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

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

With the holdiays, I'm falling behind at the moment. I'm in the middle of a few things and keeping up with the entries isn't easy. I'm setting this to post on November 30, no matter what state it's in. Yes, the bottom will look like last month's because there's a bit of cutting and pasting going on.

Issue eleven in my Analog Deep Dive bored me a little. Part of the problem was reading at bedtime or on subways coming home. Both induce me to nod off if my interest isn't being kept. That said, there is plenty of raw material that could be mined from this issue. 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.

In this issue:

The Editorial: "The Gored Ox", by John. W. Campbell. Campbell is on the case of the "liberal press" that believes that because they want to know something that they have a right to know it. He goes back to Lee Harvey Oswald (only 8 years earlier) and states that Oswald could never have been found guilty in a jury trial considering how the press were all over the case and how the DA were too accommodating. A decent defense attorney could have had most of the evidence thrown out of court. Ironically, Oswald, had he lived, would likely have been found guilty of killing a police officer because no one in the press cared about that.

The press want the government (and everyone else) to give up their secrets. However, they will fiercely guard their own secrets.

Novelette: "Silently Vanish Away" by Glen Bever, with an illustration by John Schoenherr, showing a bald man leaning forward, arms stretched out in front of him, trying to catch one of the numerous midair rats in what appears to be a cave or cavern area. The caption reads, The most secret of all secrets is the one whose holder doesn't know what the secret is, and whose user can't possibly talk!

This story could be reworked so it could be played for laughs. At its heart, it's a story of teleporting rats that suddenly appear in places. That's comic fodder for sure. Wrapped around that is Shamrock Biochemicals, and its president Pete Killeen, who created these teleporting rats, but not exactly know how them did it, nor can they totally control them. Around that are agents of the U.S. government (Dept of Internal Security) who want to get a hold of the research, the chemicals, the secret, or whatever knowledge they can. Hovering behind that is the fact that there are worldwide implications for soldiers who can teleport, particularly if the Cold War is still hot. (A recurring problem with 50 year old stories, that and the "future tech".)

I thought that the story went on a little too long, and could've been better as a short (or shorter) story. It's divided into XIV sections, which seems a bit much. It had places to go, at least. Killeen was a bit full of himself, but at least he can handle government agents smoothly enough.

Spoilers ahead: one of the big questions is why some of the rats teleport randomly but others remain in place and just die. When Killeen makes himself a guinea pig, he discovers that teleportation is actually a psi ability and he's become psi. Moreover, the secret to teleportation is moving through other-dimensional spaces which are non-Euclidean to same the least, which could drive a person mad if they don't accept it for what it is. This explains the dead rats -- rather then travel through these corridors, they retreated and their brains shut down.

By the end of it, the lab has been surrounded in the desert. But all the employees have taken the chemicals that make them psi and all disappear. Killeen has no problem with all this information getting out.

Filming this would be easy, since everything happens indoors, with maybe an establishing shot of the desert. Disappearing and reappearing rats shouldn't be difficult. I'd add more levity to the story, and also rework the budding romance between Killeen and his secretary, Miss Morrissey, so that it's obviously consensual from the beginning. Cast can be as diverse as you want it to be.

Short Story: "Compulsion Worse Confounded" by Robert Chilson, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a man walking toward the reader. In the background there's another man sitting in a large desk chair, behind a desk with a large CRT on it. He has a cigarette in his hand. There's a screen on the wall that reads "Fire La", with more hidden from view. The caption reads, The trouble with faultless logic is that it's completely irrational.

THe man's name is Alvin Raleigh, and he has a female assistant named Lariann Davis, who seems upset. He works for Addleton. They have an AI system, the Archimage, that helps it run the company. It suggests many things, usually involving business. This time it's suggested firing someone, Lariann Davis. It's never done that before.

Raleigh and Addleton discover that the AI will do what it takes to follow its programming, even if it's underhanded, so as delete key information before other info goes public. For instance, it's suggesting a possible merger or takeover of another business which is likely to hit hard times in the near future thanks to information Archimage withheld.

The one thing that this story gets right is that the AI cannot take over the world, or even team up with another AI to do so. They don't have the hard-wired resources needed, and their primary programming would set other AIs up as rivals that they couldn't work with. The ending seems a little too easy, and I actually didn't understand it. The AI think Lariann is a spy because of the queries she makes, which end up tying up computer resources to work out. She solves the problem by telling the AI to reexamine its system based on the fact that she is not a spy. Since her desk is one that the AI must take instructions from, it follows that programming and sees everything in a new light.

Nope, I don't get it. Maybe I read it too quickly and I missed something. Maybe it's just the state of the world 50 years ago. But there could be a quick little story for any anthology show. Once again, the coworker is romantically interested in main character, but that plays well for television.

Novelette: "The Old Man of Ondine" by Terrence MacKann, with an illustration by Kelly Freas, showing the wrinkled face of a hairy old man (totally framed with wild hair) filling up most of the image with an arrow-shaped spaceship flying over planet (and casting a shadow on the planet) appears behind it. The caption reads, The job of any executive is solving unexpectable and recalcitrant problems; the juniors handle standard difficulties. The ones Pace got slugged with were dillies!

