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Six Months of AnalogLate last year I decided I wanted to start reading a science fiction magazine again. I don't read a lot of short SF, and other than picking books randomly from the shelves I don't have a good source of exposure to new authors. Plus, I want to support science fiction markets like the magazines. The triumvirate of the largest SF magazines published today are: Asimov's Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. All are printed monthly. Years ago I'd read the last two. I was reluctant to start on F&SF again since I wanted to go a pure SF route (this despite the fact that an acquaintance of mine publishes fiction in F&SF). Having never tried Analog before, and thinking it might have a higher content of hard SF than Asimov's, I decided to go with that one. Six issues later, I'm not sure it was clearly the best choice, but it has been a pretty good one. Maybe half the stories in it are solidly worth reading. There are a few very weak stories, a few that aren't my cup of tea, and a few that feel like throwaways (like the Larry Niven "Draco's Tavern" stories). But there are solidly well-written, and/or thought-provoking stories in most issues, of varying length. And weighing in at about 140 pages an issue, they read fairly quickly (even for me). Having now read a full six issues, I thought I'd recap my favorite story from each issue, with a few comments on other stories thrown in.
 December, 2000: The standout story in this issue was "Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele" by Christopher L. Bennett. Before its colonization, the planet Cybele was seeded by humanity with "auxons", semi-intelligent machines which adapt themselves to new situations. As a result, in addition to paving the way for humanity's arrival, the auxons integrated into the local ecology, some of them developing a basic intelligence. It's a cleverly-portrayed riff on machines-as-organisms (which hearkens back at least to James P. Hogan's Code of the Life-Maker), and even though the essential conflict is not new (so we treat the auxons as machines or as species?) it's nonetheless a satisfying story. Special mention goes to the non-fiction article "Summer's Lease" by J.R. Dunn, about the fact that Earth undergoes warming and cooling periods which last only a few hundred years (a reasonably short period of time compared to recorded history). The article focuses on the warm period which occurred between 750 and 1250 a.d., when the Earth was about 2-to-4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today, which resulted in profound climatic changes which in turn deeply affected humanity (including a threefold increase in the European population during the so-called Dark Ages). An obvious and relevant issue this article briefly raises is that evidence of global warming we see now may indeed just be the Earth moving out of a relatively cold period in its climate. January, 2001: This was overall an above-average issue. The featured novella was also the best: "Relic of Chaos" by G. David Nordley. Hartigan O'Reilly is chief security officer of the vicinity of Saturn, and he's called in to investigate the theft of a valuable relic from Earth which has supposedly been brought into his region. The result is a near-future noir detective story which hits O'Reilly close to home and includes some clever twists and turns, such as a fight for control of the local computer net. Its "gosh wow" factor is relatively low, but it's an engaging yarn. February, 2001: "Or Die Trying", by Grey Rollins, is another detective yarn, this time with a different riff on the "reincarnated detective investigating his own death" idea I'd first been exposed to in John Varley's "The Phantom of Kansas" (in his collection The Persistence of Vision). This time the hero/victim is reincarnated as a computer program, and the resolution takes a very different tack from "Kansas". March, 2001: "Creative Destruction", by Edward M. Lerner, is yet another SF mystery, but this time with higher ideas content. The conceptual hook is that humanity has contacted other alien races, but only through lightspeed transmission; we can't actually visit them, but we can exchange information. Such exchanges can make trillions of dollars for corporations, but contact is handled only through global governments, which ban certain exchanges. Xenotechnomist Justin Matthews discovered that his best friend Alicia Briggs has been killed, and perhaps not by accident. His investigation of her death leads to an interesting plot to circumvent certain interstellar regulations that have been imposed. As a bonus, the vision of this near-future world is pretty well realized in details of the technology which is an everyday part of Matthews' life. April, 2001: Rob Chilson's "Talking Monkeys" is a fascinating story involving the colonization of a planet with a very high fraction of diamonds in its crust. Imagine the damage that dust could do if it were composed of diamonds rather than silicon, and were blown around by the wind. The lead characters all have "pocket brains" to help them in their thinking and memory, the nature of life on the planet is of a curious sort, and the lead character must deal with both these scientific issues and the introduction of a disruptive individual into the nascent colony. Unfortunately the story has trouble figuring out how to integrate these issues, and leaves several of them frustratingly unresolved. Moreover, it's left unclear whether the characters in the story are humans or are actually "talking monkeys". I never did figure it out. An enjoyable read, but needed more to be satisfying. May, 2001: Edward M. Lerner returns this month with "Hostile Takeover", a sort-of sequel to March's "Creative Destruction" (and apparently an earlier chapter in this "InterstellarNet" universe appeared in the November, 2000 issue). This story involves humanity adopting a computer technology which obsoletes printed circuitry, but which humanity doesn't fully understand. Sound like a bad idea? Soon enough, the in-system AI representing the aliens who developed the technology threatens Earth with shutting it all down if they don't pay exorbitant fees to keep using it. It's a clever exercise in negotiation and truth verification. I think I'll have to hunt down some more of Lerner's work. The feature piece in the May issue, by the way, is the first installment of Ben Bova's new novel, The Precipice. It's far from a solid piece of work: It features frequent comments - by both the characters and the narrator - on the physical attributes and attractiveness of the female characters, and appears to be both yet another "Humanity pushes the Earth's environment too far and things break down" story and yet another "How can we mine the asteroid belt?" story. Arguably the weakest piece in any of these six issues. And there are three more installments to go! Aigh!
I think I've gotten enough out of these magazines to keep with them. I don't know if I have the time or energy to add another magazine, though if I do it will probably be the quarterly Absolute Magnitude. Small press magazines need support too, after all!
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