Summary:
These are the top five short stories in the Analog Readers’ Awards (the Analog Analytical Laboratory) for 2021. With the exception of Heart of Stone, Tom Jolly’s original and enjoyable piece about sentient asteroids, they are a decidedly lacklustre bunch.
[Stories] [Subscriptions]

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Editor, Trevor Quachri

Heart of Stone • short story by Tom Jolly ∗∗∗+
The Trashpusher of Planet 4 • short story by Brenda Kalt ∗∗
The Last Science Fiction Story • short story by Adam-Troy Castro ∗
My Hypothetical Friend • short story by Harry Turtledove ∗
Room to Live • short story by Marie Vibbert ∗

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Winner of this year’s short stories is Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly (Analog, May-June 2021), which opens with what turns out to be a group of sentient asteroids (who call themselves “Stones”) seeing a flash of light in the rock field they inhabit. After discussing the matter between themselves (they think a younger member of their species may have mixed a hazardous “hotfire” that caused it to explode), one of their number, Five Rings, goes to investigate. During this, something wet hits it:

I sent harvesters out for the fluids and found that much of the internal material was organic. It was surprisingly warm, warmer than our own internal fluids. There was both water and organics, mixed together, much like our own minds and cells. Some of the outer covering was organic, too, but didn’t taste the same; it looked like it had been made, like some object we might excrete on our own stony surface. It was flexible. Had this Thing been alive? Regardless, the resources were too valuable to waste. As we spent water to propel ourselves on occasion, we needed to replenish it when we could, and the Thing was an excellent resource. I wondered if there were more Things available. It would save me from having to chase after every wayward comet that fell our way, putting a rock into its path and hoping some of the scattered ice shards would come my way, so that I might gather and store them for the future.
I broadcast my findings to the others, and the ones with close vectors propelled themselves in my direction, keeping a sharp eye out for more Things.  p. 28

After this the narrator changes to Heart of Stone, who tells the rest of them that he has detected another Thing, and is setting off to intercept it (although some of the others advise against this course of action). When he approaches the Thing (spoiler) it waves at him, and it becomes apparent (to those readers who didn’t suspect previously) that the Things are human astronauts. This second astronaut tries to communicate with Heart of Stone before trying to make it to a wrecked spaceship nearby:

I reabsorbed some of the warmgas, knowing that I wouldn’t need to escape an attack from the Thing, and ignited the rest, following the Thing to its rendezvous with the new bit of scrap.
Would this be another living thing?
No Sense Of Humor was nearby, and said to me, “That Thing is going to miss its target. If you wish to help it, you must get in front of it.”
“I have little fuel to spare,” I said. This was a common lie, since few Stones would allow themselves to get so low that they could not maneuver. That would mean a slow death, perhaps even consuming the core’s water to chase after more volatiles. It was a subtle request for help, whether actually needed or not.
“I can toss some ice to you when I am nearer. If you garner some benefit here, I expect some sharing,” said No Sense Of Humor.
It was a good response. I sparked some more warmgas and accelerated beyond the Thing’s position as it flew toward the scrap, and used simple steam to position myself in front of it. More volatiles than I would normally use in two cycles, but it seemed so important. I really was hurting for propellants. It was so rare that we ever needed to move anywhere quickly, and so expensive.
We flew past the debris together, the Thing coming down on my Stone, and then I accelerated slowly back toward the debris. The Thing seemed content to ride on my surface, though it kept pointing the shiny nob of its outer surface at me. I did not know what that might mean, but the Thing did not seem frightened.  p. 29

The astronaut eventually gets to the damaged ship—but only after fighting off alien scavengers that attack it and Heart of Stone (we learn that Stones are created by groups of scavengers occupying empty asteroids and becoming a single sentient creature). When the astronaut is finished examining the wrecked ship, he or she goes and lands on No Sense of Humour, who has just arrived at the scene. Subsequently, there are further attempts at communication during which the human gives No Sense of Humour a torch. Then the human dies—either from their injuries or damage to its suit (the scavengers caused a couple of leaks during the attack).
The penultimate chapter sees the Stones detect an even bigger ship (it appears the one that exploded was a scoutship) and, after another debate, they decide to contact it. Finally, the last chapter is related by Diamond Eye 16 cycles after this First Contact, and describes the events that have occurred subsequently (as well as giving us an insight into the novel formation of this solar system).
This is an original, inventive, and enjoyable piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,600 words. Story link.

