Reviewers always worry that they won't find anything interesting to say
about a magazine. In this regard, the July "Special Double Issue" is a
reviewer's dream, sparking ideas and notions, even critical epiphanies.
Everything that makes Analog Analog is in surfeit here, as if editor Stan
Schmidt had set out, flow chart and parts list in hand, to create the
quintessential Analog issue.
To begin with, the issue immediately shows a finely tuned mathematical
balance. There are four novelettes and four short stories, and they break down
into four fun stories and four serious ones. More patterns will become
apparent later, but first to the fun stuff.
Don D'Ammassa's short "Thoracic Park," is a parody of exactly what you
think it is. In the far future, insects have managed to reproduce the long
dead humans and one particular entrepreneur has a kind of theme park in mind...
The story lacks the convulsive energy that propels the best parodies, but with
so broad a target, dozens of shafts find their mark.
From the title to the last page, Bud Sparhawk's novelette "Sam Boone's
Appeal to Common Scents," has energy to spare. I was irresistibly reminded of
Keith Laumer's Retief yarns of beloved youth, except that Sam Boone is an
interplanetary arbitrator rather than a diplomat. The requisite sets of comic
aliens are well represented, perhaps to a fault. And when you set up your own
impasse between imaginary aliens of your own creation, there's little suspense
that your own negotiator will find a solution. And like all the novelettes in
this issue, it is much too long, as I discovered around page ten when I
metaphorically stopped to check my watch. Okay, so it's not Retief. Turn off
your brain and have fun with it, anyhow.
More energy, at least a good chase scene, pumps the action in "Threat of
Stars at 912 Main," a short by Alicia Glynn Latner. Its hero is an artist who
manages to foil a very unusual set of art thieves and win the girl in the
process. (Pattern watch: The two stories by females have male protagonists,
while two of the stories by males have female protagonists.) The tone is
light, the characters fun to be with, and the story overall well-crafted.
(Although I can see no good reason for these thieves to give up when they do
except that the plot demands it.)
I could just say that Pauline Ashwell's "Boneheads" is a classic Analog
problem story and leave it at that. But then I would have failed at conveying
my irritation at a contrivance level that makes Sparhawk's story look like
early Raymond Carver. It's the year 2089, at least that's from where a
scientific team has been sent back 90 million years. The imaginary time
machine has been carefully jiggered so that it "would Displace ... somewhere
between four and five tonnes." And then "the thing did not work any longer."
Got that? Can't Displace too much or people won't be able to get back. As a
kicker, the whole colony would in ten years time be re-Displaced 5,000 years.
So you would think that would really, truly limit things. Wrong. Ashwell
limits only what the story demands. There are 29 members of the team, along
with food for the first comers, a rocket-gun, hand-lasers, all sorts of stuff.
But not tools (because they would have to be made of metal[!]). Or radios. Or
location finders. Or matches. A year 2089 that has time machines but not one
single piece of miniaturized, ultralightweight electronic equipment of plastic
or even a fire-starter to replace what has to be a heavier and less efficient
burning glass reduces the story to an artificial absurdity. Worse, virtually
none of this contrivance is necessary to the working of the story. As it
stands, it is a clever nonfiction article about anthropological survival in a
jungle, but a failure as fiction.
To the serious side. Doug Larsen's novelette "The Alicia Revolution" gives
itself away early when the narrator asks herself, "Why had I come to [the
country of] Thusbammanna in the first place?" and answers, "I had no idea." A
graduate of any good writers' workshop knows this as a red warning flag that
the author will proceed to push wooden props around a chessboard in service of
a plot, which describes the story to a tee. Said plot, by the way, involves
having the American (read smart Earthling) tell professionally paranoid
resistance movement members (read idiot aliens) that computers can be used
against them. Everything works out in Hollywood fashion.
Jeffrey D. Koonistra's "Snowball" is a sequel to two previous Analog
stories, knowledge of which is not required to enjoy this one. Enjoyable it
is, with quietly pleasurable writing and the indefinable sense that I call
assurance: the feeling that the author knows the characters and the story so
well that you are in good hands from the opening sentence. As with the other
stories set in the here and now, "Snowball" spends several pages creating
atmosphere before getting to the sf, always a fine line to walk before the
reader gives up and searches out a story with more immediate oooph. The reward
comes from those who spend that time creating believable, detailed scenes and
people. Few more so than Koonistra's retired pastor, alone on Christmas Eve,
who discovers a mysterious animal who, of course, proves to be more than what
it appears. A moral dilemma is additionally involved, and I'm always a sucker
for such stories.
I thought at first that Schmidt's flow chart had gotten creased when he
followed "Snowball" with Joseph H. Delaney's novelette "Partners." For it also
is a here and now tale that slowly builds atmosphere and in which the
protagonist discovers animals that prove etc. And Delaney includes a moral
issue of a very similar kind. The writing has equivalent strengths, with a
succession of those well-chosen small details that brings stories to life.
