Analog, November/December 2023
“Apollo in Retrograde” by Rosemary Claire Smith
“The Eiffel Tower of Trappist-1D” by Jeff Reynolds
“Proxima Centauri Blues” by Michael Cassutt
“Wasted Potential” by David Lee Zweifler
“The Disease Collector” by Tom Jolly
“Subtraction” by James Sallis
“Going Through a Phase” by Geoffrey A. Landis
“Hyppolyta Flyby” by Michael Capobianco
“Home for Christmas: by Ron Collins
“Andromeda” by Monica Joyce Evans
“Tool Consciousness” by Auston Habershaw
“The White Tiger” by Mark Pantoja
“The Far Dark” by Gregory Benford
“An Infestation of Blue” by Wendy N. Wagner
“The Science Education of King Cormac” by Stephen R. Loftus-Mercer
“Let’s Play” by Bruce McAllister
“Living on the Trap” by Michèle Laframboise
“Family Business” by Andrew Dana Hudson & Corey J. White
“While the Rat’s Away” by Kate MacLeod
“Flying CARPET” by Rajnar Vajra
Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
“Apollo in Retrograde” by Rosemary Claire Smith is an alternate history novelette covering the NASA moon missions following the problems with Apollo 13. A female ex-Soviet cosmonaut defected to the US, entered NASA’s astronaut program and successfully walked on the moon as part of an earlier Apollo mission. When the program faces delays following the 13th mission, she and other astronauts jostle to be named as crew on any subsequent flights. The premise sounds quite intriguing, but the story has flaws that make it less appealing than it might have been. The protagonist defected primarily as she doubted she would be chosen by the Soviets for a moon mission, given her gender. Yet the Soviets chose her and other women for cosmonaut training at Star City in Russia, and we are told they also put more women into space than the US, so her doubts about getting selected for a mission (and therefore for defecting) are far from convincing. She also left behind her husband, who she seemed to love. It seems she defected principally to fulfill the story. Moreover, there is more than a whiff of ‘Mary Sue’ about the character, and the feminist storyline is a little bluntly handled. I daresay there was considerable sexism at NASA in the 70s, but the story doesn’t seem to offer further insight into the issue. When the story becomes a rescue mission on the moon, it revisits very well-trod ground in SF.
“The Eiffel Tower of Trappist-1D” by Jeff Reynolds is better and more inventive than the preceding story. On a colony world that is no longer connected to key star-routes, prosperity is falling, and many are thinking of leaving for pastures new. A widower has the idea of creating tourist attractions to bring new visitors to the neglected planet. The core idea is simple, but it’s neatly constructed and offers several thoughts about the value of tapping into memories and the feeling of self-worth that comes from doing valuable work.
“Proxima Centauri Blues” by Michael Cassutt is an entertaining short story, though ultimately, it’s not completely satisfying. Following further decline in the Earth’s climate, a massive undertaking to build an interstellar spaceship takes place, with a view to sending colonists in cryogenic sleep to Proxima Centuari. However, the financial backer for the program suddenly pulled the plug on the program, leaving many who worked on it without employment or hope. One engineer seeks out his old boss in her rural home to exact revenge. The story is quite nicely set up, and Cassutt’s work is always engagingly written. However, the denouement seemed rather rushed and struggles to convince, which undermines the tale’s overall enjoyment.
“Wasted Potential” by David Lee Zweifler is a wry, satirical piece, which successfully makes a number of observations on current trends. A man enters his attributes and experience into a hugely powerful job-search AI program, which tells him exactly what he would be suitable for right now, anywhere in the galaxy. Trading comments on the disappointing results with his AI coffee machine, he reflects on his poor prospects compared with those of his more successful girlfriend. It’s a good short story and is recommended reading.
“The Disease Collector” by Tom Jolly is the best short story I’ve read in Analog in quite some time. A man is sent back in time to many different periods when there were plagues recorded—such as to ancient Rome—to try and find an earlier, more benign viral variant of the disease that is wiping out humanity in the future. If he can find the relevant strain, and bring it back to his time, it will help in vaccine development against the pandemic. The story is well-written, it’s captivating, and the ending is superb. This is one of those rare stories that turns on its final sentence, and while some readers may see it coming and the general idea may have been presented before, this doesn’t detract from its impact. Highly recommended—if you read only one story from Analog this year, make it this one.