Ondine is an Earth-like planet, and The Old Man of Ondine makes reference to The Old Man and the (of the) Sea a few times. It got confusing to following but that's because time travel got mixed in. Josun Pace is the VP of Marine Resources Complex. There's stuff here about Earth's oceans being contaminated and that shouldn't be allowed to happen here. Chi'en Li is a nurse with an unusual patient who was found stark naked (and stark-raving mad?) and who was large, brawny and suffering from schizophrenia. Note this is in a post-schizophrenia world if you've gotten your shots. (Also, he's supposed to look fifty, which makes me wonder what the artist thought 50-year-olds looked like fifty years ago!) There's a subplot (which I didn't realize would be the subplot) about toxic scabfish that get ground up with a fishing factory's regular haul. Finally, there's a young, spoiled Terran pilot named Kelvin Dahl who's flying about the planet haphazardly and flies through a nest of powerbeams, whereupon his stardrive overloads close to the planet.

Kelvin survives the explosion, which pitched him and part of his ship away from the rest. Looking around, he realizes something else has happened. Through conservation of mumblemumble, Kelvin has been flung far back in time, but the energy isn't done with him. For thirty years or so, Kelvin has been yanked through the ages of the planet, and the Old Man they found has a retinal scan that says he's Kelvin Dahl. The old man disappears and reappears becoming a legend that will coming for centuries after.

Leaving out the poisonous scabfish, except to place the VP in the area of the Nurse encountered the old man (also, in reviewing, there was a mention of an arrow shape in the water, which I didn't pick up the first time was a reference to the ship that would crash several pages later), and this could be an interesting time-bending story. The only problem is that variations on this theme have probably been done a lot, so whoever adapted this would probably want to focus on the Old Man of the Sea aspect.

Science Fact: "In Quest of a Humanlike Robot" by Margaret L. Silbar. No image. The caption reads, Lots of people talk about building humanlike robots, but no one knows how to go about doing it. A major problem is finding a way to make a machine "think", and, unfortunately, the term "thinking" covers a multitude of sins.

Sounds interesting, but it's 23 pages long. I'll get back to it this week. Let me get through the fiction first.

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, Conclusion. Lorian knew Sixx and Lowry were spies. Sixx and Lowry knew he was wrong; the were jewel-thieves ... in a way. But they were wrong, too, and Lorian was right ... in a way!

I'll get back to this, too. I haven't read last month's yet. Sigh. Where did this month go?

Short Story: "Holding Action" by Andrew M. Stephenson, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a hovering spacesuit in the background and two people running toward it from the foreground. The caption reads, When your invaders come out of time-- how do you hold your territory?

The floating spacesuit in the illustration immediately splashed down into a fountain, instead of landing on the ground. The two men that approached him, did their best to prevent him from living. The traveler had come forward through time into the future to the year 2604 from sometime in the 21st century (one might assume 100 years after publication of the story, maybe) when the Earth is a desolate place.

The guards want to prevent the newcomer from learning too much and bringing that information back to the past and disrupting the timeline and possibly causing the present 2604 to no longer exist. They then delay him as best as they can until help arrives to trap him, preventing him from being recalled to the past. The man speaks in broken English, using the word "comrade" a bunch, but that mostly just shows that language changes over five centuries. The man also wants to know what happened to the others that were sent before him, and implies that he would be the last because they simply can't afford the expenditures to make these trips happen.

This is where it gets murky, along with the cavalary arriving with a catapult. What? I could understand if they didn't allow the previous travelers to return. I might even wonder if one of the guards had been one of them, although the narrative would've contradicted that. But it went off the rails for me here.

It seems that the residents of 2604 aren't from there either. They came from elsewhere themselves. In fact, the POV character is partially blind in one eye because of an incident traveling there, and yet he's a guard. And at no one did his blindness enter into the scuffling with the time traveler.

Still, it could make a good story, but with a different ending, instead of launching the man into Frobisher-Benyon space -- it term that comes up in the next to last page. I would've looked that up but by the end of the page, it turns out that those are the names of two fictional scientists who hadn't been mentioned before that. In any event, it doesn't require a lot of people and one location is all that is necessary.

Short Story: "The Nothing Venireman One" by W. MacFarlane, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a hovering spacesuit in the background and two people running toward it from the foreground. The caption reads, One shouldn't judge a book by its cover. And even less should one judge an Agent!

Short Story: "Motion Day at the Courthouse" by Ted Thomas, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a man in a flight suit holding a gun-shaped object in the foeground, an older woman in a short dress behind to the right, and on the left there the back of someone with a lot of hair speeding along in a motorized chair of some kind. 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. The intro is about Michael Shoemaker's attempt to compile a list of the best science-fiction stories published before 1940 (back in 1971), as voted on by contributors. H.G. Wells and John Campbell (as Don A. Stuart) had the most stories nominated, and a lot of votes. There was a problem that most readers were probably unaware of many of the older stories, so stories from earlier then 1920 didn't do well. (One story predates 1900.)

Reivews include The Nowwhere Place by John Lymington; Quest for the Future by A.E. Von Vogt; and Apeman, Spaceman edited by Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison. The latter of which Miller calls a blockbuster of a theme anthology.

Brass Tacks: New and long-time readers react to news of Campbell's death, starting with Isaac Asimov who credited Campbell's influence in Nightfall, the Robot series and Foundation. I also recognized the name of Greg Bear, whose first novel wouldn't be published for several years yet.

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