After that long opening, though, things turn around very quickly. (In
truth, this story is exactly the wrong length, with the beginning stretched out
much too far and the ending drastically compressed.) That "Partners" has the
kind of anti-Big Government rant that suddenly pops up in several stories as
unexpectedly as a kumquat in a souffle should not surprise. But one looks in
vain for some redeeming irony when, in a section that includes a screed against
"Big Brother," "history... for the next millennia" is determined by a single
town meeting without the consent or even the notification of those affected.
And there can be no irony intended in the story's concluding lines: "Man
was the alpha. That was the way things were meant to be." John Campbell's
ghost does not merely walk; it stomps.
Tom Ligon's review follows, but first a word here about my critical
epiphanies, as they apply equally to him. Analog writers are known to resent
that more literary types consider their stories to lack characterization, and I
can understand why, as the majority of people that inhabit this issue are
well-sketched, with the histories and feelings and warts and quiet heroism that
make readers identify. But they lack one crucial detail. Relationships.
Except in character studies (a description that fits none of these stories)
characterization in the literary sense is classically determined by the
interaction of characters in relationships with one another. Obviously, in an
action-oriented field like sf, many other forces may drive story plots. But
when 8 of 8 stories in an issue lack the one thing that would belie a
stereotype, my critical antennae rise.
But even if these stories do lack literary characterization, they must at
least have the virtue of defending Analog's status as the last bastion of
stories apotheosizing true speculative science. Well, although all the
familiar sf tropes from aliens to genetic engineering to time travel to
parallel worlds litter the issue, their use here is no more rigorous than in
any of their less stringent competitors. The stories from D'Ammassa, Sparhawk,
and Latner are entirely science free; Ashwell's and Ligon's depend entirely on
current scientific abilities (they would be pointless otherwise), and
Koonistra's, despite some offstage handwaving, could equally be fantasy. Only
Delaney's and Larsen's contain any extrapolation worthy of the name, and the
latter's is slight at best.
One more story is left to cover,
last to review though the first story in
the issue, given pride of place because it is, yes, the quintessential Analog
story. Tom Ligon's "Amateurs" is less a classic problem story a la "Boneheads"
(to which it might otherwise be compared) than a deliberate attempt at
fictionalizing a feature article intended for a technical magazine (and in fact
an article explicating the subject follows). Packed with deliciously enticing
engineering detail (here about creating a cheap reusable rocket), devoid of
anything resembling a true plot or even suspense, and centered around a world
in which the individual entrepreneur is morally triumphant over government
action, the piece hits every button. I enjoyed it tremendously for what it
was, and then bowed down and give it triple obeisances, for it inadvertently
gave me a powerful insight into Analog's nature.
The "other side" in the story is represented by a guy at a
government-subsidized satellite firm, who snidely insists that "I'm not ready
to try any unproven launch system with a cockeyed new engine that hasn't been
used successfully at least ten times, and preferably more like a hundred. In
the second place, I don't buy from amateurs." Hence the title. And hence the
listing we thereupon get of amateurs who "had rejected the ancient designs
offered by 'professional' aircraft companies, and opted instead for higher
performance at lower cost, using modern materials and aerodynamic theories."
Before we all cheer and boo in exactly the right places, consider this:
doesn't the mere existence of classic, let alone quintessential Analog stories
prove that they are ones written after models that have run in Analog at least
ten, and preferably a hundred times before, as each and every one of the
stories in this issue has been? Can it be less than meaningful that Analog
stories deliberately eschew the risks of any modern storytelling techniques or
modern attitudes toward science and engineering? Although most stories, taken
individually, may be well done, the effect they create as a whole is fairly
constricted, even stifling. (A caveat: This issue's glitz may all be provided
in Starplex, Rob Sawyer's novel excerpt, which is outside the scope of this
review, with the other stories deliberately chosen to give balance.)
There's an old saying to the effect that we each turn into the thing we
most hate, and the ultimate Analog bugaboo is NASA, the cautious bureaucracy
whose hidebound inability to innovate cost them the stars. As I read these
rather staid, overly worldly, sense-of-wonderless stories that could not, as
Analog stories once did, conceivably draw the younger me into the worlds of
science, of the future, of imagination, of the stars, I could not help but
think that Analog has turned into its own personal NASA. It plays it safe
while the world, and the amateurs, may have passed it by.
Analog readers should understand that, despite my qualms, they will get and
presumably enjoy exactly, exactly, what they have come to expect from the
professionals at Analog. The question that they must answer: even under their
own terms, is that still really such a good idea?
Copyright 1996 by Steve Carper
