In Which Suspension of Disbelief = FAIL

Analog's December 2008 issue starts out in a less-than-promising way. "Misquoting the Star" by David Bartell begins: "No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed "Big Bastard" exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically." This didn't help me suspend my disbelief for the story; it is my fervent belief that a number of journalists/newscasters secretly hope that the world will end someday, just so they can report it. In my own personal experience I've heard paramedics wish for a jetliner crash, just so they can respond to it--same concept.

After that opening, I never fully trusted the story. The basic background, that a handful of people escaped the Earth before it was wiped out by a dinosaur-killer asteroid, was no problem (and apparently was described in a previously published story). However, this story centers on a woman who administers one of the colonies. She starts to fall for an African guy. Then she discovers he's got AIDS (all the people in the colony were supposed to be screened against this sort of virus, but his father had given up his seat for him). Aaaand she discovers that it's still incurable, despite a quack doctor's attempt to do so (not quite sure how that was necessary to the story, except to delay the inevitable). But here's the part that I really had problems with: she eventually understands that when they resettle Earth, things won't be perfect no matter how much she wants them to be, so she will eventually let this guy return to Earth instead of forcing him to stay on the Moon forever. Really? You're going to let a guy with AIDS possibly re-introduce this deadly virus to an otherwise virus-free population (maybe you'll ask him to promise nicely not to have unprotected sex?) just because the future won’t be a utopia? There's not-perfect, and then there's being stupid, and I felt that this character ended up on the wrong side of that line. Oh well.

Next up is a story by Jason Sanford, whose work I had previously enjoyed in Interzone ("The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain"). Here he gives us a story with another interesting background. This near future Earth has a made-up religion, and its members are terrorists trying to keep people on Earth, away from space. Before the story started, they exploded a bomb that damaged a lot of satellites. This keeps a woman raised in this religion from becoming an astronaut. She's pretty disillusioned, but eventually agrees to help one of her co-religionists with a repair mission (they've been challenging the blockade with high-altitude aerostat balloons). However, she realizes that her repair mission is supposed to be one-way, and would threaten a NASA installation. She eventually saves the day, causes her priest and employer to be arrested, and winds up back in NASA's good graces. This is a good adventure story, no doubt, but I felt like the world-building could support a deeper examination into religious fanaticism, and I was a bit disappointed that it didn't happen. No worries, Sanford's world-building skills are good enough that I'm sure he'll get there someday.

"Moby Digital" ended up being a "skip" story for me. It features a VR environment where students can immerse themselves in a fictional world. A group of students gets trapped there while examining "Moby Dick," and a tech has to go in to save them. They'll die if he doesn't, because when the power runs out on the VR modules they contract and crush the user. I refuse to follow a story motivated by incredibly bad/stupid/unsafe engineering (especially in our time of over-engineering and over-warning-labeling everything because of liability issues). Basically, if the engineering of the modules was half-way competent, there'd be no story. I’ll pass.

Lastly, we get the second installment of Robert Sawyer's new serial, "Wake." I reviewed part one and liked it, and I liked this section as well. It introduced a new plot thread in having two sign-language capable simians talk to each other over the Internet, and a chimp subsequently developing the ability to paint figures instead of abstracts. The math-whiz blind girl develops more abilities with her new implant, and also deals with a boorish high school dance date. There's an unfortunate moment when a sulky walk home could have been avoided if she'd brought her cellphone, and it's hard to imagine a Western teen being without one even at a dance, but I still like the way the character is written. I'm waiting to see how all the plot threads connect; I can see their thematic similarities, but they're not meshing yet.

I'm not planning to continue this project of keeping up with this much magazine short fiction in 2009, as I've already mentioned. However, I am considering finishing "Wake" and also the serial that David Brin is running over at Baen's, "Shoresteading." These are reliable authors, good storytellers, and I'm always curious to see what they'll come up with next.

The Issue Before the Current Issue of Analog

Analog continues to deliver thoughtful stories that are more or less well-written. In the nature of thought-experiments, of course most of these stories are rather shamefully contrived. In "The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya" by H. G. Stratmann aliens have terraformed Mars and allowed only two people, a man and a woman, to live there. Then they put them through a series of tests and offer them ultimate power. The story focuses on the reactions of the humans, but I would have liked to see more about the motivation of the aliens—what the hell could they be thinking?

Likewise in "The Fourth Thing" by Stephen L. Burns—aliens wake a woman up one morning, tell her the world is going to end in an hour or so, they can only save a few people (including herself), and she can only bring four easily carried things with her. Luckily she's an assistant librarian... you can see where this is going. I’ve noticed that short story writers can never go wrong appealing to people who love books. Can’t imagine why that could be.

