Analog, July/August 2008

The July/August 2008 issue of Analog is a roller coaster: full of ups and downs—more ups than downs, but a bit frustrating all the same. It barely manages to keep a delicate balance between the scientific infodump and the storytelling, often resulting in the science overwhelming the fiction. It’s not a return to Hugo Gernsback times, either, but, paraphrasing Dave Bowman, “It’s full of description”—too much description, with not enough narrative and dialogue. Maybe that’s the tipping point of this issue of Analog.

In Bond Elam’s “A Plethora of Truth,” two televangelists try to one-up each other using very unorthodox methods. The first two paragraphs pay homage to the old Golden Age stories, with a touch of John Varley, when Pastor Billy learns that his crosstown rival, Reverend James Wheelwright, has started streaming his word over the Internet, reaching “a whole new reservoir of recruits through their computers, handhelds, and in-car navigation systems.” Billy strikes back and presents to his community nothing less than the world’s very first hotline to God, spurring another reaction by Reverend Wheelwright, who soon announces that his Creation Science Institute has isolated the gene for the human soul. But, even though every human has this gene, not everyone has it as fully developed. “Which, as you know, is how faith-based genetics works,” explains Reverend Wheelwright. Guess who doesn’t have a well developed soul gene?

A fight ensues between the two men of God, one that can have only one neutral arbiter. Yeah, you know who. The Almighty interferes almost noncommittally, but His is the final word, and the final joke. While predictable, this story’s short length made it easy reading. I don’t know that it would hold up otherwise.

In Juliette Wade’s “Let the Word Take Me,” we encounter a typical after-contact problem: how do you communicate with an alien race? Young David tries desperately to understand a female of the reptilian Gariniki species, in whose homeworld the human race has established a colony, who was brought to their colony against her will; otherwise, the colony’s charter could be revoked. David’s father, a renowned linguist, buys them three days to try to communicate with her, but he’s been working at trying to unlock their language for what seems like years and still couldn’t be more clueless. David, on the other hand, grasps it easily:

Father was infuriated by the idea of a linguistic problem he couldn’t solve, but David had to figure the problem wasn’t linguistic at all, or the Great Arthur Linden would have solved it. No, it had to be a social problem—one linked to the mystery of when the geckos told their stories—as the Gariniki would say, why Afara-mudi never talked outside the house.

This kind of story has special appeal to me because I’m a translator, and it got me interested from the beginning. The premise is a good one; the Gariniki hold that verbal language is too sacred to be spoken idly, and so they almost never communicate in this fashion outside their homes, choosing to use it to tell what humans identify as “bedtime stories.” All in all, this is an interesting story about lack of communication, but the solution develops too easily for young, nerdish David and reads like it was developed as a TV series pilot or a big-screen movie. It occurs to me that maybe “Let the Word Take Me” was intended as a new space opera, pulpish piece, but if so, it failed to fully achieve that goal.

“Junkie” by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is a good-humored story featuring true trekker (seventh generation) Matty, an overweight geek who works as a techie in a space station and who longs to go “where no man has gone before,” dreaming of first contact and five-year missions. A miscommunication—or a total absence of communication—between the crew of the space habitat and an alien ship seems to promise a true first contact adventure to Matty. However, when the crew goes to the dock where the craft should be, all they see is a kind of lunchbox—the alien ship—which, because of its size, they perceive as some sort of toy.

A cute story, but its humor fails to follow through to the end, and the Arab-like names of the aliens and the scribblings on the side of their ship are mentioned but not explained. “Junkie” is nothing we haven’t already seen before in old Little Lulu comics (remember Sammi and the Little Men from Mars?), just upgraded to Star Trek fandom-size.

Kyle Kirkland’s “Imprint ” is a good old-fashioned X-Files story, of sorts. Giles Bailey, a man with prosthetic legs who work as a technician for the famous University for Scientific Studies, was not well equipped, physically at least, by Mother Nature:

With a rail-thin torso, two slender but muscular arms, two wiry artificial legs, and a pear-shaped head, Giles often noticed people looking at him while pretending not to.

But he is virtually a genius, and the people who run the place know it. So when he starts to notice a magnetic anomaly in the campus, Professor Handen, the director of the Center for Neurobiology, seems to dismiss all too quickly Giles’s suspicions.

This is a conspiracy theory story with Giles as the typical character no one believes. Everything he says is taken with a grain of salt, and people at the university try to put him in the psych. ward. But Giles manages to discover the truth, an apparently alien artifact found in Central America (aren’t they all?). Next, he finds, to his amazement, that he is the only one who can access and use the artifact properly. Another cliché (the handicapped person who is also a genius) but well done here in something of a Theodore Sturgeon tradition. However, Giles is no Will Smith or Tom Cruise (or even Steven Seagal). The Corrupt Scientists-Administrators who sold out to The System versus the Good Crippled Genius simply doesn’t work. In the end, the story is wrapped up too soon and with a long, scientific explanation that could have been better explored.

