ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact October 1971

ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1971

The tenth issue in my Analog Deep Dive. One Year is now in sight -- I didn't think I would keep it up this long! For anyone finding these reviews, my purpose is two-fold: enjoying some "classic" sci-fi, and looking for stories that I think could be adapted for TV broadcast since so much of what shows up on anthology shows is rough to awful. Additional Note: I do NOT work in television. I just watch it.

The issue starts with a sad notice of the passing of legendary editor John W. Campbell, but notes that he had finished three more editorials. This was also the first issue of my readthrough that was poorly scanned -- the pages are visibly tilted toward the upper center of the magazine and the print quality isn't as good. But it's definitely readable.

In this issue:

John Wood Campbell 1910 - 1971

The Editorial: "Antipollution Device", by John. W. Campbell. John hatest the Instant Ecologyu Experts (see last month) but that doesn't mean that he thinks nothing should be done. What he's opposed to is doing useless things at great expense or doing things that in fact make the situation worse in the "glorious name" of improving the situation.

He then talks about automobile exhaust, which might've been taboo back then because every legislator and so many of the voters had cars. Lightning produces nitric oxides high up in the atmosphere. Cars do it more down to Earth. Nitic oxides are about 1/5 as deadly as cyanide. He then gets into electric cars, which didn't exist except for golf carts, and how wonderful they could be if someone would make then and others would buy them. Note that he expects them to be powered through electricy provided by nuclear reactors, which would produce less heat than all the IC engines would.

Turbine engines have also been developed for automotive use. They burn their gas in an excess of air instead of exploding it in a piston, which leads to lower inherent pollution. And the engine is low-maintenance and could outlast a long-haul truck using it. Unforutnately, they weren't practical for everyday cars.

Campbell gets into describing a horsepower tax, which is probably one of the first things I ever really disagreed with in an editorial that I didn't just skim over, before moving on to creating low-pollution machines. That idea is politically salable, but at the time it was unworkable. Which brings him back to zero pollutiuon, rechargeable feul cells, if they could get made.

Serial: "Hierachies" by John T. Philifent, with an illustration by Kelly Freas, showing a rodent-looking animal with very long ears like airplane wings. The caption reads, First of Two Parts. Theoretically Special Agents Sixx and Lowry had the ridiculously simple job of escorting one Royal per sorki-dog from Khandalar to Earth. But for some reason some organization was fanatically opposed to their movement --"

I'll get back to it. The last time I read a two-parter in separate months, I didn't enjoy the ending.

Novelette: "The Golden Halls of Hell" by John Paul Henry, with an illustration by Kelly Freas, showing an empty clear container, cap off, in the foreground on the left, and the silhouette of a person, likely a woman, in the background, walking into the water from a beach under a full moon. The caption reads, Hell is, by definition, an evil place. But what you think of as "evil" must then define the nature of a hellish place!

That caption told me nothing. Felicity North lives in a modest residence in San Sebastien, in the West Indies, not in a tourist section. Her husband travels a lot, and at times she travels with him. Right now, she's by herself. Her kids are in school in England and spend vacations with their aunt, Felicity's sister-in-law. She feels she has nothing and plans to kill herself by taking pills and walking out into the sea in the middle of the night, leaving her things on the beach to found. She has it planned so it won't look like a suicide.

Her plans are interrupted when a man who appears to be a 17th-century religious fanatic comes running out the beach toward her house. His name is Jeremiah Dickenson, and he doesn't know where he is, but he's just come from "Hell". he was from Ashby-de-la-Zouche in the county of Leicestershire. He believes that he betrayed the Lord to wind up in Hell, and his sin was taking his own life. She takes him in for the night so she can get him help in the morning. To add to the craziness, a man named David Lesley, Controller of the FIrst Area in the Western Hemisphere, appears and renders Jeremiah unconscious. He has come from the History Research Center that will be located on San Sebastien in a couple of centuries. He's a time traveler.