However, one story stood out for me with some particularly interesting speculation. "Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers" by David W. Goldman investigates the possibility of the brain being damaged in such a way that it consistently fails to recognize certain patterns... say a parasite that wants not to be noticed. (In a broad sense this is perfectly possible. In my Neuroscience class I just learned about patients with damage to their right parietal lobe. They simply fail to notice things on their left. If you show them a clock and ask them to draw it, they’ll draw a circle and numbers 1 through 7, then leave the left part empty.) The plot involves long-distance territorial conflict between planets. One planet’s modus operandi is to drop slow-acting biological agents that lead to planet-wide sterilization over a couple of generations. Then they swoop down and colonize. The send a human agent to a planet where this failed to work. The ability of the brain to recognize both patterns and their significance comes into play as the un-conquered population recognizes what is going on and modifies the agent's pattern recognition facilities. The story is nothing particularly ground-breaking or award-winning, but the speculation on the power of the brain and how it may be modified was well done. The brain works in mysterious ways and it seems that the more we know about those ways the more mysterious they get.

July/August Analog

Analog did me a huge favor with this issue. It leads off with the first installment of a three part serial (“Tracking” by David R. Palmer) that I found so unreadable, I skipped it after only the first few pages. This means that I got through the double issue much faster, and I’ll get through Sept. & Oct. much faster as well. How bad is it? Told as if from diary excerpts, I present to you the first paragraph:

Yes, Posterity, your Humble Historiographer does feel guilty about this—but what was Teacher thinking? What did he expect? What else could I do…?

Who the hell starts their diary entries in media res? The second paragraph gets a little better:

Oops, forgetting manners. (There’s a surprise.) Sorry. All right; let’s start over:

But then it worsens:

Hi, Posterity, Candy Smith-Foster here again—Plucky Girl Adventurer, Intrepid Girl Aviatrix, Spunky Savior of Our People, etc., etc.—at your service.

OK, I need something amazingly amazing to happen REALLY fast to overcome my distaste for a person who self-describes as “Spunky” and “Plucky.” However, several paragraphs about breakfast don’t cut it, even if they self-servingly hint at but don’t directly get at the fact that she’s somehow the savior of her people. Throw in a faux-abbreviated-for-terseness-”diary”-style of writing:

Clearly, in retrospect, from moment eyes opened today, chain of events resembled ballistic curve: foreordained progression, leading directly from bed to Teacher’s announcement to Yours Truly’s reluctant but immutable decision—thence to current AWOL status.

Well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s… etc.

As turned out, however, anarchic decision, subsequent obviously proscribed actions, took healthy bite out of unease dogging heels since morning’s first awareness. Perhaps qualms more a function of psychic feedback spawned by own upcoming brash actions echoing back down timeline rather than intangible warning of yet another impending doomy threat.

This person doesn’t have time to write “from THE moment MY eyes opened today” but has time to write “Yours Truly” and speculate on retrocausaility? Seriously? I flipped to the end of the story; it uses that prose style throughout. While it probably says all sorts of things about the personality of the narrator, it’s really annoying to read. Thus it establishes the narrator as an annoying person I don’t want to read about. So I won’t.

Most of the other stories in this issue fulfill the acronym RUMIR that I lifted from a Joanna Russ review (“The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable.”) “Sand and Iron” by Michael Flynn reminds one of his Wreck of the River of Stars, with its dysfunctional starship crew—although that sort of personal dynamic doesn’t get as much play in a novelette. It’s a pretty cool story, with interesting alien artefacts, but it stops too soon. “A Plethora of Truth” by Bond Elam revels in taking pot-shots at televangelists—Real Year = 1988. “Let the Word Take Me” is a puzzle story with humans trying to figure out an alien language—it reminded me strongly of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok,” one of my all-time favorite Trek episodes. However, the TV episode was actually better because it lacked overbearingly stupid bureaucrats and arbitrary deadlines, plus it included aliens equally eager to communicate. “Junkie” by Maya Kaathryn is “Toy Story” meets “Galaxy Quest.”

The best entry is the concluding novella “Tenbrook of Mars” by Dean McLaughlin. In a way it’s a pean to the engineer hero—he’s an engineer, and managed to keep a colony on Mars alive for decades while it was cut off from most outside help. The best parts of the story are the slow revelations of the catastrophe and what exactly Tenbrook did, why, and how it worked out. It’s very gratifying for an engineer, and also a manager, to see Best Practices engineering management save the day. However, there’s also an odd flashback romance plot that may function as political commentary (it’s hard to tell)—it seems to serve mostly as padding. It’s a convenient way to end the story on an “emotional” high point, but it seems 100% contrived, and detracts from an otherwise solid story. “Tenbrook of Mars” is pure Campbell, but there’s nothing wrong with that when it’s done well.

Adventure Out Around the Asteroid Belt

"Waterbot" by Ben Bova is a straight-up Isaac Asimov-style story. From the initial expletive "Rats!" to hunting for water in the asteroid belt to being attacked by pirates, this is pure Golden Age sf. As such it doesn't offer anything new, just the Gernsback/Campbell formula of education, entertainment, and inspiration.