“Subtraction” by James Sallis is a grim little tale of the torture and interrogation of an alien personal assistant, of the name of Butler. It’s smartly told, and immersive, but the underlying point is somewhat obscure and exactly what occurs is left to some extent to the imagination.
“Going Through a Phase” by Geoffrey A. Landis is very short flash fiction—comprising a jokey observation on an old SF trope. The point is well made, but whether it’s sufficient to be called a piece of fiction is debatable.
“Hyppolyta Flyby” by Michael Capobianco is quite a nice little tale. A probe sent on a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri suddenly went quiet as it reached its destination. We follow the AI entities and technical crew on Earth as they discuss what may have happened, as well as following the backup AI on the probe, as it too tries to understand why it has awoken to the loss of the primary AI. The story is quite short, but it conveys some interesting SF ideas and ends rather well.
“Home for Christmas” by Ron Collins is a poignant tale of a spacefaring man who returns home to scatter his wife’s ashes, meeting up with his surviving son who has aged much more than he has, owing to the time-dilation inherent in his travels at close to lightspeed. There have been many SF stories exploring the effects of time-dilation, but there’s certainly room in the genre for further tales like this one, which focus more on the human pathos than any technical issues.
“Andromeda” by Monica Joyce Evans is a rather odd little story, and it’s not especially satisfying. A young woman, Biddie, attending university on an alien planet is asked to show another human around campus. Biddie has opted for minor body modifications that better allow her to take part in ‘cycling’—a sport she plays with her teammate ‘hippos’. What the nature of the hippos is, whether her cycling is anything to do with cycling as we know it, and what the underlying point of the story is, is left unclear.
“Tool Consciousness” by Auston Habershaw tells a story from the perspective of an alien shapeshifter who has been contracted by another race to infiltrate the breeding grounds of a third alien race to reduce their numbers (by killing an exact number of eggs). When telling a tale of aliens—without any human connection—much rests on the appeal and interest one has in the alien races, though that is a little lacking here. An editorial note tells us that this is the fourth story featuring the same shapeshifter alien. Readers who are more familiar with the concepts and characters in the story may find it has more appeal than those new to the author’s universe.
“The White Tiger” by Mark Pantoja is an SF novelette with considerable promise, on which it perhaps doesn’t quite deliver. A band of various humans—with several modifications and unclear genders—have been sent across space to a giant transport ship, which has been drifting around a far-off star for decades following an alien attack. As a much larger alien invasion fleet is on its way, our protagonists wish to get the old transport powered up and returned to a populated star system so it can be used to evacuate civilians from the oncoming invasion. The nearly lifeless transport is quite well rendered in the tale, and an old robot they find onboard provides good imagery and is also a successful plot device. However, the tale has a few detractions. The different human types in the rescue band are not fleshed out and it’s unclear who has what role in the group. Indeed, the characters are rather thinly drawn, apart from indications that some are non-binary gender or have obscure mental abilities. Moreover, the key protagonist (“2ui”) communicates with the transport and its engines through ‘glyphs’. We are not told what these are, or how they work. The tale perhaps aims for a ‘cool’ immersive SF experience by taking this approach, dropping the reader into a foreign far-future world without explanation, in order to maximise its impact. Unfortunately, this has been done here at the expense of greater clarity. In addition, I’m not sure the timelines and descriptions of the transport vessel hold together. When the group comes across an iron statue of a white tiger, we are told it has been worn smooth over time by the wind. This would of course take many, many thousands of years. However, the vessel was attacked and nearly destroyed only eighty-seven years ago and the only wind seems to be air-conditioning. Either there are timeline inconsistencies, or they are too confusing in their presentation. When we get to the end, the conclusion seems to lack punch despite the stakes being so high.
