ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact February 1972

ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1972

This February issue of Analog was not a favorite. I'm glad it wasn't one of the first that I read, or I would've decided that this was too much of a chore. As it was, I didn't read any other magazines this month. Last month, I overdid the magazines and didn't leave time for much else. So as much as I wanted to read a Stainless Steel Rat story by Harry Harrison in IF, I just didn't get to it. I might still read that story and skip the rest of the magazine.

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: "Popular Wisdom". Ben Bova's first editorial mentions the legacy of John W. Campbell and then talks about the popular wisdom held by "experts" which doesn't always hold. Also, John believed that the US would cease to exist by 1963 because 50 years is as long as any democracy lasts and the passing of the 17th Amendment for the popular election of Senators was the start date of the democracy (according to Campbell).

Novelette: "Fido", by William J. Frogge with an illustration by John Schoenherr showing a very very large stick-like object hovering over an airbase. The caption reads, True charity is among the most laudable of emotions. But suppose the recipient doesn't want your help..."

A long story but it breezed through. An interstellar object comes into contact with Earth and comes to a halt just over a US Air Force base in Italy. (It took a moment to realize that USAFE was United States Air Force Europe.) Everything around it is frozen still. No one is answering the phones. Two pilots are scrambled to fly over and see if there's anything unusual. Other than the stick, nothing is unusual -- except that nothing is moving either. There should be more activity.

One of the two pilots isn't affected, probably because he flew through the sphere of influence too quickly. They take him to approach it on foot (which is where the cover illustration comes in). He's yanked out five minutes later. Someone else tries going in with the mask on and is frozen in place. This guy (I read it a week ago, and I already forget the names. I think they called him "Pappy" for things his Pappy used to say.) seems to be immune, so he's sent in to measure it, investigate it, try to communicate with it. The thing tells him that it's trying to improve people, make them better. It doesn't ask people first, of course.

The Italians claim the object because the U.S. just leases the space. The Russians aren't happy. And the US wants to convince it to fly to America -- because there's no way they could move it if they wanted to. In the end, it flies north into the sea, equidistant from all borders where none could claim it or even find it. No word on whether it stopped trying to fix people or if it just found another way.

So this could be adapted as a movie of some kind, or a one-hour episode of some drama. The budget might be high with jets and air bases, not to mention a very large CGI object. But it could work.

Short Story: "Genesis 500", by Robert F. Young with an illustration by Kelly Freas showing a man in what could be a space suit with a weird looking helmet pulling a hover-sled filled with what could be Science Stuff. In the background are trees and hills and what could be the finger of a seated man carved into the mountain. Very large fingers are in the foreground. Its hair and beard appear to be pine trees. The caption reads, Before we can say "God is Dead!" we must define just what is meant by the term "God". For a primitive people it's a simple, primitive term -- and very real!

There are superbeings in the galaxy, created by primitive civilizations. Getting rid of them is akin to winning the Indianapolis 500 (an ancient race).

Starbrook needs to evict a "god" from the planet Love and send him to the twin planet Light (or vice versa?). The god will cease to exist anyway because all of his followers have been sent to the new planet. He has a transmitter to send him to another transmitter on the other planet. The relative positions of the planets and their rotations doesn't seem to be addressed.

The fun part of the story is that the civilization and the gods have names composed of special characters. The god in particular is %radic;(.(./ (this parenthetical expression is here because I didn't want to add another period there). The people that created him (after some interference with Judeo-Christians from Earth) are the ∠ 0 7 -- except that the 7 is actually the angle symbol rotated 180 degrees. (I can't find a hex code for it.)

More amusing, with all the allusions to Eden, but evicting the god instead of Adam, the superbeing creates a female to lure Starbrook. The females name is ( * ∠ * ) which looks like a face in Smiley mode. At least the author didn't go with something that looked like boobs.

After some tries, the superbeing is evicted.

This is filmable, but the naked female needs to be covered for film. And the number of attempts Starbrook makes needs to be cut down a little. And the character doesn't have to be a god or a manifestation that will fade any way, but it can still be evicted. The girl needs to fade though.

Quirky story, but not bad.

Science Fact: "when the sky falls" by Ben Bova, with an illustration of something by somebody (no name and no idea what I'm looking at -- Rorshach test). The caption reads, What goes up must come down." Whether it's a gentle little star like our Sun, or a whole galaxy.

On the nature of quasars and the Big Bang Theory vs Steady State. Quasars are either really distant objects, or they're a lot closer than we believed. I get the feeling we've learned a lot more about them in the past 50 years.

