ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact January 1973
I am trying this again. I gave up in July because I couldn't keep up with it and read other things -- in particular, I started the Expanse series. And if there's a double whammy to be found, it's this: I currently have a 500+ day streak of reading on my Kindle app. I know, it's stupid to track this, but it is being tracked and I want to see how long I can keep it up. Keep in mind, I have be away to weekend conventions and keep the streak going. However, the app doesn't seem to count reading PDF files as reading. I thought that had changed, but I found out a few days ago that I was mistaken. Luckily, I discovered this by 11:30 pm, so I had some time left.
As for the issues that I missed, I imagine that they are going to stay missed. The most likely -- and it isn't very likely -- is that I skim through for familiar names and read a handful of stories from the six previous issues. Serials are right out, I think.
The January 1973 issue of Analog ...
The usual explaination: 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: "With friends like these". Basically, the experts are the last people who want to go to with a brand-new ideas. They'll tell you why it can't be done. The new guys, who don't know that it can't be done, will do it. Or at the very least, will come up with some interesting ideas. (Note: I've only read half so far. It continues at the end of the magazine.)
After the break, at the end of the magazine, this segues into the SALT talks, destroying nations, and the fact that numerical limits on weapons put an emphasis on having the best weapons possible under that limit, and to have weapons not covered by the treaty.
Novellette: "Integration Module", Daniel B. James, with an illustration by John Scoenherr showing a man with a tennis racket bending over to get something from a bag and a large round floating robot with three arms. The back hand has a tennis ball, the second has a racket and the third is stetching off to the top of the opposite page. After reading the story, I'm wondering if that's a cable to the ceiling. The caption reads, The most difficult thing to understand in the universe of man is -- the mind of man!
Joseph has just beaten Beta two matches out of three. Joseph has worked at the Beta Project for 23 years now, and given that the year is 2047, he's going to get hired soon! Beta isn't you're typical robot/android/artificial intellignece. In fact it has the mind of a man. Literally. This is stated very early on, and we even check in on the body of the man who lies there, integrated into Beta. We meet Joseph's wife, Eleanor, and a reporter named Mullroy, who tries to get the scoop on the project, questioning it in every way. Beta, can be very sarcastic with reporters. He learned from a book. Beta is schedule to be expanded and used more by the government. Beta calls Joseph with a concern. The integration has figure out that if he is present in so many places and only has access to certain data, then there has to be a certain repository, a device that is certral to his being, to his consciousness. He doesn't know where it is, but he knows that it must exist. He convinces Joseph to bring him to it.
I enjoyed this story. A quick search of my blog didn't turn up a mention of Daniel B. James.
This is ripe for an adaptation, given the moral and philosophical questions involved. It can be played as retro future or adapted for the past 50 years. Casting is wide open for Joseph and the reporter. The spouse could be expanded or removed for time. But hopefully not a funny voice for the robot. I don't see any problems there.
Science Fact: "The Third Industrial Revilution", by G. Harry Stine, with an illustration of industry on the Moon that appears to be credited to "General Electric". The caption reads Part One of Two Parts. The first industrial revolution freed man from physical slavery. The second is beginning to liberate man's mind from the numbing drudgery of repetitive tasks. And the third ...
This was interesting and I stuck with it longer than I do with a lot of science articles. The unfortunate thing is that I expected something about the computer revolution and the coming Information Age, which was forseeable in the early 70s, at least by visionaries. This is not that article.
Stine refers to industrialization in SPACE. We are running out of room here and we will run out of material, but there is plenty of material in space ripe for the picking and the vacuum will hardly notice our waste heat. What is unfortunate is where he predicts that we could be in the next 50 years, when costs and time will be cut dramatically.
Sigh.
The reasons for it stand out. The best vacuum you can find it up there. And you can get extreme temperatures cheap. The Earth can produce really hot, but making really cold is expensive.
I'll read part two next month.
Short Story: "Health Hazard", by Howard L. Myers, with an illustration by John Schoenherr, showing the back of a hairy biped with a sack in its left hand and what looks like a square monitor or CRT under its right arm. There are three others (an adult and two children?) in the background. They all seem to be heading for some kind of hut or mound. The caption reads, "Sometimes high-minded scientists with the best of good will, can be remarkably obtuse -- while by mistake doing something useful!"
The main character is Romee, a chimee from Notcid. The chimos and chimees are just about as human as men and women of Earth.
Romee Westbrook wants to get her "damn-TV" set working and goes to the Trading Center, or the Cultural Exchange Center. There are new Earth people running things now. The old ones were the exploiters (the traders/capitalists), and the new government people are here to help. Most of the traders are gone, but people like the repair guy aren't important enough to bother with.
At some point, she was given the name Westbrook because that's the location were she lives.
Romee has to go to the jungle to get roots to sell to the Earth people to get money for the damn-TV and to buy chocolate. She's addicted. The new government wants to ban the sale of chocolate because they think it's unhealthy for the Notcid, and it could be why so many are dying in the jungle.
Romee meets a woman who is looking for people for a series of tests on response to envrionmental stimuli for a modest stipend. Romee applies.
