one talks about the newly discovered rotation rates of Venus and Mercury, as well as what they might mean in relation to the history of the solar system.

On the one hand, I learned a bit, and that's significant given that I know a lot of astronomy.  On the other, I felt the pictures were worth a thousand words, and I found myself skimming a lot of the text.  In other words, maybe 20 pages wasn't necessary to make the point (God help us–next month's science article will be 10,000 words!).

Still, four stars.

A Question of Attitude, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

A recruit for the interstellar patrol finds himself in an increasingly difficult series of imaginary tests, ones that stick him in mortal peril in a simulated alien planet environment.  He seems to fail each one, ending up "dead", yet the Lt. Colonel in charge of training seems to think he has promise.

Normally, Anvil and Campbell are a toxic combination.  This time around, the story is kind of interesting.  I also rather enjoyed the nihilistic suggestion that the recruit's success is measured in the degree of his failure, and also that passing the tests only means his life is about to get worse.  It fits with the whole zeitgeist of our current engagement in Vietnam.  Even if Joseph Heller did it better.

Three stars.

Psi Assassin, by Mack Reynolds


by Kelly Freas

Lastly, yet another of Reynolds' tales of Section G, the interstellar agency whose job is to make sure no human planet ends up too backwards, lest the race become prey to an ominous but yet unmet alien menace.  This time, a psionic assassin is sent to kill the head of a Latin dictatorship.  The problem: agent Ronny Bronston has already dispatched said leader and taken his identity!

We have all the hallmarks of a Reynolds Section G story: endless historical lectures (that never seem to have any object lessons beyond the mid-20th Century), flippant personalities that leach the story of any gravitas, the lone female agent (Reynolds never lets us forget her sex), and a happy ending.

Reynolds has done decent work with this series, but less often than not.

Two stars.

Doing the math

So who's right?  Alex or Ted?  Based on this month, I'd give the nod to Ted.  While Analog was on the mediocre side, managing just 2.8 stars, other magazines fared much better.  Both Galaxy and New Worlds scored 3.2 stars.  Fantasy and Science Fiction was also pretty good (3.1).  If was a bit tired, but par for the course (2.8), and while Amazing's 2.7 score puts it at the bottom of the pack, it actually is on an upward trend.

You could fill two magazines with all the superior stuff that came out this month, which is a good crop.  Sadly, McCaffrey wrote the only woman-penned piece, and it wasn't very good (though it was better than Poul Anderson's novella in Galaxy).

I give magazines at least a few more years…

But that's not all we have for today.  All the way from Australia comes this exciting stop press in the world of space news!:


by Kaye Dee

“Australia Joins the Space Club!”

Although Australia has supported American and British/European space efforts over the past decade, just yesterday, on 29 November we finally gained our own membership of the Space Club by placing our first satellite, WRESAT-1, into orbit. I’ve written articles previously about the first satellites of France and Italy, so it gives me great pride to report on Australia’s own satellite launch.


WRESAT-1 under construction in at the WRE

WRESAT-1 (WRE Satellite) has been a joint project of the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) and the University of Adelaide, with significant support from the United States. In 1966, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) offered Australia a spare Redstone rocket from the ARPA-led Project Sparta programme at Woomera as a satellite launcher. Sparta has been the final phase of a US/UK/Australian re-entry physics research programme commenced in 1960, investigating radar-echo phenomena created by re-entering missile warheads. The Sparta team even offered to prepare and fire the Redstone for the WRE.

“A Rush Job!”

The scientists and engineers involved in the Australian upper atmosphere research programme took advantage of the proposal to move their instruments from sounding rockets to satellite. However, the Sparta launch offer placed the satellite project on a very tight schedule, as the spacecraft would have to be ready for launch by the end of 1967, when the Sparta project would be complete and the Americans returning home. So, in just 11 months Australia’s, WRESAT has been designed, constructed, tested and was finally launched on 29 November. Its development has been an example of local “make-do” ingenuity, as much of the testing equipment needed was not available in the country.

Australia’s first satellite has been designated WRESAT-1 because my WRE colleagues hope that it will have many successors. Australia doesn’t yet have a space agency like NASA, but the WRE is putting a proposal to the Australian Government for a national space programme, and we hope that it will be funded, with the WRE formally designated as the Australian national space agency.


Diagram showing the internal layout of WRESAT’s systems and scientific instruments

Given the short development period, WRESAT’s scientific payload consists of instruments similar to those already flown in the Australian sounding rocket programme conducted in conjunction with the University of Adelaide Physics Department. The university team has developed a suite of instruments to study solar and ultra-violet radiation, atmospheric ozone and molecular oxygen density, as well as measuring the temperature of the solar atmosphere.

“Going Up From Down Under”

After an aborted launch attempt on the 28th, the Redstone lifted-off flawlessly on the 29th to place WRESAT into a polar orbit, where it is being tracked, and its telemetry signals recorded, by NASA’s Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network – a service also generously provided free to Australia.


WRESAT soars on its way to orbit from Launch Area 8 at Woomera

Because of its short development time, a solar array could not be designed for WRESAT, and the satellite is only battery-powered. This means it will have a very short operational lifespan, but we expect it to gather a large amount of data on the upper atmosphere that will provide a check on the data already gathered by sounding rockets.

Let’s hope that WRESAT-1 marks the start of Australia’s true Space Age, and that this country will soon “shine as brightly as the Southern Cross”, as President Johnson has put it in his congratulatory telegram on our first national launch!




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