Novelette: "The Sword of Cain", by Henry Sauter with an illustration by Kelly Freas showing a man with a sword and two leopards in the foreground, on a hill with snowy pine trees. In the background, there's the semblance of a city on the hills. The caption reads, The inevitable answer to street crimes against individuals is individual self-defense. Which then leads to ...

This is the first story in over a year that made me say, "Why am I reading this?" I was more than halfway through and I really wasn't sure what was going on, nor did I care about a single person in the story.

So there's a guy whose old and all his parts are working, which is bad because within six weeks to six months, all those parts will fail at once. Those can't be replaced. Besides more people are being born than are dying, so there aren't enough "spare parts" out there. There are rumors that another scientist is growing spare parts though. So this guy is told by his doctor that a brain transplant into a new body is possible but he needs to get a new body, alive. And the price for performing this procedure is a second body because the doctor is tired of his own. How the doctor plans to perform his own brain transplant? I don't know.

So he goes out, walks across roofs, gets into fights and kills people with swords, flies off in a helicopter, and finds an underage kid who carries a weapon like his older. And there's a helicopter chase ... I think. Then, about a third of the way through the story, we switch over to the guy with the leopards, who spies a helicopter landing wherever they are. He kills the guy and then reports in to the doctor. It's the doctor who grows the spare parts and this guy is the titular Cain, who job is to kill people. And I kept reading ...

And then I asked myself. "Why?". A long time ago, I used to give up on texts if I found them difficult. As I got older, I forced myself to continue to read books. Then I got to an age where I realized that I had a lot of books that I wanted to read, why am I torturing myself with books that I'm not interested in?It's not worth another 13 pages.

Since I'm not being paid for these reviews -- although I thought of approaching a magazine with a feature idea -- it occurred to me: I don't have to read stories that bore me!

So I stopped and moved on.

Short Story: "One Man Game", by Joseph Green with an illustration by John Schoenherr showing a very large bird-creature standing in on white earth against a dark background next to a scantily-clad woman who has her arms stretched out (like the bird). She is stading up and is shorter than the bird's wing. The caption reads, It's not always easy to tell the players from the fauna without a program ...

Fun little story but the ending is a little out of left field honestly. There are 8 crew members and a score of scientist on the Explorer checking out stars and planets. They send a probe down to a planet which has a twin on the other side of the sun as well as three moons that rotate so that at least one is always visible in the sky. The probe notices the birdmen who look right into the camera.

The captain orders a two-week vacation for all the scientists and one week for all the crew (half at a time). The beach explains the scantily-clad woman. The bird isn't as big as the picture would believe, making me think that a "parent" who show up. The birds are too quick to be caught and one of the scientists is ready to shoot one of the birds to study. A second scientist (the swimwear one, I believe) interferes. While they argue, the birds steal the weapons. They aren't called Fasties for nothing. Toward the end of the story a predator attacks a Fastie. It escapes quicker than any could imagine. The scientists evacuate the planet. One of them supposes that the aside from being naturally quick, she thinks the bird teleported to one of the moons and returned. She also believes that these birds are actually from the other planet but they are over on this one as it is some sort of game where they run around naked. The arrival of the scientists might have interfered with it, but it's all taken in stride.

While that ending could make sense, I don't know what transmission were monitored to reach that conclusion. Seems like a bit of a jump to me, especially since they didn't investigate if it was true.

Anyway, space scientists taking a vacation on a planet where strange things happen? Well, Star Trek already had done it by then. Still, it could be an amusing episode, depending on how realistic or goofy they went with the bird costumes (or the CGI). They might want to drop more hints about it being some kind of game that they've fallen in the middle of, though.

Serial: "A Spaceship for the King" by Jerry Pournelle (Part Three of Three Parts) with an illustration by Kelly Freas showing (parts of) two people and a very stylized dagger.. The caption reads, They'd come light-years, but how do you get across a continent of pirates and barbarians when you can't use weapons the enemy hasn't got and you're outnumbered ten thousand to one?

I'll get to this next month and make a separate entry for it. Apparently, a later version of it was published as King David's Spaceship in 1980. The novel is part of his Future History, and takes place late in the series that starts with The Mote in God's Eye. So maybe I'll read the serial instead.

The Reference Library , by P. Schuyler Miller. Reivews include The Hugo Winners: Volume Two edited by Isaac Asimov, Abyss by Kate Wilhelm, Android at Arms by Andre Norton, and Gray Matter by William Hjortsberg

Brass Tacks: No letters this month. This paragraph is a placeholder.

Now onto March. Maybe. I'm starting to have doubts about this.