In short, researchers from an early century than Lesley used to pluck people out of history right at the moment that they were about to commit suicide, so they wouldn't be missed from the timeline. They did this to learn more about the time period, putting aside for the moment that they were interviewing people who were so despondent about their time periods that they were going to kill themselves. This practice has stopped by Lesley's time but he still oversees some of the earlier attempts.

The problem with Dickenson was that he did not adapt and thought himself in Hell. Somehow he escaped and wound up in 1971. A team will be coming to collect him and bring him back, erasing his memories.

Lesley also tells North that he's familiar with her work, too. She protests that she hasn't done anything noteworthy. He mentions that she will. Just not in the 1970s but in the last quarter of the 21st century. And that she would go willingly. She scoffs at this, and at the idea of doing anything noteworthy. Her science skills are 17 years out of date, and would only be worse a century later. Nonetheless, Lesley states she would thrive in a different time, but can say no more (and will likely erase this conversation).

North comes up with a plan to save Dickenson by shipwrecking him with some Quakers in the Caribbean back in his time, and ends up going to the future, but not as far as Lesley's future.

This could make a great show for television. It would have to be a period piece set in 1971, whem a woman might have given up her career to be a wife and mother, and then somehow gave up her kids to travel with her husband. There are five speaking parts: the three mentioned about and the two people from the History Research Center who show up. Diverse casting is possible for the time travelers, but less so for North and Dickenson. I enjoyed this story.

Science Fact: "Supernova" by Edward C. Waltershcied. Image shows a supernova. The caption reads "One of the most fascinating of all phenomena in the universe is the appalling and ineffacle biolence of an exploding supernova -- when one star suddely blooms with greater energy emissions than all te rest of the stars of a galaxy combined!"

This was a very lengthy Science article with a lot of images. I made it through as much as I could. Keep in mind that it's 50 years old, so we've probably learned a lot more since then. This is pre-Hubble, mind you. If I read this correctly, the size of the largest solar mass mentioned is likely an order of magnitude incorrect. I think I've read some of this information before (more recent works or older Analogs) although maybe without all the science involved. It's interesting, but it's dense. (Kinda like those supergiants! Or the remaining dwarfs! Yuck, yuck!)

Short Story: "The Crier of Crystal" by Joseph Green, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a wooded or jungle scene with a predatory animal, four-legged with a tail, claws, and fangs, running between three men who are wearing protective clothing, goggles and lighted helmets like miners. Two of the men are shooting laser guns at the beast, while the third holds a box-shaped device with an attached tripod. The caption reads, Convincing a man of something he knows is impossible involves the truth of "I wouldn't believe it if I saw it with my own eyes!"

The caption has little to do with the story, except the ending, unless any earlier skepticism flew right past me. And my first thought about the illustration was that it was going to be a war story because I thought the picture was conjuring up something (metaphorically) out of Viet Nam.

There's a planet named Crystal after its unusual silicone-based lifeforms. Everything is sparkly in the daylight and you need protective gear to move around. The creatures have unbreakable crystal teeth. Humans and the planet's fauna are generally safe from each other because they cannot feed off each other, but animals act on instinct and could attack before realizing that such attacks are wastes of time.

Conscience Allan Odegaard is the first person we meet. Conscience is his title, and his job is to determine if any of the local fauna are intelligent. He walks out at night among the giant chandeliers with trunks of shimmering crystal and leaves of tinted glass. There's an elusive creature that could be intelligent. The station director, Cappy Doyle, has several recording of a thin voice of something like a high-pitched child that unsterstands a few words of English and utters a lot of gibberish. Council Member Kaylin goes along on the assingmnet to witness the conscience in action. (He'll be the doubter from the opening caption.)

Odegaard discovers a primitive looking speaker grown from one of the trees. The tree itself is the intelligent life, and everything in the woods and the continent is part of the Unity. Allan comes back with a better speaker and a microphone that he is able to incorporate into the tree so it can communicate.

The planet has intelligent life, but Kaylin thinks it was all a show, a put-on, for his benefit.

It's a cute little story which would make good television if someone could afford the CGI to make a Vancouver forest look like a Crystal wood, or digitize any of the animals properly. The cast is a decent size and diversity shouldn't be an issue.

