Analog January/February 2008Still a few days to go until it’s 2008 proper, but the new year’s short sci-fi (and fantasy) has already been available for a while. We won’t call it a “resolution,” per se, ’cause we all know how those turn out, but I will try to stay on top of things from here on out. In this ginormous double issue, we get eleven (!) stories, one of them the first part of a serial, plus a “Probability Zero” (a short, humorous vignette) and all the usual features and departments. With such an abundance of riches, this is gonna get unwieldy, so I’ll try doing it in two parts.

The first story in the issue is “Marsbound,” the first third of a serial by Joe Haldeman (who won every award in creation in 1976 for his novel The Forever War, then repeated the feat with its 1997 follow-up Forever Peace). The premise is, so far, really simple: an 18-year-old girl named Carmen moves to Mars with her family. The interesting part of the story (to me, at least) is the plentiful descriptions of the day-to-day processes of the move — departing the Earth on a space elevator, the six months on the ship between the two planets, and the adjustments to life on Mars once they arrive. Alas, the human aspects of this story are more of a letdown. Carmen herself ranges from inoffensively shallow to annoyingly self-involved, and her fling with Paul, the ship’s captain (the only supporting character who’s developed even halfway decently so far) didn’t add to my interest in either her or the story. Things start to pick up a bit towards the end of this segment — Carmen’s personality clash with an authority figure on Mars shows promise (pending its development in the remaining two parts), as does the cliffhanger, which I won’t spoil here. So “Marsbound” doesn’t start out on the best foot, but has enough potential for redemption that I’ll withhold ultimate judgement until I’ve read the rest of the story.

In J. Timothy Bagwell’s novelette “Tangible Light,” a resentful young Indian man named Prashan discovers the monumentally important reason behind his father’s odd dying wish. Ideas jostle up against one another in this conceptually crowded tale — Prashan’s complicated family relations, individuality in a historically enormous population, Earth’s place in an uncaring universe, and a useful new technology (along with some interesting different uses for that tech) all made this a rich, satisfying read. It’s not flawless — there was an unwelcome whiff of real-world intrusion in the political aspect of the plot, and I’m not 100% sure the ending worked for me. But these were easily-overlooked minor missteps in what was, overall, a quite enjoyable story. I’ll be looking for Bagwell’s name in the future.

I’m a bit on the fence about Geoffrey A. Landis’ “The Man in the Mirror.” On the face of it, it’s a tremendously entertaining old-school SF story about a deep-space prospector whose curiosity gets him stuck sliding back and forth on an enormous, frictionless mirror on a planetoid beyond Pluto’s orbit. With only his wits to get him out of this seemingly hopeless situation, it has the kind of set-up and scientific problem that propelled some of the best of the golden age stories. The only problem is this: not only is it very similar to one of those golden-age stories (”The Men and the Mirror” by Ross Rocklynne, which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1938), but that story is also referenced explicitly (albeit not by name), and there’s dedication to Rocklynne at the story’s end. So while I enjoyed this story hugely, I am ultimately unsure whether to think of it as a useful updating of a classic idea for a modern audience, or as the shameless plundering of an older author’s story. You be the judge.

“The Natural World,” by Don D’Ammassa, was almost as much a horror tale as a sci-fi tale. Sisters Emma and Virginia Wilson, out walking in the Victorian English countryside with Emma’s unwanted suitor Jared Rackham, discover an unusual structure apparently built by beetle-like insects who exhibit some very unusual behavior. Bizarre events ensue. D’Ammassa evokes the Victorian mindset quite nicely, and sets it an interesting problem, the results of which were convincing and entertaining. Nothing life-changing or exceptionally memorable here, but a fine tale nevertheless.

Carl Frederick’s “The Engulfed Cathedral” presented a number of problems for me. I had similar problems with his novelette “Double Helix, Downward Gyre” in the January/February 2007 Analog — Frederick’s left-wing polemicizing really gets in the way of both the enjoyment and the believability of his storytelling. In a near-future where global warming has raised the sea levels considerably and genetic modification is commonplace, a worship service for a conference of geneticists, held in a submerged cathedral in the Mediterranean Sea, provides an opportunity for violent Christian terrorists to make their feelings about gene-mods known in a horrifying fashion.

Okay, here we go. As a devout, practicing Christian myself, I’m firmly in the Francis Collins/Alister McGrath camp. I don’t have any hostility towards science, nor any problems reconciling my religious beliefs with my scientific knowledge and understanding. So the recent trend in many SF stories (especially in Analog) of presenting an irreconcilable conflict between religion and science (or, as they present it, superstition and reason) has never really flown with me. These authors seem to have an over-inflated awareness and/or fear of fundamentalists’ influence in the world today (witness such troubling ideas as “Christian terrorists,” something I’ve seen in several stories before this one). But there’s another real weakness in this story: In an apparent effort to be fair, Frederick creates a protagonist (physicist Paul Ryan) who is supposed to be actively religious himself. But Paul’s thoughts and statements to this effect don’t sound like any kind of genuine religious inner life that I’ve ever heard of. In fact, they sound like what someone who’s only seen religious people from afar, and doesn’t like them, would guess must be going on in their heads. That, along with the smug way Paul’s non-believing wife gets him to question his beliefs by the end of the story, made this story not only impossible for me to believe as an accurate evocation of human behavior, but also, like “Double Helix…,” actually offensive in some ways.

So I get it. Carl Frederick’s work is just not for me. Since he appears quite frequently in the pages of Analog, I’ll try to compensate for that in future reviews.

The rest of the issues stories get reviewed in the next post.