Magazine Review: Analog Science Fiction Science Fact December 1984 edited by Stanley Schmidt
Continuing to dig through my pile of stuff that I’ve been meaning to reread, I found this issue from the year I actually subscribed to Analog.. This was an indulgence as I was underemployed at the time, but a magazine in the mail every month was cool.
“Guilty Until Proven Innocent” by Stanley Schmidt is an editorial about the increasing of security measures in the face of rising crime. For example, he could no longer just walk out of the airport without proving he hadn’t stolen someone else’s luggage. He suggests that it might be necessary to have larger shake-ups of government more often to make sure that society doesn’t get overly hung up on security and that the laws keep up with the times. I wonder what he’d think of today’s airport security?
“Elemental” by Geoffrey A. Landis is science fantasy. A couple of centuries in the future, humanity has finally discovered how to use magic. Due to its complexity, the vast majority of magic is used by scholars and technicians. For example, the spaceport at Naples in Italy uses wards in conjunction with powerful computers to contain antimatter for spaceship launches. But some small magic has leaked out to the general public.
Our protagonists are two graduate students in Chicago, Ramsey Washington (physicist) and Susan Robinette (thaumaturgical engineer). Susan is headed to Naples to launch for Venus, where she will be studying the Earth Elemental of that planet. Ramsey is studying the geomagnetic flow of the Earth. He’s noticing some anomalies, and by the end of the story, they have to work together to stop an eruption of Vesuvius.
The crisis turns out to be caused by hundreds of individual people using the same spell over and over, warping the earth elemental in that spot. Each thinks that they’re doing it secretly as they’ve learned from a friend, but in fact it’s the entire farming community. (Think of pesticides being used too much in one area, causing an ecological breakdown.)
It’s a decent mix of subgenres; of minor note is that Ramsey is offhandedly revealed to be non-white, which he worries could cause him some difficulties, but the impending volcano eruption overrides any social issues.
“Second Planet — Second Earth” by Stephen L. Gilette, Ph.D., is a fact article about what it would take to terraform Venus, given what was known about that planet’s conditions at the time, and available technologies. The chemistry gets pretty thick, but lots of story potential here. I’m not up on present science enough to tell how much it’s outdated.
Jay Kay Klein contributes a short biography of Dr. Gilette, and a “Probability Zero” short about body transplants based on the notion that scientific progress is increasing in speed every year. “…we made more progress last week than in all the centuries before.”
“Criticality” by Frederik Pohl is a humor piece with several threads converging. First, the America of the future has been defeated in the World’s War, in which every country in the world except the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. simultaneously declared war on those two countries, and the only way out of the mess was to surrender. So the various nations contribute to Occupation forces that…don’t actually do much.
Second, American culture has been consumed by the “tell us how we’re doing” mindset and its citizens go around constantly rating things, and each other. The viewpoint character has a computer-generated matchup, and he and his date spend most of their time trying to get the highest possible ratings from each other. This is baffling to the Canadian peacekeeper who keeps running into them.
And also, it’s now open that Americans admire their politicians more for being cunning than effective.
There’s some ethnic references that are deliberately “off”, but it’s an interesting commentary both on the America of 1984 and ours.
“On Gaming” by Dana Lombardy is a role-playing game column. The Chaosium game based on Larry Niven’s Ringworld system is the subject, and it’s more an ad for the game than a review.
“Q.E.D.” by Bruce Stanley Burdick is set in a future where religious fanatics have taken over human society, and space colonization is about spreading their religion over the universe. Alienologist Simon Janov has been studying the Plexians, the natives of the world his colony has been established on. The Plexians have their own system of formal logic he’s been unable to learn, and a “technology” based on “control”. Janov is told that a new wave of colonists is arriving, and he must determine if the Plexians can be made to serve, or if they will need to be destroyed.
As it turns out, the Plexians have decided that the humans are not “people” and are choosing to not allow any new ones to arrive, and let the ones already here die off. Janov must find a way to prove to the Plexians that humans can in fact be people, without letting them be enslaved or killed off in their turn. The ending is nicely ambiguous as to whether Janov has done the right thing.
“Brass Tacks” is for reader letters to the editor, lively as always, with subjects such as whether GPS will be effective quickly enough, whether the “people” should be allowed to dictate what their government does, and who might actually survive the coming nuclear war.
“A Very Good Year” by Jack C. Haldeman II is interesting for being a story that’s not impossible. The Department of Accident Prevention notices that deaths by accident have dropped drastically. As have all other kinds of deaths. In fact, no one seems to be dying at all this year. But how long can you beat the odds?
“The Military Ratio” by G. Harry Stine looks at the concept that America is “over-militarized” due to its large standing army by comparing the ratio of soldiers to citizens of various countries and times. He doesn’t really come to any firm conclusions, but thinks that there’s a few good research papers to be had from the subject.
“The Life of Boswell” by Jerry Oltion has a college student and aspiring poet discover that in the future he’ll become super famous and influential to the point that a time traveler is doing her thesis on him. Except that now he knows that, he doesn’t like the idea of his entire life being set in stone. Can he find a way to live his life without being reset by the Time Patrol? The ending’s a bit telegraphed.
“The Reference Library” by Tom Easton is book reviews. Nothing in here I’ve read, though I should really get around to the Heechee series some day.
“The Shaman” by Joseph H. Delaney closes out the issue with a sequel to an earlier tale starring Kah-Si-Omah, an immortal shapeshifter. After Casey O’Meara was forced to reveal his true nature to help deal with humanity’s first contact with aliens (not counting the ones who changed him millennia ago), he has fled into hiding with his latest wife and children.
But now the government has tracked him down. It seems that the alien prisoners they’d encountered were just the tip of the iceberg of an interstellar empire which is technologically superior to humanity. They aren’t aware of humans yet, but in a year or a century, the empire will be, and it would be best if the humans had a fighting chance.
So Ka-Si-Omah must infiltrate an even worse prison planet to strike into the heart of the Empire. This one also ends with the protagonist having moral qualms about what he’s had to do to achieve what is probably the greater good. This and the previous story were turned into the book In the Face of My Enemy, which you might be able to track down.
Overall, an okay issue, though I would really like to see the next issue if I still have it somewhere as it was the Kelvin Throop special.