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Runner up in the short story section is The Trashpusher of Planet 4 by Brenda Kalt (Analog, March-April 2021), which has an opening that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the story that will follow:

In the center of the ship, near the AI, a dozen candidates for methane drainer scurried out of the examination room.
“Watch it, trash!” a young chemical engineer snapped as he bumped another student.
“I’m sorry.” Awi Trashpusher Nonumber had a blind spot behind him. Though an adult, only four of the six eyes on his pale, skinny, cylindrical body had developed. The engineer castes had twelve eyes in two rings around their upper tips.
Awi had taken the exam in his usual state of hunger, and his tip now curled forward. Wrapping one tentacle around a waterpipe, he enfolded the pipe greedily. By the time he was temporarily full of water and upright again, the corridor was almost empty.
“Awi! How’d it go?” Roob Mechanical Engineer 3886, barely old enough to be a candidate, had scandalized his classmates by befriending Awi. Roob’s body was the clear yellow of the engineer castes, with more intense color along his feeding strip.  pp. 32-33

I would have probably stopped reading there if I was an editor as, at that point, I would know that (a) the story has an amateurish and juvenile tone, (b) it sounds clichéd and (c) that the tale would show Awi overcoming the disadvantages of his caste after some difficulties.
I wasn’t far wrong. After this encounter Awi goes home and broods about his lot until the ship AI (it materialises that he is on board an alien generation ship) gives him a job cleaning the scout ship Beautiful Light. The AI then tells Awi to take Beautiful Light on a reconnaissance mission. Awi takes the ship out—experiencing zero gee for the first time and learning how to use centripetal force to feed himself from the pipe—before orbiting a nearby planet that looks habitable. Then, when Awi returns, he meets Roob disembarking from another ship and they go to see the AI together. The AI subsequently instructs Awi to lead Roob’s ship, Firm Resolve, to the planet so they can dump nitrogen there to prove that the planet is terraformable.
After their experiment proves successful, the terraforming begins—although not without some pushback from the higher castes—and, during this episode, a new worldformer caste is created. Roob is given a place in it, but Awi is refused.
The story finishes (spoiler) with the AI more or less forcing the aliens to settle on the partially terraformed planet (it wants to go off and explore), and Awi taking his scoutship to investigate the “moonlets” that keep coming from planet 3 (Earth, obviously, so the planet they are terraforming is Mars).
I suppose that this is a competently enough told YA story where, ultimately, Awi doesn’t change the system but does escape it. I have to wonder, though, what it is doing in Analog—I wouldn’t say that about all kinds of YA stories, but this type of story seems far too unsophisticated for a modern audience.
∗∗ (Average). 5,700 words. Story link.

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In third place is The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro (Analog, January-February 2021), and it is a short-short that initially sets up the connection between stories and the outward urge:

At one point, someone wondered, what’s beyond the next hill?
No one had been there. No one had worked up the nerve to go there.
So, someone asked, “What if we went?”
A story got told.
And as time went on, and people went beyond that hill, it happened again.
“What is it like on the other side of the river?”
A story got told.
“What is it like past those distant mountains?”
A story got told.  p. 42

After a bit more of this (and some description of the human race spreading through the Galaxy) I would have expected the last line to echo the connection above, but instead the piece finishes with the question (spoiler):

“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good . . . but what’s out there?” p. 43

This appears to be a non-sequitur as that question illustrates human curiosity, which may be related but isn’t the same thing.
∗ (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link.

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In fourth place is My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021), which opens with Dave Markarian, CEO of Interstellar Master Traders, arriving at work to anxiously prepare for a visit by a representative of the alien Brot. During the three page wodge of exposition that follows, we learn that the Brot have the economic (and military) whip hand over humanity, and use us as an economic subject race (I guess you could view this as an extreme version of China’s relationship with many developing countries).
The middle act of the story sees Old Salty (the name given to the Brot representative by Dave) arrive in a gossamer bubble that is beyond human science or comprehension. When Dave welcomes Old Salty, the alien almost immediately tells him that this will be his last visit as he is returning to his home planet. Then they set off on a tour of the premises so Old Salty can inspect the devices that are being built there (the devices have “Made on Earth” on the base, and the workers manufacturing them have no idea of what they are, or how they work). During the visit Dave walks on eggshells—even though he is friendly with the alien, or as friendly as you can be with aliens who have, in the past, levelled a city for unfathomable reasons.
Before Old Salty leaves Dave invites the alien to have a farewell drink with him (“the Brot could handle methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol”) and, during this get together, Dave presents Old Salty with a going-away present, a set of plastic “California Raisins” toys that were originally given away with fast food meals in the 1980s:

