Analog, October 2007

Is it possible in the twenty-first century for science fiction to be sustained solely by ideas? Should the intention to generate a sense of wonder be the summit of the genre’s ambition? As children, when we read, we tend to be more forgiving of weaknesses in style, characterisation, and ambition, particularly if the story manages to whip along at a good old pace while creating and sustaining a sense of wonder. My introduction to SF as a child came via Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and others long forgotten. I didn’t just read these books, I devoured them, as I did many of the stories of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Larry Niven as I entered my teenage years. Later, though somewhat after the moment, I got into the whole New Wave thing, and in discovering writers like J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Samuel Delany, and Thomas Disch, I realised that the genre’s potential extended way beyond the event horizon of juvenile entertainment.

Much has happened in the field since then, to the extent that the breaching of SF’s protocols by outsider elements—ideas and themes emerging from cultural, social, and political debate—has made the genre a far more fluid and dynamic beast, one whose texts are as likely to appear in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror as in Interzone, in Black Static, as in, oh, say Analog.

Except that in reading the October 2007 issue of Analog (vol CXXVII, no. 10), one would be hard-pressed to find much in the way of dynamism, or evidence to suggest the way the genre has evolved in the last twenty or so years. Take Barry B. Longyear’s “The Hangingstone Rat.” Ostensibly a detective story dressed up as science fiction, it concerns a pair of detectives’ efforts to discover the identity of, and bring to justice, the man who, at the start of the story, lured them to a remote part of Dartmoor and tried to kill them. The protagonists, Jaggers and Shad, who work for ABCD—the Artificial Beings Crimes Department—are an odd couple. Both use “meatsuits”—in the former’s case a kind of replica Basil Rathbone, in the latter’s a Mallard Duck—into which one’s consciousness, or Engram, can be uploaded. Shad, we are told, worked as a cop in the USA (a point on which the plot hinges), before relocating to Devon for reasons I didn’t quite get. He also had a brief but successful career as an actor, which fact serves as the source of much of the story’s attempts at humour.

Having survived the murder attempt, Jaggers enlists the help of his wife—a cat—Shad’s girlfriend (another cat), and an artificial being called Walter who resembles P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves as interpreted by Stephen Fry. Together they discover Shad’s fate and the identity of a mystery man from his past, one whose political ambitions Shad could potentially threaten. Along the way, there are references to numerous movie characters and their mistreatment—why didn’t the Wookie get a medal for bravery like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo did? And did I forget to mention that Jaggers’s boss is modelled on John Dillinger? Hilarious, no doubt, but all this laboured jocularity serves merely to expose the thinness of the tale, one whose paucity of ideas is painfully dragged out over twenty-six pages. If the detective story itself were engaging, then it would be possible to forgive Longyear his poor characterisation—and the notion that the story plays with archetypes doesn’t hold water—or the lack of tension, but it isn’t. Unlike, for example, Jonathan Lethem’s reworking of the tropes of detective fiction in a SF setting—the dark, offbeat and wonderful Gun, With Occasional Music (published back in 1994)—underneath all the padding, this tale of a revenger from the past is, simply, no fun at all.

“A Bridge in Time” by Joseph P. Martino revisits a familiar scenario, in this case the retrieval and use of information from the future for financial gain. Here, Martino’s protagonist, a maintenance engineer for Time Gates Inc., is duped by a female employee of an insurance company keen to get an edge by finding out the future worth of their holdings. Carson is immediately attracted to the girl, and we know this because we are privy to his initial impressions of her:

“Nice legs under those running shorts, he thought. And she’s obviously got a jogging bra under that tank top.”

Despite the fact that he falls in love with the athletic Jenny, Carson never really gets to grips with who she is. How else to explain his inability to recognise her motives for quizzing him about the working of the time bridge and how to exploit it? Probably too busy figuring out her cup size. Even so, theirs is a curiously chaste relationship. Seeing each other two or three times a week in addition to their morning runs, they share dinners, movies, plays, museum outings, and even symphony concerts, which, what with the interrogations, leaves little time for anything else.

Eventually, Carson discovers Jenny’s duplicity and is presented with a dilemma: should he turn her in or will true love win the day? Martino concocts an ending that would have any self-respecting Mills and Boon editor reaching for the black pen, but here, decked out in the sexy tropes of SF—and it has to be said that there’s nothing alluring in his reworking of the time travel theme—he’s allowed to get away with it.

“On the Quantum Theoretic Implications of Newton’s Alchemy” by Alex Kasman is burdened with the same quasi-humour as Longyear’s story. A young mathematician—Igor Stravinsky—leaves college to work for a quantum chemist by the name of Doctor Frank Stein, solving Riemann-Hilbert problems that seem to have no bearing on chemistry. It turns out that Stein’s great discovery is to prove Newton’s theories regarding the scientific basis of Alchemy. It all has to do with the notion that matter is made up of light waves, not particles, and that once Igor has solved the relevant complex mathematical equations, Stein will indeed be able to change lead into gold. Needless to say—this being a humorous tale—things do not go according to plan. It’s entirely possible that the template for this story predates Newton’s ideas on alchemy; that being the case, it would take a better writer than Kasman to transform such base material into something precious.

