Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Vol. 92, No. 2, October 1973

Astounding/Analog

by Ben Bova (Editor), Carl Sagan (Contributor), G. Harry Stine (Contributor)

Vol XCII, No 2.

Contents:
5 • Experiments in Utopias • [Editorial (Analog)] • essay by Carl Sagan
10 • A Program for Star Flight • [Science Fact (Analog)] • essay by G. Harry Stine
28 • Whalekiller Grey • novelette by William E. Cochrane
53 • The Analytical Laboratory: July, 1973 (Analog, October 1973) • [The Analytical Laboratory] • essay by uncredited
54 • Notes from Magdalen More • short story by Susanna Jacobson [as by L*z*r*s L*ng]
56 • An Earnest of Intent • short story by Alfred D'Attore
73 • Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand • [Snake] • novelette by Vonda N. McIntyre
92 • Antalogia • short story by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond
94 • The Hand is Quicker • short story by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.
110 • The Far Call (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Gordon R. Dickson
160 • The Reference Library (Analog, October 1973) • [The Reference Library] • essay by P. Schuyler Miller
167 • Brass Tacks (Analog, October 1973) • [Brass Tacks] • essay by uncredited
167 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • [Letters: Poul Anderson] • essay by Poul Anderson
168 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Harry Harrison
169 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Joseph F. Goodavage
170 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Bruce Robbins
170 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Alexander D. Wallace [as by Alexander Doniphan Wallace]
175 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Scratch Bacharach [as by William 'Scratch' Bacharach]
176 •  Letter (Analog, October 1973) • essay by Marc Russell
177 • In Times to Come (Analog, October 1973) • [In Times to Come (Analog)] • essay by uncredited.

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Genres: Science Fiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1973

About the author

Ben Bova was born on November 8, 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1953, while attending Temple University, he married Rosa Cucinotta, they had a son and a daughter. He would later divorce Rosa in 1974. In that same year he married Barbara Berson Rose.

Bova was an avid fencer and organized Avco Everett's fencing club. He was an environmentalist, but rejected Luddism.

Bova was a technical writer for Project Vanguard and later for Avco Everett in the 1960s when they did research in lasers and fluid dynamics. It was there that he met Arthur R. Kantrowitz later of the Foresight Institute.

In 1971 he became editor of Analog Science Fiction after John W. Campbell's death. After leaving Analog, he went on to edit Omni during 1978-1982.

In 1974 he wrote the screenplay for an episode of the children's science fiction television series Land of the Lost entitled "The Search".

Bova was the science advisor for the failed television series The Starlost, leaving in disgust after the airing of the first episode. His novel The Starcrossed was loosely based on his experiences and featured a thinly veiled characterization of his friend and colleague Harlan Ellison. He dedicated the novel to "Cordwainer Bird", the pen name Harlan Ellison uses when he does not want to be associated with a television or film project.

Bova was the President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past President of Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

Bova went back to school in the 1980s, earning an M.A. in communications in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1996.

Bova has drawn on these meetings and experiences to create fact and fiction writings rich with references to spaceflight, lasers, artificial hearts, nanotechnology, environmentalism, fencing and martial arts, photography and artists.

Bova was the author of over a hundred and fifteen books, non-fiction as well as science fiction. In 2000, he was the Author Guest of Honor at the 58th World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 2000).

Hollywood has started to take an interest in Bova's works once again, in addition to his wealth of knowledge about science and what the future may look like. In 2007, he was hired as a consultant by both Stuber/Parent Productions to provide insight into what the world is to look like in the near future for their upcoming film "Repossession Mambo" (released as "Repo Men") starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker and by Silver Pictures in which he provided consulting services on the feature adaptation of Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon".

http://us.macmillan.com/author/benbova

Reviews

[David H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the forty-first magazine issue of my personal project to read the Analogs that my dad gave me before he passed away (I collect all my reviews for it here). My parents are living in Tennessee (school or work). The movie The Way We Were came out this month, and while I haven’t seen it, it’s got Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford who I know my parents liked. This is also a very busy month—you have the US vice president resigning (good-bye Spiro Agnew!), and the infamous Saturday Night Massacre occurs, which accelerates the Watergate scandal even more and Congress now starts wondering if they should impeach Nixon (they should). And internationally, you have the Yom Kippur War as Egypt and Syria attack Israel, the start of the oil crisis (and oh yeah, there’s a recession coming). In Analog-specific news, however, Kay Tarrant, the longtime assistant editor who worked under John W. Campell, Jr. retires, to be replaced by Diana King.

The October 1973 issue has a cover from Rick Sternbach illustrating Stine’s “A Program for Star Flight.” It's a great piece of art, especially when you turn the magazine 90 degrees to the right (as recommended by Bova in the issue preview last month). It's illustrating two Enzmann starships (as described in Stine's article).

Carl Sagan's guest editorial “Experiments in Utopias" is an excerpt from his book The Cosmic Connection, discussing the lifespan of alien & human civilizations, with a focus on allowing "social mutations" on Earth to allow for the best suited future. An afterword by editor Ben Bova suggests that this could be a selling point for humans colonizing other worlds.

The Science Fact article “A Program for Star Flight" by G. Harry Stine focuses on coming up with a long-term space program for space exploration and settlement. It's pretty decent for an initial plan, though I kept noticing points that he just sort of waved his hands at some of the engineering difficulties. There's a lot of space optimism in Analog, that's for sure!