“I see,” Old Salty said, which gave not the slightest clue about what he/she/it thought.
He/she/it picked up one of the Raisins: Beebop, the drummer. His/her/its eyestalks swung toward Beebop for a close inspection, and tentacles felt of the small plastic figure. “On the bottom of one foot I the inscription ‘Made in China’ find.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Dave nodded. “I know that, these days, China’s right up with the United States or maybe even ahead of us. That wasn’t true then, though. China was just starting to turn into a big industrial power. Peasants would come off the farms and move to the big cities to work in factories.”
“We this phenomenon on other worlds also have observed,” the Brot said.
Dave Markarian nodded again. “Yeah, I figured you would have. Some of those peasants would have made their livings painting eyes or gloves or shoes or whatever on the California Raisins, over and over again. Same with the detailwork on all of these other little plastic toys. They wouldn’t have known why the figures were supposed to look the way they did. They wouldn’t have seen the advertising campaigns or games or films the toys were based on—they lived in a faraway country that used a different language. I sometimes wonder what they thought while they painted every toy the same way while they went through their shifts day after day.”  p. 38

After more small talk, Yoda—sorry, Old Salty—leaves in his gossamer bubble.
The final act of the story (spoiler) sees Old Salty back on his home planet, and we see him visit his sister and her children. Old Salty gives each of the children one of the devices made by Dave’s company, and we learn that they are cheap junk toys for kids. Old Salty reflects that the master/peasant relationship between the Brot and humanity is similar to the one between American consumers and Chinese workers in the 1980s. The alien hopes that humanity will develop spaceflight and find races that can work for them, but doubts that will be the case.
This is a plodding, expository, and clunky story with a very old-fashioned feel and a dispiriting vision of interstellar commerce. I also note that the repeated “he/she/its” pronouns used for the alien are awkward and irritating—what is wrong with “they” and “its”?
∗ (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

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In fifth place is Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021), which has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
∗ (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

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With the exception of the Tom Jolly story, this is a poor group of finalists. I sincerely hope they do not reflect the quality of short stories in the magazine during 2021.  ●

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Summary:
These are the top three novellas¹ in the 2020 Analog Magazine Readers’ Awards. There isn’t anything outstanding here, but the Adam-Troy Castro and Neal Asher novellas, Draiken Dies, and Moral Biology are solid reads or better.
[Stories]

_____________________

Editor, Trevor Quachri

Draiken Dies • novella by Adam-Troy Castro ∗∗∗+
Flyboys • novella by Stanley Schmidt ∗
Moral Biology • novella by Neal Asher ∗∗∗

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Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, September-October 2020)² is the sixth of his ‘John Draiken’ stories but one which features another character, Delia Stang, a physically imposing woman with golden skin. She starts the story as a prisoner undergoing interrogation, partially paralysed by a device attached to her neck:

 The voice of her interrogator could be old or young; male, female, or any of the other associated genders; human, or some representative of several possible alien races. The golden woman has her suspicions. All she can determine of its character is a total lack of empathy.
“Your name is Delia Stang.”
“Yes.”
“Is that your actual name or just some alias you’re using?”
“Yes.”
“I would advise you not to play games with me.”
“I’m not playing games. It’s both my name and my alias. These are two different things.”
“Explain the distinction as you see it.”
“I was not born Delia Stang. It is the name all my associates know, the name I use when I think of myself. I could give you the one my parents gave me, but you are not interrogating a child with no choice over who she chooses to be. You are interrogating a grown woman who can be anyone she wants to be. I have used other aliases, but this is the only name I recognize.”
“If it suits me, I will call you anything I like and train you to accept it.”
“That would be exerting your techniques pretty early in the conversation, I think. I’m being cooperative enough. “
“Very well. Your name is Delia Stang. “
“Glad we have that settled.”
“Restrain from sarcasm.”
“That wasn’t sarcasm.”  p. 173