The title alone of Daniel Hatch’s “The Angelheaded Hipster Escapes” caused a brief lifting of the spirits, but alas, this didn’t last. It starts out promisingly enough, with our narrator, a consciousness trapped inside the last vestiges of flesh and bone—an Organic Memory Storage Device (in plain English, a living head in a jar)—effecting his own rescue from a solar observatory. That he leaves behind his companions, three heads in various states of mental and emotional disintegration, suggests a tone of dark cynicism, but this is not sustained. Instead, the narrative follows a fairly conventional path as Jonathan Bender—the OMSD—develops a crush on his rescuer, Penelope—kind of awkward since she sees him more as a kind of super iPod than as a sentient being. Taken back to an Earth one hundred and fifty years after he was born, Bender is pursued by agents of the Artificial Intelligence who had once employed him—more or less as a slave—to refine their ability to read and interpret human emotions. Just to complicate matters, Penelope is one of the chief protagonists in a plot to overthrow the dictator-like head of society’s ruling twenty-seven families, a man she holds responsible for the death of her father.

Bender, limited as he is physically, is able to interface with communications systems, by which route he uncovers Penelope’s involvement in the plot to destabilise Sky City. With his consciousness able to follow her via the network of CCTV cameras, computers, satellites, and cell phones, Bender does his best to warn and protect Penelope while at the same time trying to elude the clutches of his former employers. Though the story has pace and excitement, its comic tone undermines any tension Hatch manages to create. The plot is unnecessarily complex, with its disparate strands failing to really hang together. It’s as if Hatch’s uncertainty about his story prompted him to throw a little bit of everything into the mix in the hope that when the dust settled, he would be left with a coherent narrative. Perhaps reworked at greater length, with clearer connections made between the various plot strands, it might have worked. Maybe Hatch planned this as a novel. The story’s end points towards future adventures for Bender and Penelope. I won’t be holding my breath.

“El Dorado” by Tom Ligon exemplifies the problem of Analog’s take on science fiction. The problem—and I acknowledge that this may not be such for most Analog readers—is one of idea over execution. Ligon knows his science and manages to create an exciting central conceit—the threat posed to our Solar System by an alien Bussard Ramjet. The physics involved is fascinating, as is Ligon’s description of the formation of the metal-rich asteroid across which our prospecting protagonist stumbles, out on the far reaches of the solar system. This find can make Victor Gendeg a very wealthy man. Unfortunately for him, at the same time he discovers this valuable rock, his fellow prospectors receive a communication from Earth regarding the origin of an alien transmission they have recently detected. This transmission is a warning, but by the time it is decoded, the alien race who sent it have followed up with the launching of a matter converting spaceship aimed at our sun. Victor’s rock may be humanity’s only means of diverting the weapon. With such material at hand, one is entitled to expect a tense, exciting narrative, but Ligon fails to pull it off. While the ideas are there, his problem is in how to convey them to the reader without making it sound like a lecture in astrophysics. He uses a neutral narrative voice to explicate the formation of the asteroid and its billion-year journey through the solar system, and this cool, authoritative tone works well, conveying what I need to know without distraction.

However, when Ligon switches mode to focus on Victor, he resorts to having the protagonist ramble on to his ship’s computer as a means of telling us how he recognised the significance of what he’s found. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of Victor’s monologue, written in an obtrusive and irritating mix of vernacular and more technical language, with mention of “Oort Clouds” and the “core/mantle interface” sitting uncomfortably alongside words and phrases like “freakin’ sumbitches,” “tain’t much,” and “folks.” Trying to disguise infodumping in vernacular speech doesn’t work, and neither does having the rest of your characters appear in the text only as voices prefaced by a “handle” over a communications system. Thus we don’t “see” the story so much as listen to it unfold. This robs the story of real tension: by the time the narrative returns to Victor, I’d more or less given up on him and had little patience left while he worked his way through the missed communications from his fellow prospectors and the implications for his find. The story’s climax is muted, and the coda seems somehow false, tacked on to reinforce the possibility—just in case you missed it—of Victor’s redemption.

“Virus Changes Skin” by Ekaterina Sedia is about Willow Robertson, a young geneticist altered as a child by a melanin suppressing virus that transform her from black to white. Deliberately administered by her parents, the virus was presumably intended to help Willow get on in an implicitly white world. Following her mother’s death at the start of the story, Willow tells her doctor she wants to reverse the procedure. Initially unsure of her motives, Willow grows curious about her parents’ culture and almost resentful at being cut off from it. But even as she tries to reconnect with a black identity, she remains acutely aware of how difficult it will be to shed the cumulative effects of her white experiences.

The narrative is set in a future where Ozone depletion has led to a world laid waste by UV radiation. Where once Willow’s love for science was rooted in a search for truth, now it’s focused on developing way to make plants and crops resistant to the vagaries of a hostile climate. The virus Willow ingests to reverse the melanin-suppressant is only one of thousands that humanity has used and tinkered with to effect changes in the genetic structure of plants. Just as these new strains offer hope to humanity, so Willow believes her virus-altered body will lead her to discover the truth about herself. The irony is that the melanin generated by this virus also offers a degree of protection against UV and that soon, as her friend Emari tells her “everyone will be doing it.” Pondering this, Willow sees a future in which everyone will be like her, “the color of their skin divorced from meaning or history.” This epiphany leads Willow to an understanding of the true nature of viruses and their resentment at our usurpation of their role in shaping both the world and ourselves. Sedia’s is the shortest story in Analog and easily the best. Alone among them, it achieves a balance between its ideas and their telling. The science is rendered subtly and supports the narrative rather than being all that that story is. Willow convinces because she is confused and afraid and alone. In short, she is all too human.

The Sedia story apart, the science fiction of Analog is a long way from that which appears in F&SF, Asimov’s, or Interzone. Then again, could it be that reading the present Analog is intended as a science fictional experience in itself—a journey back through time to when we were all so much more easily astounded?