William E. Cochrane's "Whalekiller Grey" is vaguely interesting if you are interested in a future where instead of bullfighting, you have whalekilling instead. However, I don't really think either of them is all that ethical, even discounting the fact that sperm whales are endangered. I was amused by the Moby-Dick stylings of the "whalekilling" rituals, though.

"Notes from Magdalen More" by L*z*r*s L*ng (actually Susanna Jacobson) is a short parody of Heinlein's "Notebooks of Lazarus Long," with silly aphorisms. I'm assuming this was a lot funnier to Bova and Analog readers back in 1973 than it was for me now.

Alfred D'Attore's "An Earnest of Intent" is his debut story and it's a bit of nuclear brinkmanship between the US and China, and the US decides to nuke them after all. However, the pilot ends up having his own opinion, so in a way this felt like a precursor of Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" (1984), though Robinson's is far superior.

"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" by Vonda N. McIntyre is the best story in this issue by far. It features Snake, a healer of some kind, who uses three special snakes (named Grass, Sand, and Mist) to heal her patients. Here, she's assisting a young boy with a tumor, though misunderstandings and fear from the community she's in lead to a tragic occurrence. I really liked this one! In 1978, McIntyre uses this as the first chapter of Dreamsnake. The story itself earned her a Nebula win and a Hugo nomination (losing the latter to Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird").

Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond's "Antalogia" isn't properly science fiction at all, as it's just the story of a young boy looking at an anthill while on the beach, described in the most alien way. It's two pages long, so like the "Magdalen More" bit above, I assume it's a page-filler for the issue.

"The Hand is Quicker" by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. is his debut story, and it features a man with telekinetic powers getting swept up in matters beyond his control to tragic consequences. I liked the character voice a lot, so I'll be curious what else he does for Analog (we'll see 8 more stories here before I'm done). As a side note, I just found out that his father just finished serving as the Director of the Peace Corps (1971-72).

Gordon R. Dickson's "The Far Call (Part 3 of 3)" concludes the serial novel, and this was simply awful to me. I felt like I could never grasp any of the characters, and the plotting appeared to want to be "realistic," but I was just so bored by it all. Apparently it's been described by one person as "the finest realistic novel about the space program yet written" and arguably his best work. I highly doubt that. Dickson was apparently unhappy with the Analog version of his story and rewrote it at least three times before the standalone book version in 1978, though judging from other reviews, I suspect he didn't make it any better in the end.

"The Reference Library: Part-Time Scholars" by P. Schuyler Miller begins with a discussion about "part-time scholars," how Miller refers to amateur scholars who generate a lot of critical work. He also reviews two "best of the year" anthologies (one by Harrison and Aldiss, and the other by Wollheim) as well as Damon Knight's Orbit 12 anthology and a Keith Laumer novel.

"Brass Tacks" is the letters column, and we finally got something juicy for the first time in a while: dueling letters between Poul Anderson and Harry Harrison over the new John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel! Anderson was offended by how much Campbell would have hated the winning novel, Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, while Harrison defended the award's scope as "best SF novel," not "best SF novel that Campbell would've liked." The other letters were mostly focusing on past editorials and science articles, but we actually got some discussion about the fiction for once, mostly reader reactions to George R. R. Martin's "With Morning Comes Mistfall" from the May issue.

From a future issue: "The Analytical Laboratory" is a feature where Analog readers rank each issue’s stories, published several months after, with the top two winners getting pay bonuses. Here are the results, posted in the January 1974 issue:
2.05: "The Far Call (Part 3 of 3)," Gordon R. Dickson
3.09: "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," Vonda N. McIntyre
3.48: "Whalekiller Grey," William E. Cochrane
3.80: "An Earnest of Intent," Alfred D'Attore
4.46: "The Hand is Quicker," Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.
5.10: "Antalogia," Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond
5.54: "Notes from Magdalen More," L*z*r*s L*ng

It continues to be a travesty that Dickson's serial is ranked so highly, but at least the rest of the stories are roughly how I would have ranked them, though I'd have pushed the O'Donnell story up a couple slots. It turns out readers didn't like that "Magdalen More" thing after all.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a future where whales are hunted like in a bullfight (man-on-whale to the death) “Whalekiller Grey” is a celebrated champion. His wife however, has been kidnapped by a betting syndicate hoping he will die in his next bout but even that threat can’t break his indomitable spirit. Even for 1973 I feel that William E. Cochrane’s brutal tale may have been insensitive. An act of piracy by a Chinese warship against an American ship in international waters brings the two close to war. To show “An Earnest Of Intent” hawkish U.S. factions decide on a nuclear attack. A less deadly message is sent however, in Alfred D’Attore’s tale. Snake is a shaman who uses snakes to both alleviate pain and cure illness, but when a young boy dying of a tumour is being treated, the fear and ignorance of the locals put them all at risk. “Of Mist, And Grass, And Sand” by Vonda N. McIntyre is memorable. When a man with telekinetic abilities is barred from Vegas for manipulating dice a fellow traveller comes up with a new plan for making money. Unfortunately ripping off gangsters is always fraught with peril in “The Hand Is Quicker” by Kevin O’Donnell Jr., and Gordon R. Dickson concludes “The Far Call” with part of the Phoenix mission continuing to Mars. I have reviewed the extended novel elsewhere.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

B (very good):

Notes from Magdalen More by Susanna Jacobson
The Hand is Quicker by Kevin O'Donnell Jr
The Far Call (pt 3 of 3) by Gordon R. Dickson

C (average):

Whalekiller Grey by William E. Cochrane
An Earnest of Intent by Alfred D'Attore
Antalogia by Walt & Leigh Raymond

D (poor):

Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand by Vonda N. McIntyre