The narrator has been stuck with the less-than-desirable task of sheparding a "waterbot" out to the asteroid belt. It's got an on board AI and repair droids, but inevitably enough stuff breaks down to make sending a human engineer along worth it. (Don't think about the economics too much.) Living in enforced solitude is driving the narrator nuts, and he's even mean to the on board AI. It had been trying to improve itself by reading the textbooks he'd uploaded for himself, but he even goes so far as to make it delete some of them. Dude, that's just like kicking a dog.

Of course, the AI is right to have been working on improving itself: it had worried about being attacked by pirates, and right on schedule they are, indeed, attacked by pirates. They barely survive the encounter, and start limping back to inhabited space with dwindling resources and no hope of rescue. The narrator, after weeks of barely surviving, begins to contemplate suicide.

The moral of the story seems to be that AIs may be saner than humans, especially out in space. Its also uses the story arc where two incompatible people grow to like each other when thrown into hardship. It's the sf equivalent of the buddy cop movie, really. It's quite entertaining, and the AI is very easy to root for. In fact, the only problem may be that when the human is mean to the AI, we're already on the side of the AI. Preaching to the choir, I think they call that.

Adventure Out Around Saturn

Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell both believed that science fiction should be: a) educational, b) entertaining, and c) inspirational. (Notice the lack of "good" or "literary" in that line-up.) Richard A. Lovett's story in June's Analog, "Brittney's Labyrinth," follows that prescription to a T.

Having been rescued from a tight spot in June 2007's "Sands of Titan," Brittney and Joe are at loose ends. Joe is just a regular guy, a spacer working out around Saturn. Brittney is the AI that spontaneously gained sentience during the last story, and lives in some chips implanted in Joe, making them effectively a cyborg. Brittney is the narrator; Joe is a man of few words.

They're engaged by a rich speculator to guide him on some exploratory work on the moon Iapetus and in Saturn's ring system. Brittney can't quite figure what his angle is: rich idiot out to make a name as an explorer (there are frequent references to British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton), prospector, thrill seeker, other? Joe doesn't seem to care—he spends most of the story silently wrestling his own demons without communicating much to Brittney.

They do find out what the rich guy is up to (it unsurprisingly turns out to be sinister—he may as well have had a pencil-thin mustache, been wringing his hands and chortling the whole time) and Brittney and Joe also make progress upon the delicate path of learning to co-exist. It doesn't strike the strongest-ever blow for AI rights, but it's a start.

However, there's an extent to which all that is besides the point. The real point is: Look, Saturn! And its moons! And its rings! And all the things that might be out there! Isn't that cool?

And by gum, it is pretty darn cool. Lovett's enthusiasm for solar system science is infectious. He incorporates all the latest information from probes such as Cassini and Huygens, and throws in a lot of informed speculation. His description of looking out at Saturn and the surface of Iapetus from atop the moon's mountainous ridges is exactly the sort of amazing imagery that makes you want to get there yourself, even if you have to invent a way to do it. It's exactly the sort of inspirational view that Gernsback and Campbell hoped would inspire the next generation of engineers to get us that much closer to making it a reality. Let's hope it still will.

May's Analog in Review

"Test Signal" by David Bartell (na, skip)
"No Traveller Returns" by Dave Creek (nt, OK)
"The Ashes of His Fathers" by Eric James Stone (ss, OK)
"Still-Hunting" by Sarah K. Castle (ss, meh)
"Petite Pilferer Puzzles Piedmont Police" by Walter L. Kleine (ss, good)
"What Drives Cars" by Carl Frederick (ss, good)
"Consequences of the Mutiny" by Ronald R. Lambert (nt, good)
"The Night of the RFIDs" by Edward M. Lerner (ss, meh)

This seemed to be a below-average issue of Analog. There was some heavy-handed politics and some fluff, and nothing that really grabbed me and changed the way I thought about the universe. Can't win them all.

Next up is June's Asimov's. It's good that we're getting into the June stuff this early. However, I think the gains will be short lived. I'll be leaving for England on vacation in mid-June, and I'm not sure what my posting schedule will be. And if there's one thing I know about vacations, it's that I never get as much reading done as I expect. So we'll have to see how it goes. I'm trying to get ahead, but between Masterclass reading and Hugo reading, it's a bit tight.

Generation Ship Issues

The remaining story in May's Analog is a novelette: "Consequences of the Mutiny" by Ronald R. Lambert. This is another story using the oblique approach to transfers of power. In much same was as "Immortal Snake" and Galveston, it focuses on what happens after you have a dramatic shift in power. Generally speaking, when in a story you overthrow the status quo, for whatever reason, there are two points of drama. One is the initial overthrow (think American Revolution) and the second is when the new system is tested again (think the election of Thomas Jefferson). In the other two stories it only takes a generation for the new system to be tested. In "Consequences" the system has been stable for several generations before the next crisis point arises.

