Analog, January-February 2008

Analog once again kicks off the year with a double issue. The 2008 January-February issue’s short fiction offerings include ten short stories and novelettes, as well as a “Probability Zero” piece, alternate history star Harry Turtledove’s “Worlds Enough, and Time”—a two-pager offering a quirky twist on the exogenesis hypothesis of how life began.

The first of the novelettes, J. Timothy Bagwell’s “Tangible Light,” tells the story of Prashan Chakrapranesh, whose late father liquidated his estate to send him on a research mission to the Hall of Records in the Great Library at Polity—the seat of the Reticulum, the interstellar confederation in which they live. As it turns out, this mysterious errand embroils him in the galactic politics swirling around a little blue planet all but oblivious to the intelligences “vast and cool and unsympathetic” observing it, and preparing to take a decision on its fate. Toward the end, the story gets a bit confusing (perhaps deliberately so), but the relatively fresh science, some interesting bits of world-building, and otherwise robust storytelling effectively held my interest in this update of a familiar genre theme.

Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Man in the Mirror” is premised on a lot of tropes familiar from the genre in general and the pages of Analog in particular—space prospectors looking for a “huge strike,” a lone spaceman trying to survive in a harsh extraterrestrial environment, an encounter with a mysterious artifact. In this case, the main interest in the encounter with the artifact sets up a technical mystery for the protagonist to resolve. While the novelette is competently executed, some readers will find the concept and drama a bit limited. (Notably, this is just one of three pieces in this issue have a non-scientist coping with a scientific mystery, which, alas, all seem to share that combination of strengths and weaknesses.)

Don D’Ammassa’s “The Natural World” moves backward rather than forward in time, to 1870s England. In keeping with the style of a great deal of Victorian science fiction (Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), D’Ammassa’s story centers on a comfortable, complacent bourgeois with an acquaintance whose oddness hints at a shocking secret, revealed by tale’s end—in this case, Emma Wilson of Seamouth, increasingly preoccupied with curate-in-training Jared Rackham. D’Ammassa does not quite have the knack of, for instance, Michael Moorcock at summoning the past to life in a retro-style speculative tale (such as he displays in the Oswald Bastable novels), the story certainly achieves a good deal of the feel nonetheless.

The protagonist of Ron Goulart’s “Conversations With My Knees”—sixty-one-year-old Frank Whitney, a retired ad agency art director in a failing marriage to a washed-up folk singer—is an unwitting guinea pig (among other unwitting things) for artificially intelligent implants (guess where) that make him all but a superhero—and draw him into a bit of international intrigue. This time around, this familiar trope is written as parody, complete with preposterous powers and ridiculous foes, and the story succeeds on those terms.

Barry B. Longyear’s “The Purloined Labradoodle” is the fourth of his “Jaggers and Shad” mysteries to appear in Analog. (The three preceding ones are November 2006’s “The Good Kill,” October 2007’s “The Hangingstone Rat,” and November 2007’s “Murder in Parliament Street.”) Harrington Jaggers (the narrator of the tales) and Guy Shad are a detective team from the “Exeter Office of Artificial Beings Crimes,” both members of which have for their bodies “bio replacements.” Jaggers looks like Basil Rathbone, an actor who once portrayed Sherlock Holmes; Shad at the moment looks like another British actor, Nigel Bruce—the Watson to Jaggers’s Holmes. Such choices are not atypical among people in this casually posthuman future England, the sensibilities in regard to such things providing a fair amount of the humor quite prominent in these stories—the weird little details of this world, the “Holmes-Watson” act (and of course, the classic movie references) getting at least as much time as the mystery at hand. Nonetheless, that is not to say the plot is shortchanged (I certainly didn’t find it to be that), and I have to admit that the Jaggers and Shad stories have grown on me since I first encountered them in “The Hangingstone Rat.”

In Carl Frederick’s short story “The Engulfed Cathedral,” married doctors Ingrid and Paul Ryan are attending an international genetics conference while fundamentalist terrorists—the preacher Ezekiel Bushman and his Guardians of the Light—plot from the shadows. Frederick recently dealt with the theme of the clash between cutting-edge biological science and Christian fundamentalism in “Double Helix, Downward Gyre” (which appeared in the magazine’s January-February 2007 issue), but where that one played out as a comedic spy caper lending a new twist to Cold War genre conventions, here the politics are the backdrop to the much more intimate story about this married couple which, more than usually conscious of the options open to (and dangers facing) prospective parents in this world, is planning its family. (This story is also noteworthy for its lived-in greenhouse future, which has rendered the world a much wetter place—a trope that seems to becoming much more commonplace.)

Wil McCarthy’s “How the Bald Apes Saved Mass Crossing” is another galactic empire story—capital G and E this time, complete with multitudes of exotic alien species, eons-long time scales, and cosmic distances. Unlike Bagwell, McCarthy opts for humor over drama in centering this appealingly over-the-top tale on the “Salamander People of Antares IV” and their effort to construct a “Brain” which, enjoying the advantages of a capacity for pure intellection, is supposed to process every scrap of their knowledge to answer all of their problems. As might be expected (the theme of a project like the “Brain” is an old one in the genre, explored by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men, and Arthur C. Clarke in The City and the Stars, as well as other classic and not-so-classic tales), things do not go according to plan, but the able, lighthearted approach to familiar concepts works to good effect.

In Jerry Oltion’s “A New Generation” a small creature is snatched off the surface of her planet by awfully familiar-looking beings in a spacecraft and flown up into orbit. The creature is never named (either as a species or an individual) or described externally, though we quickly realize that she is an egg-laying quadruped with a tail—which also happens to be not only much more intelligent than the physical description suggests (or her kidnappers took her for), but self-aware, the beneficiary of ancestral memory and in possession of human-like manual dexterity. Oltion’s effective telling of the story from his unconventional protagonist’s vantage is the strong point of this inversion of the alien abduction tale.

Mia Molvray’s “Low Life” is another example of the future from the bottom-up, telling a story of a scientific mission to Europa—from the vantage point not of scientists or ship captains, but of a master plumber named Mike looking to get away from his troubles on Earth. Of course, he simply happens to find new ones up in orbit: personality clashes, institutional politics, and a mysterious e.coli outbreak complicating Mike’s life. While not completely free of the narrative limitations of Landis’s similarly themed story, the smoother integration of science and plot made for a better read, and endowed it with the verisimilitude to read like a recounting of future history.

Analog regular Richard A. Lovett teamed up with a collaborator this time around, Mark Niemann-Ross, to produce “A Deadly Intent.” In keeping with the murder mystery-style title, it centers on the mysterious death of a tourist in near-future Antarctica and her guide’s effort to identify the culprit. At the end, I was left feeling that the title was a bit of a cheat, and the conclusion less than completely satisfying, even within the story’s parameters (the culprit, apart from being obvious, warrants a much stronger reaction at the end than actually materializes), though credit is due for the piece’s briskness and technical inventiveness.