Analog, January/February 2009

The January/February 2009 issue of Analog is one of their biannual double issues, which gives their readers an extra-large serving of fiction, gives their staff a break, and gives encyclopaedists a numerical headache.

The cover artwork belongs to Rajnar Vajra’s “Doctor Alien,” which is about a human psychiatrist who is summoned to an alien space station in orbit around the Moon. The Tsf, a species that is the last word in commercial trading, run the station. They have recently come across three individuals from different species and have no idea how to communicate with them. The human doesn’t hold out much hope for himself cracking the problems either, but it was far too good an opportunity to pass up. Vajra walks a tightrope with this one, and to his credit, he manages to get to the end without falling off. The Tsf communicators, for example, are programmed with language acquired from listening to over a century’s worth of Earth broadcasts, and their talk is littered with much archaic slang. This could have gotten old very fast, but it works. Later, when the psychiatrist starts to unlock the secrets of the aliens, it is because he has remembered analogues for their behaviour on various places on Earth. It has nothing to do with psychiatry and everything to do with chance. The reader might well experience a feeling of being cheated if the psychiatrist hadn’t been aware of exactly what he was doing, and just how lucky he was. The remainder of the story has a lightness that doesn’t drift into slapstick, and the alien species are highly inventive creations. It’s one of the highlights of the issue.

In “Zheng He and the Dragon,” Dave Creek speculates on what might have happened if the 15th-century Chinese admiral Zheng He had encountered an extraterrestrial on one of his voyages. This isn’t a counterfactual story as it could easily be slipped in amongst his true adventures without disturbing our timeline. Besides, Zheng He is narrating it to his official documenter who naturally has doubts concerning the veracity of the story. When a dragon crashes into the sea in the middle of Zheng He’s enormous fleet, he orders the crew of his flagship to haul the egg that floats to the surface on board. The egg soon hatches to reveal what can only be another dragon. The dragon is bigger than a man and, curiously, wears strange clothes. Zheng Hu confines it beneath deck and is amazed that it soon learns to speak his language. It must still, of course, be regarded as a barbarian. Creek’s well-crafted exploration of hubris and interpretation weaves its way through a fascinating area of history that is still somewhat unfamiliar in the West.

Richard Foss’s “To Leap the Highest Wall,” by contrast, is counterfactual. The story takes place in NASA Mission Control in 1970. The turning point seems to have been in ‘68, and the result is that Apollo hasn’t landed on the Moon at this time. The USSR has a manned mission in lunar orbit that has just radioed NASA requesting permission to land on American territory should an emergency arise. If NASA refuses, they may have to abort the Moon landing. What should they do? And is there another reason for requesting NASA’s help? It’s hard to write too much without including spoilers, but the story hinges on a possibility that could easily have happened with any of the Soyuz missions in real life if it were going to happen at all. It’s a wish-fulfilment flag-waver of a story that would only work if the Soviets didn’t put any care into cosmonaut selection. In the ’60s, NASA didn’t select atheists as candidate astronauts, and it seems unreasonable to expect the Soviet Union to have been less dogmatic in their choices. Characterisation is also sacrificed in order to patronise the reader, with members of Mission Control chortling about a Chinese space program and gee-whizzing over the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a computer chip.

Edward M. Lerner’s “Small Business” is a Heinleinsque novelette of the farm-boy-done-good variety, where sex is a skill rather than a part of the human condition, and “freedom” means freedom-from-responsibility rather than freedom-of-conscience. In other words, it doesn’t match my political viewpoint any more than Foss’s novelette did. However, it is a much better story and feels more plausible despite the greater jump in technology involved with it. Jason Grimbaldi (no obvious relation to the clown) is recruited by a libertarian revolutionary movement while he’s at university. His nanotech engineering skills are viewed as useful attributes, and the group are one of many who aim to open up the solar system, which is effectively monopolised (and therefore stifled) by a state-owned corporation that jealously guards the secrets of its diamond-hulled spaceships. Much industrial espionage and breaching-of-copyright (in the purest fictional sense, of course) follows from the author in this well-paced adventure.

John G. Hemry’s “Rocks” is a conceit masquerading as a short story. Hemry presents us with a series of vignettes that move from human prehistory to the near future. In each one the protagonist realises the value of a rock (or ore) as a weapon. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Several decades ago, this story might have ended with uranium ore, but the climax has been forced into the future by more recent developments.

Richard A. Lovett’s quite wonderful “Excellence” is reminiscent of a low-key Robert Reed-style tale. Morally open in outlook, it tells the story of a mediocre athlete in his early forties who is given the option of illegal gene therapy to become a potential Olympic champion. It’s only been tested on rats, and it does look like there will be serious long-term side effects, but Morgan decides that it’s worth the risk. Some Botox and hair dye, coupled with youthful looks and a good (but not great) coach, and he’s soon a contender. It’s a first-person narrative, but that is one of the few clues Lovett gives to the eventual finish. It’s a beautifully observed story of character and motivation, and it should feature in a Year’s Best sometime, if there’s any justice.

The motivation of the main character in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “The Recovery Man’s Bargain” sometimes feels a little forced, but Yu is under extreme pressure throughout it and has little choice in his course of action. Perhaps if there were a bit more of a feeling that he was lying to himself then it would feel less jumpy. However, there is not much else to fault here. This novella feels like a novel in its scope and range. Yu is a recovery man and his job is to find “lost” items for clients. After a lengthy set-up hunting down a rare (and possibly sentient) flower, he is stiffed by a client who then threatens to clean him out to recoup her expenses. He has little choice but to accept a job for an alien species, the Gyonnesse, who want to “recover” a human who wiped out 60,000 of their larva in a crop-spraying incident. A court that didn’t have any of the Gyonnesse sitting on it freed the human, and they feel that they have been cheated out of justice. The story is more complex than this quick summary suggests, but it also manages to pack a fair punch as well. Hopefully Rusch will expand it to novel length sometime soon.