"Consequences" takes place on a generation star ship. There's a living crew, with generational turnover, that is supposed to deliver 50,000 frozen colonists to their new home. A few generations into the mission, the crew mutinied against their original leadership—many of them, having never set foot on a planet, certainly didn't want to become part of the new colony. Now the plan is to create a new starship, drop off the original colonists and original starship, take the new one, and keep going. The problem is time and storage space.

Due to environmental constraints, many of the crew's children have been placed in cold storage until there is environmental slack enough to restore them. Given that they're almost at the end of the mission, they're running out of space for the children. All of the sudden, those 50,000 frozen colonists look pretty vulnerable. Most right-thinking crew members oppose starting their new mission with innocent blood on their hands, but people can get pretty emotional when children are on the line.

This is a good story that brings together the generation ship trope with the fuzzy thinking that surrounds reproductive issues and terrorism. However, as it must be in a novelette, it's all a little too simple. The one main character figures out all the answers exactly when he needs them, and has to hand exactly the people he needs to solve the problem. For an every-day-Joe sort of character, he's suspiciously competent at everything.

That's easy to forgive, as is the other glaring flaw in the story: the ending. It feels like the author couldn't quite figure out where or how to end the story, so we get a flash-forward and some painful dialog—all the more surprising given that the dialog for most of the story is fine. Still, those points are quibbles against a solidly well-done sf story.

Politics in Analog

Taking things slightly out of order, I'd like to discuss two stories in May's Analog that touch on politics. One is a silly short story from Carl Frederick, "What Drives Cars" and the other is a polemic from Edward M. Lerner, "The Night of the RFIDs."

Frederick's story is very cute. Our protagonist is a high school guidance counselor who, by the grace of a brother working for the car company, has gotten a first generation AI car named Victor. He's already well on his way to anthropomorphizing it when Victor and his "family" (all the Victor cars share information via the cell phone network) decide to head for Philadelphia (with their owners inside) to lobby for more ethanol stations. Upon learning that ethanol production has been raising food prices world-wide and making more poor people starve, they all change course and head for the nearest ethanol plant to try to destroy it and themselves in protest (they've been programmed with Asimov's Three Laws, you see). Eventually the guidance counselor, recognizing their similarity to teenagers, works with his brother and the head programmer to solve the problem. It's a funny story, one that could have been written any time in the last 80 years with only a substitution of political issues. It also gives hope to those who dream that one day their knowledge of the Norwegian language will help save the day!

Contrast this then, with Lerner's story. I was hesitant to read it at all, since he's been on a tear about RFIDs and their potential for governmental abuse for at least the last year in Analog's non-fiction columns. I suspected that this story would be a thinly veiled rant, and I wasn't wrong. The first give-away was in the 2nd paragraph of the first person narration:

"I never wanted to go into politics. Sometimes we sacrifice our dreams for a greater cause."

There's a lie right there: people who never want to go into politics generally don't. The story is told in flashback from the point where the narrator has achieved high political office. He remembers the crisis that started him on that road.

For a couple of days when he was a teenager, all the electronics in his region of South Carolina go on the fritz. Annoying, but not catastrophic. Terrorism is suspected, and once everything is back on line, Homeland Security thugs show up, asking about one of the narrator's friends. Turns out he'd hacked the RFID tags of some things to upload viruses to the RFID databases in the giant government databasing warehouses where they sinisterly track all of our movements. They arrest the friend (he nobly allows himself to be captured rather than abandon another friend). Then the government institutes checkpoints all around the region insisting that everyone submit to a full RFID scan or else not be allowed to travel. Apparently they're so concerned that they might be missing some tracking data that they'll tip their hand by disrupting all commerce with heavy-handed checkpointing. Various speechifying ensues, leading to a (non-violent, of course) threat of secession and civil war rather than submit to evil government surveillance. By becoming a spokesman for the pro-freedom side, our hero winds up in high government office, able to enact legislation that all right-thinking people agree with.

This is all so much wish-fulfillment. Noble, self-sacrificing, ideologically pure politicians and hackers fighting against the evil, sneaky, jack-booted thugs of the government. I can't dispute Lerner's obsessively researched (and info-dumped) facts. RFID tags are ubiquitous nowadays, and with massive amounts of computing power, collecting and using huge amounts of surveillance data becomes feasible. However, I still just can't get that worked up about it. Frankly, we make the same choice to allow information about ourselves to be collected every time we use a credit card to buy something. Yes, RFIDs make it harder to live off-grid. With the credit cards, you could choose to pay cash (and never use the Internet ever again). With RFIDs in the dollar bills that you get, you don't even have that option. However, it's been getting harder and harder to live that sort of totally off-net individualistic existence ever since this country was founded. Most people don't want to live in caves with freeze-dried food paid for with RFID-free dollar bills. Most people are perfectly fine with the knowledge that someone could find out that they buy too many books about science fiction on Amazon.com with their credit cards. It simply isn't the end of the world, and it isn't a causus belli for risking another Civil War. I agree in principle with Lerner's leanings here: it'd be great if the government would back off on the ubiquitous surveillance. However, I can't agree at all with the level of histrionics embodied in this story.