Carl Frederick’s Science Fact article, “The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe,” explains how improbable the existence of our universe is and the role Intelligent Design is now playing upon the hearts and minds of scientists. From Murray Gell-mann and Einstein to Arthur Dent, Frederick rewrites J.B.S. Haldane’s quote (some say it should be attributed to Arthur Stanley Eddington), “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Frederick also provides a fiction piece for this issue, “The Exoanthropic Principle,” based on the same theme, about first contact in a very down-to-earth scenario—not involving ships and stations, but scientists in the Institute for Distant Communication: Alien Intelligence Group. These scientists start receiving messages in the form of prime number dot sequences and set about translating them. Thus, they begin communicating with the aliens…although the outcome of the conversation may not be exactly what they were hoping for. There’s a lot of “as-you-know-Bob”s here, but I found them well-balanced against the dialogue, which is fast-paced. The ending was anticlimactic but logical. A good story.

In the far future, ore miners find a prehuman artifact on a distant planet in Michael F. Flynn’s “Sand and Iron.” A proverbial story about the Unnameable or the Unrecognizable:

We don’t know when the prehumans were around, or for how long. We don’t know if they ruled this quarter of the galaxy or only roamed through it. There’s probably a tall tale to cover every possibility. People can’t tolerate the inexplicable. So they tell a story or sing a song. All we’ve ever found were their artifacts. No human ever saw them in life.

The crew of human and alien miners find a kind of vault with strange objects whose purpose none of them can fathom. In the end, they are easy prey for an Irresistible Force which almost dooms them, but it’s a force this reader found easy to resist. Reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama in its approach to things unknowable, overall, “Sand and Iron” is a well-built story with an unsatisfactory ending.

“Shotgun Seat” by Paul Carlson is another near-future Earth based story. Claude, a middle-aged truck driver must mentor a newbie girl named Lu Ai-Lin and show her the tricks of the trade. But then Claude and Lu notice that Sylvantronics, a robotics company for whom he sometimes works, is putting humaniform robots to work as truck drivers.

I’m fond of stories like these; this one brought on a dream where I was a truck driver (come to think of it, there was a time I really did want to drive a truck; my father worked a temporary assignment for the Army driving trucks when I was seven or eight, and I liked to sit up in the cabin with him when I was allowed to), but a humaniform robot as a truck driver? Almost twenty years after Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash gave us Mr. Ng, Carlson postulates a cyborg truck driver? Why not simply jury-rig the truck with an A.I.? Carlson tries to make a case for using them as helpers, heavylifters, a kind of apprentice, but he didn’t convince me. After all, Claude has Doll Box, his truck’s A.I., with whom he can talk and which is both guidance system and spy robot pigeon, so one presumes that robots come in many flavors in the near-future. But they don’t, and the story is poorer for it. “Shotgun Seat” has a strong Asimovian touch and does have a nice ending, showing how robots are good after all, even if they are likely to take over the world in the long run, but I have to wonder if this kind of story still touches anyone who isn’t a Three Laws of Robots Asimov fan.

In his novella, “Tenbrook of Mars,” Dean McLaughlin introduces us to Donald Tenbrook, a man moved by inertia. After a brief spree in college, where he falls in love with a girl that seems to like him but refuses physical contact and leaves him before he can express his love for her, he takes on a variety of mega-engineering projects from New Mexico to Honduras, then to Antarctica, and finally to colonize Mars. Tenbrook is definitely not a hero, a kind of character that’s hard to describe and requires a tour de force to create. His indifference is low-profile, but it did make me want to punch him for being such an ass, apathetic about everything.

Tenbrook lived on Mars for twenty years until something went horribly wrong. An accident strands the colonists, and he becomes the only person the survivors can trust. He and 17 other survivors manage to return to Earth, leaving 533 others behind, their fates—alive or dead—unknown. There, he finds himself in a web of red tape and Senate hearings, reminding me a little of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, but worse, as he’s stranded on his own planet, wanting to go back for the others although it may already be too late.

“Tenbrook of Mars” felt a bit like a Kim Stanley Robinson story, dealing as it does more with crises and what people do (or try to do) in the face of them rather than the adventure of colonization. It’s told as a long flashback interspersed with an interview Tenbrook gives to a PR man in the craft from Luna to Earth, to “please the op-edders.” People are trying to make him look like a hero, but he sees himself as just a man who was doing his job:

“You looked ahead and saw what you’d need. Everything.”
“Any fool could have.”
“You’re the one who did.”
“Just happened it was me.”

This is an entrancing story regarding the logistics of survival and a page-turner, even though the ending is predictable and has a certain deus ex machina flavor that almost smacks as cliché, but the story works well in spite of that.