The test turns out to be a little cruel. It uses the machine-sounding noises that the Noctid hear in the jungle and usually don't survive. Most of the time, their response is to jump away from the noise. By the time she's heard the noise twice, she's flattened to the ground, scared out of her wits. This continues until the experiment is stopped by a senior official who is not amused. He mentions "damage money" that Romee will be awarded ... but that won't be for quite a while.
Since she still needs money, she goes off the jungle and finds some of the roots she needs. While she's crawling around, she hears the noises roaring above her. She flattens to the ground and waits for the end to come. But nothing happens. The noise keeps repeating, over and over, until there are new sounds, a creak and a crack. It was a swinging tree limb, and it kept swinging so long that it finally cracked and fell. Worse for the tree, it fell into the very trap the limb would have pushed Romee into had she jumped into the air instead of flattening to the ground.
She now knew how to beat the tree. She wanted to tell others but their instinct would still be to jump. So she starts by training her family the way she was trained.
This was a cute story and should be easily filmable. Hollywood would likely screw it up because makes the capitalists friendly but hardly ever polite, while the government people are polite but hardly ever friendly. Too much of the current output leans in favor of the government over any private enterprise, even when it acknowledges government's shortcomings.
Casting, as written, there are two big parts for women, but you only need a few background characters in hairy suits, one main character and four humans. I'd watch it.
Howard L. Myers has written several stories that I've read already.
Short Story: "A Thing of Beauty", by Norman Spinrad, with an illustration by Kelly Freas, showing a slight, bent, bald man in a silk robe in the foreground, overlooking in the back a Japanese village, and behind that, a headless Statue of Liberty. The caption reads, "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre ..." Days of greatness may fade just as London Bridge came tumbling down. But enterprising men can still make life worthwhile, and even enjoyable.
This takes place in far enough in the future that the Insurrectionists have brought the US low, and possibly elsewhere as well. There are a lot of ruins and things are for sale.
Mr. Ito of Ito Freight Boosters is a very rich man and can spend as much as the national debt with blinking. He comes to visit Mr. Harris, the POV character. Harris works for the government, and sells things including landmarks to people who have the money.
Ito wants something to be a centerpiece of his garden, something big and obstentatious to run in the face of his wife and in-laws who look down upon his industrialist standing as unrefined, even though he could buy and sell them a thousand times over.
A hover-car (jumper) takes them around the city. First, we see the Statue of Liberty, but that's too sad to take, and the UN, but that's an insult to Japan, and finally Yankee Stadium. Ito spends hours telling Harris all about Yankee history. He then declines because his wife and in-laws wouldn't be impressed over baseball. Harris is dejected because he wasted a day, and any other landmarks are outside of his territory, and he won't get a commission.
They hang a lampshade on what he finally does sell him. In the epilogue, Ito sends Harris a bonus gold brick. Harris says he doesn't get the reference Ito is trying to make.
Enjoyable story, except for the last line. If he didn't get the joke, why even mention that there was a joke there he wasn't getting. Just acknowledge it like the other one.
This story could be entertaining, but I don't know what could be done with matte work and what needs CGI. That could bring the costs up. Otherwise, it's basicaly two people talking and flying around inside of jumper.
I know that I've read some Norman Spinrad in the past, but I couldn't say what. There isn't anything in this blog.
Short Story: "Proud Guns to the Sea", by Norman Spinrad, with an illustration by Kelly Freas, showing a pirate ship with Jolly Roger flying and sails unfurled, in the background. In the foreground, there's a bumpy, lizardy humanoid with a large jaw with extended teeth. He appears to be holding a space gun. The caption reads, The necessary characteristic of a troubleshooter is his ability to solve insoluble problems -- even if he does it with his own neck!
This story didn't do much for me. Nothing wrong with it, and others might enjoy it, but it didn't do much. The pirate ship in the illustration doesn't exist. It's space pirates.
In the 26th century, there's a colony world called Hallway, which seems to be a stopover point from Terran space to Keroni space (and there's a conflict?). It goes through Sheekathyrn space, and there are colonies a few light year from the star bridge. All interesting, if I kept it straight.
Jack Kellney is in charge of the colony of a few thousand people when they get word (though a message torpedo) of a pirate attack. Not an invasion, but piracy. Jack takes a ship and goes into space, and while he's gone, the ship attacks Hallway and takes Jack's girlfriend hostage.
With know options, he plays on the honor of the species attacking to declare that their captain issued a personal challenge when he kidnapped the girlfriend. It gets to the point where there's supposed to be a duel, but then there isn't one. And the two get away.
Anyway, it didn't do much for me, and I'm probably not doing it justice. Big shock there.
Is it filmable? Yes, but it'd need several sets. Something for the interiors of the colony base and of two ships. Plus the hull of the ship (docking footage?) and establishing shots. Most of the people would be dressed as lizard men, except the two humans.
Short Story: "One Plus One Equals Eleven", by G. C. Edmondson, with an illustration by Leo Summers, showing a man in coveralls with tools in each hand, kneeling next to a tool box, apparently working on some kind of circuitry. There are images of computer memory boards and light displays in the air, giving the impression of big computer. The caption reads, Even though they've been called "thinking machines," computers can't think. At least not on the human level. But, there are some forms of human endeavor that don't require thinking -- on a human level.
