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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 30, 1970] Praise for the Resident Witch (May 1970 Analog)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

With the inflation scare going away, national protest attendance down to the tens of thousands, and a Supreme Court on its way to being filled, not to mention a lull in space news, I can finally turn my attention where it matters: this month's science fiction magazines!

I'm always grateful when Analog turns in a decent issue to round out the month, and this month's edition has some real bright spots.

The cover of Analog; a color image, showing a Viking riding horseback through a forest. Behind him rises a ruin, and in the sky above is outlined the faces of a woman, and a wolf.
by Kelly Freas, illustrating "But Mainly by Cunning"

But Mainly by Cunning, by John Dalmas

A few months ago, we followed the adventures of Nils the neoviking psychic in the serial novel, The Yngling, in which he spearheaded the defeat of the evil Turkish immortal, Baalzebub.  Now he's back in what seems to be an interstitial tale, roaming Bohemia in search of Ilse, the raw-boned beauty who taught Nils how to master his powers.

Black lines on white background depict three Nordic barbarians on horseback, riding out of ruins to approach an overturned cart in the foreground. Beside the cart, taking up much of the space of the page, is a desiccated corpse. Above the figures reads the title, and the legend 'The strong man is the one who can face realities and induce others to the same hard courage!'
by Kelly Freas

Though the back of Baalzebub's assault on Europe was broken in the previous adventure, thousands of desert horse barbarians still roam the countryside, pillaging and occupying so as to brave the upcoming winter.  Nils and his three Nordic companions attempt to rally a defense while they quest for our hero's lover (who, it turns out, has been captured by the marauding Arabs).

Dalmas continues to be an above-average depicter of scenery and character, and his tales read like history.  Nevertheless, there's precious little SF in this installment, and not a great deal of plot movement.  Again, this feels like a bridge piece.  I look forward to the main course after this appetizer.

Three stars.

MR Robot, by William L. Kilmer and Louis L. Sutro

A black and white photograph of a computer office. Various parts are labelled -- 'computer', 'stereo TV camera', 'long-persistence display', 'gray-scale display', and 'camera monitor'. One white man sits at the printout station, another stands in the background near the stereo TV camera.

This is a long, technical article about mimicing the human brain—specifically the sense processing and response subsystems—for implementation in Mars rovers.  Aside from this being an overly abstruse and dry piece, it has a rather fatal flaw.  Its premise is that the mind is a computer, so mimicing its structure an efficient way to design digital brains.  But the authors start their piece by modeling the brain as a computer in the first place, and then taking that model and applying it back to their theoretical rover.

That's a tautological application.  Who knows if the brain really works like a digital computer?  This all seems like an exercise in sophistry.  And it's boring to boot.

Two stars.

Resident Witch, by James H. Schmitz

An two-paneled image in black and white. On the right side, a white woman with long blonde hair and painted fingernails winds a string towards herself. This side is done with black lines on a white background. The string leads to the left panel, where the illustration becomes white lines on a black background. The string is part of many strands being pulled from a human form, which is in front of an embryo curled within an egg. Beneath the hands of the woman on the right is the title, and the following legend: 'Kyth Interstellar, a detective agency, had a problem that not even their highly skilled operatives could handle -- without Telzey, their Resident Witch!'
by Kelly Freas

Telzey Amberdon, the 16-year old psi who has been heroine of a clutch of prior stories, has returned.  This time, she is hired to find and rescue a rich magnate, who has been kidnapped by his jealous younger brother.  Said evildoer is holed up on an estate worthy of a Bond villain, with genetically modified guard dogs, dead-eyed security mooks, automatic defenses, and a psionic shield.  Telzey and her two employers must infiltrate the compound, incapacitate the abductor, and save the billionaire—if possible.

Schmitz is an excellent writer, weaving action, astral projection, and suspense with ease.  Telzey, in particular, is an interesting character: physically a teenager, but centuries-old mentally, due to her having touched so many consciousnesses telepathically.  Unfortunately, Schmitz doesn't linger too long on Telzey's interior personality, which renders her presentation a bit sterile.  Also, the depictions of the torturous depredations the tycoon suffers at the hand of his brother are a bit hard to take if you're of a squeamish nature.

Still, a well-earned four stars.

Caveat Emptor, by Lee Killough

An illustration, black lines on a white background, depicting three aliens and one human, in a rough line. From the left: A lion-headed man sitting on the floor and wearing a woolly sweater and fringed pants; a human man in a jumpsuit, holding a blanket and facing away from the viewer; a centaur with clawed feet and a foreshortened, donkey-like head; and a BEM wearing a loose tunic and pants, and checking off a clipboard. In the foreground, there is a bowl and three balls.
by Vincent Di Fate

An interstellar merchantman attempts to seal a trade deal with the human Federation.  It looks like the Terrans hold all the cards, forcing our alien hero to settle for a humiliating agreement…but sometimes a poor primitive has an ace up its sleeve.