“The Far Dark” by Gregory Benford is a curious and quite successful story that borrows from a scientific conference presentation by Geoffrey Landis on the use of stars as gravitational lenses to magnify distant space. In fact, the story reproduces several of Landis’ figures on gravitational lenses. While this may sound like it could lead to a pretty dry SF story, Benford uses the notion of lensing spacetime to weave an interesting tale about a deep space probe (located in the ‘far dark’), and its interactions with an unusual alien race. Despite the probe AI acting as the point of view in the tale (with a complete lack of any human characters) Benford manages to bring quite a bit of humanity to the tale. The setting and ruminations of the probe allow for considerable reflection by the author on the nature of humanity, its shortcomings and its achievements. It’s well written and enjoyable, as one might expect from this author, and is recommended for its depth and thoughtfulness. I was reminded, reading this, of Jeffrey Carver’s Chaos Chronicles, with which this tale shares a key SF idea. Fans of those books should enjoy Benford’s tale.
“An Infestation of Blue” by Wendy N. Wagner is a successful short story. The tale is told from the perspective of a dog who has been given a cranial implant that enables it to understand words and speech. The grieving widower of the dog’s owner hopes the implant will enable the dog to shed more light on the nature of his wife’s death. The author imagines and conveys the thought processes of an enhanced dog very well and this aspect of the piece is (perhaps surprisingly) quite convincing. Moreover, the tale is quite immersive, with good emotional depth. Several thoughtful observations offered by the author can be read as allegory, notably that technological ‘progress’ is not necessarily a boon if we lose our sense of self in the process.
“The Science Education of King Cormac” by Stephen R. Loftus-Mercer is a short, humorous tale, which looks at the application of the scientific method in a fantasy kingdom. It’s a reasonably entertaining diversion, and the jokey, ironic prose style suits the story, though it’s ultimately not one of the stronger pieces in this issue of the magazine.
“Let’s Play” by Bruce McAllister is flash fiction concerned with love between robots. It doesn’t really offer much novelty, or have much to say, but then flash fiction rarely does.
“Living on the Trap” by Michèle Laframboise is a short story that describes the difficult life for those who took a colonisation spaceship to a distant star system, only to find they had reached the system hundreds of years after more advanced colonists who left Earth later. Left with the least appealing moon on which to live, they have eked a precarious existence. It’s a reasonable premise for a story—though it’s been done before—but the tale lacks dramatic tension and is a little clunky in its construction and prose.
“Family Business” by Andrew Dana Hudson & Corey J. White is a good story, spanning seven generations of a family that found and develop a carbon-sequestration business to help cope with climate change. With each successive generation, the ideal of the initial enterprise is whittled away and mistakes are compounded, such that corporate greed and marketing pressures overtake the raison d’être of the original family business. SF stories like this are important, as they highlight both the critical need to take current climate issues seriously, but also warn of the importance (and difficulty) of maintaining focus on ‘greater-good’ goals over long periods, without being swayed by corporate pressures. The story is recommended.
“While the Rat’s Away” by Kate MacLeod is pretty entertaining. A group of devout church members are emigrating from Mars to a distant planet onboard a starship, when they are woken from cold-sleep mid-journey. This occurs as their cold-sleep requirements run out prematurely due to the extra burden placed on the system by two stowaways. The tale takes some interesting turns from hereon, and to say much more would spoil an enjoyable plot, but this well-written story is likely to entertain most readers.
“Flying CARPET” by Rajnar Vajra is a decent SF novella to conclude this issue of Analog. An IT guru works for local law enforcement, as does one of his two wives; she’s a cop, while he runs their IT networks. When several incidents of mass murder occur, they both join the case, aided from home by the genius second wife. The principal SF invention here is the police’s CARPET system—a complex computer algorithm that can link all the area’s security camera information to enable the user to virtually fly around the town to witness criminal events at any point in the past. It’s a neat idea. The difficulty in the murder case is that the murderer appears to have hidden their movements and actions, which ought to be impossible. The combination of the clever SF speculative elements, coupled with good characterisation and an engaging plot make this a good novella, and it’s recommended. As the editor notes, the author sadly died earlier in the year, but with this successful tale they left us one further enjoyable work of SF.
More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/