Two Twee Stories

Analog continues with a couple of stories that ride the "twee" threshold. "Still-Hunting" by Sarah K. Castle ended up on the wrong side of that line for me, while "Petite Pilferer Puzzles Piedmont Police" by Walter L. Kleine stayed on the right side of it. A bit counter-intuitive, given the titles, but you know what they say about judging stories...

"Still-Hunting" involves "uplifted" polar bears: they can talk to an extent, plus interact with humans and pursue goals. The main character is a successful male, looking to mate with a favorite female. She has thrown her lot in with the humans. She taught them the basics of polar bear communication and accepted their deal of having her live in a zoo during tough times. The male thinks all of this is pathetic and beneath their dignity. Eventually though, he sees which way the winds are blowing, and capitulates to the inevitable. It all seems very improbable to me, especially since no mechanism for the bears becoming so intelligent was ever offered. I needed a little more help building up my suspension of disbelief. In the end it seemed more like "Look! Talking polar bears hurt by climate change! Isn't that awesome/awful?" than a well-thought out sf story.

"Petite Pilferer" on the other hand is a cute mystery story that doesn't aspire to higher things. A small woman has been stealing random items from homes in upscale Piedmont, CA. Even more oddly, she begins returning them. Our protagonist is an older cop with some health problems. Even when directly confronted with the Pilferer he can't catch her. However, when he goes on vacation he meets a woman in the art antiquities business who may have some answers about the pilferer... and may open up the cop's horizons. It's a nice story with a good sense of humor. Given that this is Analog the resolution won't be too surprising to anyone. It may be the start of a story series (a bit like "The Witch of Waxahatchie" that I wrote about in the last issue of Baen's) and I think it could make a good running series. Kleine seems to have a good feel for how to deliver fun, light sf.

Adventure Tales and Philosophy

"No Traveler Returns" by Dave Creek is a story centered on Mike Christopher, a character he has written about before. However, it is perfectly readable on its own without having read the other ones, which I haven't. This is an adventure story. Christopher hired passage on a ship piloted by an alien with its own agenda. Instead of taking Christopher where he wants to go, they've made a stop at the Station of the Lost and wrecked their own ship in the process. The alien is running from something, and has decided that his best option is to go to this no-alien's-land of smugglers and villains to try to make the next step in his voyage.

At first I thought that this would be a "two very different beings learn to understand one another as they journey on" story. They land at the wrong side of the Station, bickering all the way, and begin to trek down the axis of the Station to the place they want to be, encountering thugs, alien colonies, and arms dealers along the way. However, the story takes a different turn when the folks pursing the alien catch up with him, with Christopher caught in the middle. An unexpected ethical dilemma presents itself, and Christopher takes matters into his own hands. It all comes to a satisfying conclusion, although perhaps not the most sensible one.

"The Ashes of His Fathers" by Eric James Stone also takes an unexpected turn at the end. A young man has traveled over a year to get to Earth, carrying the ashes of the founding fathers of his colony. He was raised strictly within a fundamentalist-style religion, and believes that these ashes must be returned before the millennium of the year 3000. Many bureaucratic and diplomatic tangles ensue, as the founding fathers did not leave Earth on the best of terms so many centuries before. A customs official takes pity on him, and tries to help him work through all the red tape. As the millennium date approaches though, he must take matters into his own hands. He may not have been the best seminary student the planet ever had, but he really believes in what he's been told.

The story makes unnecessary self-sacrifice in the name of an arbitrary belief system seem very noble, which, while a common sentiment, isn't really one I approve of. I can appreciate the craft of the story, with its very empathetic and noble characters, but it all seems a bit wasted on a relatively unpalatable philosophical stance. I'm sure that Stone is not making any sort of statement that religious suicides are in general Good Things, but the unquestioning heroism and nobility of the guy's sacrifice seems a little shallow. C'est la vie.

In Which it Turns Out I Don't Like Reading About Jerks

Generally speaking, I start every story with the intention of finishing it. That's the default setting that most authors want to encourage. Unfortunately, in the opening novella in May's Analog ("Test Signals" by David Bartell), I felt like I was running into repeated stumbling blocks thrown into my path, telling me to go no further.

The first bit seemed promising: a gigantic computer runs genetic simulations over an astronomical number of combinations. When it finds a viable organism, it turns it over to some underpaid staffers to pick out the potentially useful or salable ones. So far, so good. One of these staffers is our protagonist.