I wondered at first if this was going to be a story of the computer developing some kind of literate intelligence, similar to a story I read last year. It went a different way.
There are two characters in the story, and the best I can tell through scanning, neither are actually named. (It's in first person.)
So the narrator is a technician who puts on his coveralls and goes inside a super computer to clean it out and keep it running. Interestingly enough, the references might seem dated but there's no reason to believe that this story couldn't have taken place 50 years ago inside one of the nation's supercomputers that many users paid a lot of money to get a little bit of time on, and sometimes had to wait for a lull in processing to get their jobs executed.
While cleaning the "idiot machine" out, there's a printout which appears to have poetry lacking meter and rhyme. The narrator isn't much for poetry, but thinks this is terrible. He doesn't know who would be wasting valuable resources inputing this stuff. More starts coming out. He tries to inquire who is writing this, going as far as to shut down all input. If he can't fix this (I'm not sure what needs fixing), he'll lose his weekend fixing the machine.
It starts getting better, but still seems odd, even with a title. Then later it turns into more gibberish. In the end, a secondary character comes in. The "poetry" is pieces of his essay. He can't get a PhD without remedial English. He thought all this had been deleted, but shows a printout of the later essay draft. (It still reads badly, honestly. It's about the race of spermatozoa and people saying they didn't volunteer to be born.)
Not a lot of bang for the buck with this one. It might have had more of bite 50 years ago, but doesn't seem to offer much. It could be rewritten to make the POV character a little paranoid about the AI getting smarter and more creative -- and the story does suggest that the computer did edit some of what it had to work with.
Otherwise, not a top candidate for adapting for my hypothetical anthology series.
Short Story: "Proud Guns to the Sea", by Duncan Luna
This entry appears to have been deleted. I must've typed it at work and didn't "save" it. Or it was lost the last time my computer froze and I had to do a hard boot.
Until it's restored: I wasn't thrilled with this story. It's filmable, but I don't it could/would be made into a segment on an anthology series. The pirate ship in the illustration has nothing to do with the pirates in the story.
There's a corridor in space between to regions, and there is a colony called Hallway. Pirates come to take over. Meh.
Short Story: "Year 3 of the Shark", by Joel S. Witkin with an illustration by Jack Gaughan, showing a man in black with folders/papers in each hand, walking among the rubble of a building of some kind. (There could be a rank and insignia on his arm and shoulder). The caption reads, Some soldiers are not warriors. But it takes all types to make an army -- or a world.
Chief Master Sergeant Miltner is more than a pencil pusher. He's an eight-stripe pencil pusher. The war is in its third year (Year 3 of the Shark), and Miltner is one who is keeping it organized. He does his duty because he must. His former CO said as much. That man didn't care about work because he joined to avoid the draft. He knew that Miltner couldn't not do it, and knew that when he rose up he'd still do the job because he needed to be doing his job.
Miltner even reorganizes the troops as the strength dwindles in certain units. His voice has more weight than a major's. He meets with Tech Sergeant Donalo and Sergeant Cruze who mostly humor Miltner is his obsession to keep doing his duty, with the folders and the filing.
A colonel comes in asking about troop strength of Unit Four. It's been deleted and 17 men have been reassigned to Unit Eight. But 300 men are needed to fill a gap. There's probably 50 and possibly a few more. Miltner has some difficult decisions to make, and after he makes one, the colonel comes in to say that the war is over.
Cruze and Donalo leave. Miltner is ready to leave to ... but he can't because he can't leave the paperwork half done.
Quick little story about behind the scenes in a war. I enjoyed it. Filming it would require a couple of exterior shots, and the rest can be shot on a couple of sets. It needs a five-person cast, which could even be four if you combine Cruze and Donalo. Easily filmable. The futility of war is a universal concept.
The Reference Library , by P. Schuyler Miller. Opens with the Hugo Awards. Reivews include Flash Gordon: Into the Water World of Mongo by Alex Raymond, The Edge of Forever by Chad Oliver, The Outposter by Gordon R. Dickson, which was serialized in Analog, and which I read the novelization of, The Infinite Cage" by Keith Laumer (a new I've seen before in these reviews), The Molecule Men by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle, The EGorgon Festival by John Boyd, Other Eyes, Other Days by Bob Shaw, and The Byworlder by Poul Anderson (apparently a hard-shelled conservative, but not so much here).
Brass Tacks: A letter proposing a hp tax on cars to fight pollution, a proposal for a canal (730 feet wide, 50 feet deep) from Lake Superior to the Pacific Coast (30 years, $100B) -- Ben Bova responds that more Congressional support could be had if the canal wound through as many states as possible, but the Rockies and the environmental effects could be a problem), corrections to the editorial about McCarthy, a complaint about the change in tone of the editorials and the editorial tone since Campbell's passing, and more.
This seemed to be a quicker read than usual. I finished before the end of the month, after a late start, and I'm usually rushing to finish. I'll continue for another month.
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