Short Story: "Mr. Winthrop Projects" by Tak Hallus, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing the face of an older male, partially obscured by an American flag wrapped around him. The caption reads, The compulsive power of a gun is obvious -- but there's also the not-always-gentle art of persuasion!

It was a little confusing to start. There's a guy named Browning in a cabin, and he refers to another guy as "Swami" who is actually Mr. Winthrop. Note that he is also "Mr." while Browning never is. I don't know why but this stuck out. Winthrop starts in a full lotus position on the floor before he's sent to work barefoot in the basement on the Wintrop Projector, where he hopes not to electrocute himself. It's called a "telethesia projector". (Definition: The supposed perception of distant occurrences or objects by means other than the known senses.)

We next have a flashback to 40 years earlier to when Mr. Winthrop was a graduate student. He was terrible when it came to predicting ESP cards, worse than guessing, but he was great at transmitting information, particularly on days when he was elated. He decided he was going to go into advertising, at which he became successful. By the 1990s and the invention of visiphones (which is what they were usually called in scifi stories but in real-life they were just "phones"), he has successfully started marketing 3-second ads to play during busy signals, which feature the bare back of a Swedish model. His next advancement would be not subliminal advertising but pre-conscious advertising, such as implanting ads while people sleep, driving around in a van at night (okay, that's my summary, and I might use that).

This causes him to get kidnapped by a Mr. Nicolson, who wants to be President Nicolson. He orders Mr. Winthrop to build the projector. He does, and he builds his escape plan into it. Not surprising.

Not a great story, but definitely filmable. It'd have to be modified, of course, but you can get the gist of it easily enough. It doesn't need a lot of people, although it would need a few extras milling about some scenes.

Short Story: "Motion Day at the Courthouse" by Ted Thomas, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a woman's face in the foreground on the left side. There's someone in uniform holding a baton in one hand and grabbing the collar of a clown running past him, a trashcan knocked over in the background. The caption reads, Which has to do with the problems faced by The Mob when a law-abiding telepath starts throwing emery in their gears...

Why one would throw "emery" in their gears, I don't know, assuming that emery is the stuff from those boards.

Okay, so it wasn't a clown. It was just a guy, a crook to be sure, someone bad off, but not a clown. The image had me wondering.

It starts with a lawyer being hired by a guy looking out for his business interests -- i.e., a crook. They were testing the cops with a drop, but the cops knew about it in advance and snapped out everyone involved. Mr. Louisa wants to get his guy out of jail and he wants to find out if the cops obtained their information illegally somehow.

An investigation leads to a woman who works as a clerk in the DA's office. She is apparently an ESPer, and she's the one who told the cops. The lawyer releases that she can read his mind word for word repeatedly. He decides that he will acknowledge ESP exists so he can file a motion that use of ESP is unconstitutional. After a weekend of preparation, he is ready to cite case law about illegal wiretaps and other such stuff. This is interrupted by scientist and academia types who want the entire concept of ESP discredited. (If it's discredited, then she can go on snitching to the cops and there would be no defense against it.)

This leads to the judge testing the woman herself before any final decision can be rendered in court.

This is a great little short story and is easily filmable, given all the courtroom dramas on TV and the number of sets that must be available (not to mention actual courthouses). Very enjoyable story. Were this 50 years ago and I had a stamp, I would've voted this number one for that month.

The Reference Library , by P. Schuyler Miller.
Introduction discusses the results of some reader vote for their favorite story or series of stories, with many authors getting a lot of votes for a lot of stories. "Nightfall" was the favorite, followed by the robot stories and Zenna Henderson's "People" stories. (I don't know who that is or what those stories are.) It's a long list and worth searching for on the Internet.

Reivews include The Methuselah Enzyme by Fred Mustard Stewart; and Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson.

Brass Tacks: Nothing stood out enough to worth mentioning, but I made it through. Interesting snapshot of opinion 50 years ago.

On to November, and whatever else is in the TBR stacks in Kindle, iBooks, and the physical nightstand, including a book of poetry by a former student.