He gets a call from one of his co-workers Tina, identified as "the company whore," (bad sign #1) who has recently been promoted. He had once considered going out with her, but a deformity on her neck made him queasy, then he found out about her reputation. He identifies himself as an asshole around this time as well. (Bad sign #2)

Anyway, he goes up to Tina's office to see what she's found. One of the simulated organisms that she's found has four arms, just like our protagonist turns out to have. This disturbs them both greatly, for no reason I was able to discern (#3). They're so concerned that they go have a talk with a senior analyst who's crazy about trees (??). The senior guy suggests that Tina has arranged it just to get our hero to go out with her (#4), leading to this gem of a quote:

"Her face was getting red, so I decided to change the subject. Not that I don't like seeing people squirm, but in her case, I'd rather see it in private."

(#5) Basically, this guy is just the kind of jerk I really dislike in real life. I'm already not looking forward to spending more time with him, but I forge on!

They're still freaked out about the 4-armed humanoid, so they go out together across town for lunch (#6), where they proceed to not talk about work at all (#7). Instead they insult each other about their deformities (#8), which apparently makes them like each other even more (#9).

So what we have here are two dislikable people. The author has established that the boy doesn't like the girl, so of course they end up going out. They're both worried about this work thing, but instead of talking about it at work they go out, despite the aforementioned dislike. They insult each other, which leads to attraction somehow. And the actual topic that they thought was so important (although we're still not sure why) gets completely dropped while this version of "flirting" goes on.

Count me out.

Finishing April's Analog

"Into That Good Night" is a short story by William Gleason that puts me in mind of an early Heinlein story. Specifically, the Heinlein story it reminds me of is "The Long Watch" where a young man has to think fast in an emergency and save the day by sacrificing himself. Here a young man has just joined a facility on a moon somewhere. As he's getting checked out on his equipment all hell breaks loose, and the boss that everyone thinks is a complete jerk calls on him to save the day. The reversal here is in the role of the sacrificial hero, which is nice. However, by itself that isn't really enough to make this story worthwhile. Yes, asshole bosses can be heroes too, but there's nothing else new here.

The last short story in this issue is "The Anthropic Precipice" by Jerry Oltion. In this one, some "grey" aliens (like the ones from X-Files) visit a physicist to dissuade him from conducting an experiment he has planned regarding the dark energy of the universe. Or rather, from giving a paper that will lead to being able to conduct the experiment. He shrugs it off and gives the paper anyway. Going to dinner with colleagues that night, they are all abducted along with their taxi driver, and once again given a stern talking to.

The interesting part of the story is the physicists' response to all this. They know for a fact that the instant they say they've seen aliens, their credibility will be shot forever. In this way, it hearkens back to the story that opened this issue: "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can." No one pays attention to crackpots, no matter how serious they seem. In the end, I think the author comes up with a perfectly plausible response to the scenario he's set up. Nicely done for such an outlandish premise.

Finishing off this issue is the last installment of Joe Haldeman's serial "Marsbound." I read it through to the bitter end, but I was never able to settle into the story. Even in this last installment, as an adult, the heroine never rang true for me. (I'm going to note without comment the fact that she's fascinated by xenobiology, having made first contact with Martians, but is so bad at math that she can't major in it and has to major in English instead.) The end the story takes a turn for the "The Fate of the World is At Stake!" It's a problem I've had with sf stories before (*ahem* *Kiln People!* *cough, excuse me*). The plot is perfectly suited to a story of limited scope, one investigating a certain intellectual space of "what if" questions. Then, as if needing a large fireworks show for the finale of a small intellectual symposium, they threaten the fate of the entire world and our protagonists have to make an instant conversion to pulp heroics. (Here I'll mention without comment that the heroine's space-pilot boyfriend is the actual pulp hero here, putting his life on the line while she sits and waits, tearfully, back on the station.) I found it an unnecessarily dramatic ending. Also, most of the characters don't gain any depth: the bad bureaucrat woman is still evil, the heroine still makes immature decisions, her boyfriend may as well be made of cardboard. The other characters can be distinguished only by their different names. It's a shame. The story's strongest point is the world-building, which is excellent. So again, this was throughout a readable story with good science, but it never quite found its focus. It wandered through a few different types before going out with a whiz-bang ending out of left field. I hope that the transitions gets smoothed out when this is published as a stand-alone novel later this year.

April Analog, Pt. II

"Amor Vincit Omnia" by Craig DeLancey is a nicely done novelette. A successful business man gets a visit from a government official. The official is asking questions about the orphanage where he grew up. Government officials asking questions always make us suspicious, and of course here the suspicion is justified. The man gets in touch with other alumni of the orphanage, and it turns out that they're all pretty special people: each one is successful, and they do their best not only for themselves but also for the greater community. There is some alluded-to scandal in their past, but it seems minor.

Eventually of course, all questions are answered. We find out what's special about the man, the orphanage, the scandal, and why the government is looking for them. It all ties together nicely, although I suspect that the effects of the orphans' specialness is over-dramatized (i.e. the author seems to be presenting a silver bullet for the world's problems). I enjoyed it quite a bit: the author has a good feel for when to tease the audience, when to answer questions, and how to explain things in such a way as to raise more questions.