Something of a forgettable piece, its greatest noteworthiness comes from having the extraterrestrial get the best of the human.  Analog editor Campbell has historically poopooed such tales, but I note they have been creeping onto his pages more often.  Perhaps he allowed it this time since the alien is a humanoid whose greatest distinguishing feature is his tail.

Three stars.

An illustration from the Department of Diverse Data, white lines on black background. Four creatures speed across the panel, looking rather like a cross between a flatfish and a shovelnose guitarfish. Four tubes come out of each of their back ends, streaming behind them. Underneath this image is typed the following legend: 'Jet propelled Fork-and-Platter bird Avis Messator. E.T. from Spica IX. Has an insatiable appetite but is rather untidy in its habits. Does not fly very well, due to rarified atmosphere.'
art by David Pattee

Heavy Duty, by Hank Dempsey (Harry Harrison)

This is the third tale (that I've read, anyway) set in Harrison/Dempsey's newest setting.  We are thousands of years in the future, and humanity is sending out teleportation stations out to planets settled centuries before by conventional space ships.  We follow Langli, an agent of "World Openers", as he transits to an almost uninhabitable world looking for survivors of an ancient colonization.

An illustration, black lines on a white background. On the left side, a craggy-faced spaceman tries to pull wrist restraints from a futuristic wall. On the right side, a bearded man in traditional taiga clothing crouches, ready to fling a short spear towards the spaceman. In the space above the spaceman's head reads the legend, 'What you get for nothing is worth it! And on a bleak, heavy planet -- the future can look like a free gift...'.
by Vincent Di Fate

The planet's gravity is 2.1 g, and even its summer is frigid.  Its settlers have, in fact, survived, but just barely.  Only two literate colonists are left: the chief and his beautiful (if stocky) daughter.  Their subsistence economy is on the razor's edge of viability.  They are left with the choice: sign an onerous exploitation contract with Langli's concern, or stumble onward to almost certain exctinction.

Once again, we've got an atypical story for Analog, which is something of an indictment of rapacious capitalism.  The color is interesting, too, with the setting and settlers reminiscent of (if more primitive than) the ones from Harrison's Deathworld.  Of course, the Crew/Colonist divide is reminiscent of Niven's Slowboat Cargo/A Gift From Earth.

My favorite story in this series so far, I give it four stars.

The Siren Stars (Part 3 of 3), by Nancy and Richard Carrigan

An illustration, white lines on a black background. Along a silvery river on the left side of the page, a massive satellite complex rises against the sky. On the right side, it is watched by a translucent bubble (so tall as to occlude the moon) surrounding a disembodied eye.
by Kelly Freas

Sadly, I cannot be so effusive about the conclusion to the latest Analog serial.  John Leigh, agent of SPI, infiltrates the Soviet radio telescope base to sabotage the facility, rescue the pretty Swedish biologist who guessed that the alien message picked up by the installation was really a Trojan Horse designed to subvert humanity to its own purposes, and bump off the Russian Chief Astronomer, already in the thrall of the alien Lorelei.

Maybe John Dalmas could have pulled it off.  The Carrigans are simply not up to the task.  They write amateurishly, often repeating turns of phrase in close succession.  Leigh succeeds almost at random, stumbling into lucky break after lucky break.  Really, if this were submitted to a publisher as the pilot of some kind of contemporary hero series, like James Bond or Sam Durrell (Assignment:) or Mack Bolan: The Executioner, I imagine it would have gotten rejected.  Campbell has lower standards, I guess.

Two stars.

Doing the math

A computer room, largely empty. There is only one person in the room, a white woman in a brown minidress, reading punch cards in the corner.
IBM 360

We end on a bit of a downbeat, especially since P. Schuyler Miller's book review column is strangely absent this month.  Nevertheless, there's enough good stuff in this issue to make it worth your while, rating just a hair under three stars in toto.  How does it compare with the other May-dated mags? 

A pretty middle-of-the-road bunch, actually. Galaxy's 3.2 barely edges out Fantasy and Science Fiction's 3.2. Both do better than Vision of Tomorrow (3.1), Amazing (3.1), IF (3), Venture (3), and the anthology "magazine" Infinity (2.8), but none are abyssmal.

Despite having eight short story sources this month, the four/five star material would fill just two of them.  Women wrote 7.8% of what was published.

So, my praise for Analog, the resident witch (since, as we know, witches are just humans with psi powers) is muted but not inaudible.  Still, would we rather have a very wide middle to our bell curve of science-fictional quality, or more superlative (and awful) outliers?

What do you think?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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