Analog, November 2008

The meat of Analog’s November issue is the first episode of Robert J. Sawyer’s four-part serial, “Wake.” Rather than reviewing part of the whole, we’ll merely note its presence and pass on to the first of two novelettes.

Carl Frederick’s “Greenwich Nasty Time” starts out on the Isle of Wight. Paul is a physics student who is combining a cycling contest with his thesis advisor’s physics experiment, and he is accompanied by his English lit student girlfriend, Vicki, who gives him an excuse to infodump the scientific theory behind the experiment. It’s all to do with quantum multiverses which sounds intriguing until you shake it a bit, and then bits of the plot start to come loose and you can hear them rattling about inside. The present-day locals also sound wrong as well, and one suspects that the reason Frederick sited his story there was for an excuse to use the title. Anyway, Dr. Richardson sets off the experiment on the mainland, and the mainland promptly falls silent. It becomes apparent that the modern British mainland has been flung out of time and has swapped positions with a Dark Age Britain. Paul and Vicki have to go ashore and cycle to where Dr. Richardson set off the experiment in order to reverse it. The Saxon spear-carriers (in both senses of the phrase) come across much more convincingly than their modern equivalents, no doubt due in part to their impenetrable dialect. Like Paul, I need a good translator to get anything from Beowulf. Frederick’s story has flaws a-plenty, but it cracks along at a good pace and is generally enjoyable, if annoying. It also leaves the reader wondering about a lot of stuff that it doesn’t have the time to go into, such as the effect all of this might have on space missions, and that has to be a good thing.

The second novelette is much more accomplished. “Unburning Alexandria” again features time travel, but Paul Levinson’s introspective story has the opposite effect on the reader. It is so well researched that the temptation is to dive into reference books to see what, exactly, is fact, and who amongst the cast really existed. It takes place in North Africa in 413 AD and features the attempts of modern scholars to rescue parts of the past. It seems that time travel can only be accomplished by living objects, and while it is possible to pull people from the past (replacing them with brain-dead clones shortly before they were due to die anyway), inanimate objects can only be hidden and hopefully rediscovered in the future. Sierra has replaced Hypatia at the Library of Alexandria, and she is trying to preserve documents by having copies buried in tombs and suchlike. Hypatia herself is due to be destroyed in two years time, and another time traveller is trying to persuade Sierra to flee. They can, of course, have the records faked to cover her tracks. She is driven to stay by her love of knowledge, while Levinson’s own erudition makes the whole era breathe. The ancients seem alive and their society comes across as vital as our own. This was around the end of the Western Roman Empire, and the state religion, Christianity, was still young and malleable. The Augustine who walks onto the page in Carthage comes across as a nicer person than the one who wrote Confessions of a Sinner, but that is also entirely plausible. It is the sheer weight of reality that seems to crush the danger of paradoxes, and that is testament to a rare ability to portray the past.

Alan Dean Foster has a massive back catalogue, and while some of his fiction can feel as if it were written by someone who wasn’t fully engaged with it, it is always smoothly and professionally crafted. It is only after “Cold Fire” is finished that one realises that there wasn’t all that much of a plot there to begin with. An urban photographer is stranded in the frozen wastelands of Alaska and is about to be eaten by a wolf when he is rescued by an Inuit trapper. He is taken back to the trapper’s cabin to recover, and there he discovers that the trapper’s daughter has an unusual relationship with the Aurora Borealis. What will the photographer choose to do with this information? The landscape may be frozen, but the story’s suffused with a gentle warmth.

Richard A. Lovett’s “Bug Eyes” also has a big heart. Frank Rodgers is a scientist who is monitoring a rover on Io when a big, bug-eyed creature appears in front of it. The rover operation has been running for several years and it is now so low-key that he is the only person who is online at the time. Frank is convinced that someone has hacked the system and is pulling a prank. Since we are reading a science fiction story, we are fairly certain that it’s the real thing, and it makes for an annoying couple of pages while Frank catches up with us. However, once this happens (and Frank still reserves the right to be proved wrong) the story grips. The rover, unfortunately, loses its own grip and is destroyed. Frank then has to get on with the rest of his life, and how he deals with the experience is at the core of the story. His development as a character does prove useful as the story comes together in a tidy, albeit slightly sentimental, climax.

Oz Drummond also tries the reader’s patience at the start of “Re\Creation,” but fortunately, her story also evolves into something that’s more worthwhile than it first appears to be. Gale is playing several advanced computer games and keeps running up against another player. She comes across as somewhat shallow and little better than some of the virtual characters she meets or inhabits. Then it slowly dawns on the reader that she is herself a computer artefact, and the other player, in her, is trying to create an artificial intelligence. The story soon transcends the necessary early clichés and goes on to subtly supply us with the motivations of the programmer, the growth of Gale, and sufficient clues to the state of the real world to answer any remaining questions.

There’s also a letter to the editor from Stalin L. Bungs (or Stephen L. Burns, if you prefer). “Mea Cupla” is the familiar literary conceit of the fake contributor’s letter. Most are written with tongue firmly in check and this is no exception. Lightweight it may be, but it does put a smile on the face. Bungs goes on to confess that he has written his 54 stories while wired to the gills on stimulants. His typing speed is remarkable, but he is quitting as his health is suffering. He also owns up to having pseudonyms to get even more of his work published, and a well-versed SF reader will be able to decipher many of the names that he’s used. “Mea Cupla” won’t win any awards, but it’s not intended to.

This issue also contains a science article from Thomas E. Easton, book reviews from Tom Easton (yes, they’re the same man!), and a column from Jeffrey D. Kooistra. It’s the first time that I’ve seen the electronic version of Analog, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the interior artwork is in colour in this format.