A tangential note: it's a bit depressing how easy it is to hook into reader's paranoia about the government. One guy in a suit, claiming to be from a government department, and we know something's up. We have no trouble believing that this person is a bad guy with a hidden agenda. In fact, that seems to be the default. If he *didn't* have a super-secret evil agenda, maybe that would need some explanation. I'd say it's the post-9/11 times we're living in, but the example of the X-Files certainly pushes that paranoia back a decade or so. In fact, it probably goes back at least as far as Heinlein. So it's something of a constant, but it happened to jump out at me here.

In another government-related story, we have "Righteous Bite" by Stephen L. Burns. This is a straight-forward war story: two soldiers moving through an enemy-occupied urban landscape (obviously somewhere in the Middle East) at night, looking to assassinate an enemy target. Burns plays it completely straight until the twist at the end, which I shall not spoil. However, I'm afraid that this story will probably generate quite a bit of mail for Stan Schmidt (Analog's editor). I suspect that people will either say it's glorifying war or that it is insulting our nation's soldiers. It will be interesting to see what the Brass Tacks column looks like a few months from now.

April Analog, Pt. I

April's Analog starts off with a story that is about a real manuscript. "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can" by Thomas R. Dulski takes as its plot center the Voynich manuscript. This is a work in some sort of indecipherable language, originally created around the 15th century. It has served as an endless source of entertainment for cryptographers and conspiracy theorists alike (I first read about it in Fortean Times Magazine, a wonderful place to find out about odd things in the world such as this). Most people dismiss it as an early and elaborate forgery.

That option isn't open to our protagonist. He's a private investigator, hired by a girl's father to find out why she abandoned a promising career in chemistry to follow a bunch of crackpots who seem to think that the Voynich documents have something to do with alien abductions. She engaged to the ringleader of this conspiracy-theory group, and her dad is really unhappy about that. So now our hero has to find out about the manuscript, the girl, the guy and the group. Along the way we learn some very interesting things about all four of them.

I found this a very enjoyable story. However I suspect that some Analog fans will be a bit disappointed by the ending, which takes a turn for the mundane instead of opening out into the fantastic. There's nothing wrong with that; conspiracy theories in sf stories can't all turn out to be true. For those waiting for the sf genre conventions to kick in though, it feels a bit like stepping on a step that isn't there. Kudos to Dulski for reminding us how close and yet how far away the fantastic is in daily life right now.

The next story, "The Beethoven Project" by Donald Moffitt, is another story that seems to have its Real Year somewhere in the 1950s. I get this impression mostly from the set-up: a bunch of recording studio executives worrying about market share and figuring out where the next big hit will come from. While I'm sure that's been a constant ever since the days of phonographs, the company names seem outdated (Divergences, Inc. vs. The Music Factory) and so does the dialogue: "We need a biggie, Marty," he said. "Something surefire."

That nitpicking aside, the rest is an enjoyable "what if" story. What if you could go back in time and get Beethoven to write a 10th symphony? In fact, what if you could restore his hearing? He was notoriously money-hungry (as so many artists have been throughout history). What would he do faced with that sort of scenario? I'll leave it to you to find out, but Moffitt has obviously done his research and I could completely buy in to his extrapolations.

Finishing off March's Analog

The last few stories in the March Analog were generally OK, but nothing outstanding.

"The Bookseller of Bastet" by John G. Hemry involves a bookshop on a planet undergoing political unrest. The bookstore tries to maintain independence, tries to stay above the fray, and they're successful for a few generations. But eventually the violence comes to them. It's a nice moral tale about the importance of free and independent sources of information, but I suspect that it's preaching to the choir. I doubt that any Analog reader has been quietly muttering to themselves: "If only we could bomb out those darn book sellers!"

"Knot Your Grandfather's Knot" by Howard V. Hendrix starts out with an older man restoring an old car plus an extended health report. He's failing at getting the car running, and his health is failing. Then he goes off reminiscing about his grandfather. I didn't get any whiff of an incipient plot, and with all the car/health reports, no sense of the protagonist's character, or why I should care what may happen to him. So when I asked myself "skip or keep going?" the answer came back "Skip."

I love John Clute's "Real Year" concept. It's a handy tool for identifying when a story seems temporally out of place. The Real Year for "Helen's Last Will" may be the late '40s or early '50s. Blanche is a wealthy, elderly and unpleasant woman. Her sister Helen has died, and this unpleasant woman feels that she hasn't gotten her fair share of the will. She's also concerned that Helen's head has been removed from her body, as she donated it to "Advanced Technologies." She sues Helen's son, a one-dimensional momma's boy, and eventually finds out what it is that Advanced Technologies actually does. With all the dialog between selfish older women and their lawyers, and their concerns with their social charities, there's almost nothing in this story that couldn't have been written 50 years ago. It's readable, and it's nice when Blanche gets her comeuppance, but there's nothing new here.

