“Keeping Track” by Richard Foss
“911-Backup” by Richard A. Lovett
“The Case of the Contumacious Qubit” by Thomas R. Dulski
“The Diversification of its Fancy” by John Barnes
The November issue of Analog hits for the cycle, with a Probability Zero, a Short Story, a Novelette, a Novella, a Serial, and a science article. Since Tangent doesn’t review non-fiction or serials, that still leaves four categories to examine.
The Probability Zero for this issue was written by Richard Foss. “Keeping Track” is set in the Mayan Empire and, as with most Probability Zero pieces, is a fluff story, in this case about the chief calculator of the Mayan religious calendar and what could happen when one gets too close to his work.
Richard A. Lovett provides a cautionary cyberpunk tale with “911-Backup.” When Winston finds himself on the verge of an accident while driving on the Sunset Highway, he immediately works to backup his consciousness into his off-site storage unit so that if anything happens to him, he’ll be able to be brought back as good as new. While a traditional cyberpunk story would look at the amazing things a person could do when they tapped into their extra memory, Lovett points out some of the problems with this setup, clearly basing his exploration on what he has seen of people’s use of regular computers. While Lovett could have chosen several different moods for the story, he gives Winston a certain detachment which, while a reasonable choice, tends to make the narrative less forceful and doesn’t permit Lovett to drive his point home as well as he otherwise might have.
Thomas R. Dulski delivers a novelette with the unwieldy title “The Case of the Contumacious Qubit.” This is the continuation of a series of stories about a scientific Sherlock Holmes and his Watson, in this case Oliver Wendell Baker and Woodside Dulski wrote some twenty years ago. The tale is two stories in one. The first is about Woodside’s journey to fill in as a judge at a science fair following his retirement from a large company and the results of the judging. While at the fair, he gets involved with Baker after two decades of being apart. Baker was contacted by one of the entrants because the student’s aunt, Hypatia Theonsky, had disappeared. Baker and Woodside track Theonsky with a complete lack of subtlety. Unfortunately, Dulski brings the same lack of subtlety to the mystery aspect of the story, introducing few potential suspects and even fewer red herrings. Staying true to his model of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Dulski does not provide his readers with the clues necessary to solve the mystery themselves, instead allowing Woodside to explain things as they happen, the result being a rather unsatisfactory mystery.
John Barnes rounds out the issue with the novella “The Diversification of its Fancy.” The story, a continuation of Barnes’s “Thousand Cultures” series, explores an attack on the life of singer-spy Gerault Leones at his fiftieth birthday concert and his relationship with Paxa. One feature of the story which jumps out because of its proximity to Richard Lovett’s “911-Backup” is the ability of people in the Thousand Cultures to back up their memories and personalities in case of death. While the acceptance of this need to backup is about the same as in Lovett’s work, Barnes’s viewpoint on the issue differs. In the three novels which so far make up the Thousand Cultures series, Barnes has created a rich universe. This allows him to avoid recreating it in “The Diversification of its Fancy” and instead focus on his characters (also previously created) and the situations in which they find themselves. The end result is unsatisfactory. While Barnes ties up some of the issues, others are left unresolved, leaving the reader with the impression that “The Diversification of its Fancy” is an excerpt from a fourth “Thousand Cultures” novel, although the magazine does not identify it as such, not even mentioning that it is part of an ongoing series of works.