Finally, we get part II of a serial by Joe Haldeman, "Marsbound." I won't go into too much detail, as two-thirds of a novel is a bit much to cover here. I've read it all the way through so far, but it hovers right on the keep going/skip it boundary. The protagonist seems too stupid to be a realistic teenager, and the plot seems to hinge too much on her making silly decisions. I may be biased, but I just don't remember teenagers being as stupidly silly as some authors write them. Also, in this story even the adults get pretty irrational when the plot calls for it. It's probably not too far out of the bounds of realism, but it just didn't ring true for me. However, the hard-sf trip to Mars & the Martian colony in the first installment, and the encounters with "Martians" since then have been great, and keep me on the right side of my dividing line. The Martians here aren't quite like any I'd read before, and that's a big plus. In the third installment it looks like the protagonist will be significantly older, and I suspect that I'll probably enjoy it more. I'll let you know how it goes.

"Not Even the Past" by Robert R. Chase

I've spoken before about some of my biases when it comes to storytelling. For instance, I'm overly fond of stories about sentient books, not a big fan of metaphorical "they're all really dead" stories. I think I'm neutral when it comes to the noir-ish private investigator trope which shows up so often. However, I am decidedly a fan of well-done closed-door mysteries. I'm not a regular murder mystery reader, but Murder on the Orient Express is one of my all-time favorite books.

So as "Not Even the Past" moves from well-realized diplomatic tale on a space elevator to closed-room murder, I was delighted. It starts out with a great hard-sf hook: cooking on a space elevator. You thought cooking on a sail boat might be hard! This chef's got problems that have barely been dreamed of so far. Plus, given the nature of the story, he has to cook individual meals of completely different ethnic cuisines to cater to the various diplomats on board. He's got pressure cookers, LED indicators, and everything has to be stowed and accounted for so as not to go astray in the ever-changing gravity.

This makes it easy for the chef to notice when there's a knife missing after dinner, but before he can do anything about it, the unpleasant Chinese ambassador has been murdered. Now we find out that the chef isn't merely a chef, he's also security personnel, and it's his job to try to solve the mystery.

Which he does. The story eventually covers a lot of ground, including the national and personal sins of the past coming back to haunt the victim. It makes a very good point about Chinese relations with the world, although we shouldn't assume that China is the only bad actor on the national stage. Nations, and powerful individuals, do a lot of very nasty things. Sometimes, at least in small ways, the little people take revenge.

This is a well-paced, serious story, with good hard-sf furniture, and a little more political nuance than average. It doesn't take itself too seriously, even when dealing with serious issues, which also helps. It stays a story, without becoming too much of a lecture.

"The Spacetime Pool" by Catherine Asaro

The March issue of Analog leads with a novella by Catherine Asaro. I had previously read her novel, The Quantum Rose, which is a book in the middle of her famous Skolian Empire series. I didn't much care for it: the mix of sf background with fantasy and romance plotting tropes just didn't work for me. I decided to give this novella a shot to see if a different piece would give me a different perspective on this author. Nope, not this time.

Our heroine is Janelle, a recently minted Ph.D. in Math from MIT. She is out hiking when she is suddenly kidnapped, dragged across dimensions, and then attacked by savages. The kidnapper tries to explain why he did it - his father had seen a prophecy many years ago that involved her. He is one of twin brothers, and he's the good one. The bad one is the elder, currently ruling in oppressive and warlike ways. The prophecy said that whoever married her would rule, and whoever killed her would die. So he was able to get to her first, and would she like to get married now?

After some absolutely token protests, she decides that she's really into the hunky good prince, and yes, she would like to marry him now. That's where it all started to break down for me. It's one thing to accept the practicalities of the situation, but she's really into him from the first horse ride. After all, he's studly. And seems nice. Why not dive in after only a day's acquaintance with a guy who's torn you away from everything you knew for his own gain?

After this other adventures ensue. The wedding does not go smoothly, and she finds herself in a trap which only her detailed knowledge of mathematics can help her solve. Talk about contrived. The dialog goes:

"Very well." His laugh grated. "The combination that releases the chain is the same number of terminal zeros in 4089 factorial."

What the blazes? She understood what he meant, but it astounded her that he offered such a game of number theory. It wasn't something most people knew even in her own universe.

"You do know what a factorial is?" he said.

"No," she lied.

"Pity. Not that it would help you. You could never multiply all those numbers together."

Yep. Contrived.

The story ends on a cliffhanger, and seems very much like the opening third of a novel. It's perfectly well written: well-paced, good action, empathetic characters, nice prose, good descriptions. Again, it's the instantly-fall-in-love-with-the-hunky-barbarian romance trope that just turns me off. I understand why so many people enjoy her stories, but she's just not the author for me.