This intermittently amusing cat-and-mouse conversation makes up about half the story; the other half is concerned with what Stang was doing in Hallestagh (a dreary town of algae-eaters on the backwater planet of Garelagh) before she was taken prisoner. This latter thread begins with her beating up and seriously injuring a local strongman because of what he did to a young woman called Naline, who Stang then takes under her wing.
The rest of this part of the story oscillates between Stang interacting with Naline (mostly in a rented room above a bar where Stang has her sleep pod) and Stang tramping about the desolate local area (during which she sees an anomalous one hundred metre square indent in the landscape).
Meanwhile the interrogation thread dribbles out a steady stream of backstory, including the revelation that Stang killed Draiken because he asked her too (Stang says that Draiken had grown weary of hiding from the unnamed organisation of which the interrogator is part). Later, Stang is also asked about another man called Jathyx, who Draiken and she earlier freed from a space station.
These two threads merge at the end of the story (spoiler) when Stang is approached by an old man who tells her that she is being “talked about” in the wider population. We learn at the end of the story that this is Draiken in disguise, and he is passing on a warning that the shadowy organisation is about to attack her room and take her prisoner. The attack scene, with the exploding gel mattress that immobilises many of the attackers, is excitingly done, even though Stang is eventually captured.
The climax of the story (which occurs after Stang is once more visited in her cell by the disguised Draiken) sees Stang tell her interrogator that she is a decoy, that there is an attack vessel in orbit commanded by Jathyx’s mother, and that Draiken is alive—after he “died” a medical team immediately revived him (this was all done to give Stang a cover story that would stand up against a lie-detector).
At the very end of the piece, after the organisation’s hideout has been taken, Stang tries to get Draiken to return with her to Greeve (they have romantic history), a tropical planet where Draiken used to live—but he elects to continue pursuing the shadowy group that has been hunting him.
This is a pretty well done piece of SF adventure, and one that stands alone quite well considering that it wraps up a plot arc that has spread, presumably, over the previous five stories. That said, I’m not sure that this is really an SF story—more like a story with lots of SF furniture, and you could probably transplant the whole thing into a contemporary Mission Impossible movie. Still, not bad.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 20,200 words.

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Flyboys by Stanley Schimidt (Analog, July-August 2020) is a sequel to his novel Night Ride and Sunrise (Analog, July-August to November 2015), and opens with an alien called “Bob” watching his son Junior make his first flight from his mother’s home to an all-male settlement called Surfcrag. During the pair’s transit there, and also from later on in the story, we learn that (a) the flying adult males live separately from the females on this planet, (b) they are nocturnal and eat flying insects, and (c) that humans have settled on other parts of their continent. We also find out about a recent conflict between the humans and the aliens which ended with an agreement to peacefully co-exist (as the humans are stranded on the planet and cannot leave).
The day after Junior has been welcomed to the lodge at Surfcrag, Bob is approached by another male called Highguard, who tries to recruit him to a movement that will drive the humans off their land (during this we learn that there is yet another, malevolent, group of humans on a different part of the planet). Bob tells Highguard he will have nothing to do with his plans.
Shortly after this conversation Junior disappears, and the story then alternates between his point of view and Bob’s. Junior is taken by two males to another place called High and Mighty, where Highguard makes another recruiting effort. Junior isn’t having any of it though, and escapes, giving his pursuers the slip before he goes to hide with his mother in Surfcrag:

He found Sylvie in her shop, absorbed in tinkering with a new variation of her steam engine.
He rushed right in after a hasty “Here I am” from the hall. He closed the door behind him as he said, “Hi, Mom.”
She looked up with a quick kaleidoscope of emotions on her face: surprise, confusion, delight, and deep concern. “Junior?” she said, in Shetalk, since that was what she could speak.
“What are you doing here? You just left. What brings you back so soon?” She looked him up and down, and the concern became dominant. “What happened to you?” She hop-slithered down off her workbench and skittered over on her four short legs to paw and sniff at him.
“I’m all right,” he said reassuringly, in He-talk (since that was what he could speak). “But something’s come up. Maybe a danger for all of us. I need to talk to you.” He gestured toward her bench. “Why don’t you climb back up there and make yourself comfortable?” As she did, he hopped onto one of the room’s two male-perches so they could talk on each other’s eye level.
“Okay, first,” he said, “you want to know what happened to me because I look like I’ve been through some ordeal. It’s not quite that bad, but I’ve been flying longer, harder, and faster than I should without a break. Two guys were chasing me. Bad guys, in my opinion, and I think you’ll agree.”  p. 64

The passage above illustrates some of the story’s problems. First, it reads like clunky YA; second, aliens speaking and acting like a 1950’s American suburban family is a real suspension-of-disbelief killer (the physical differences, sex-separation, nocturnal flying, and insect eating all feel pretty much tacked on); third, it has pages of talking heads who describe things that have already happened in the story.
The rest of the this piece doesn’t improve (spoiler): Junior goes to see his girl, Coppersmith; Bob contacts the humans to inform them of the threat from Highguard, and also to ask for help in locating his son; Bob and a human called Luke find Junior after a helicopter search; the matter goes to the alien council—who then catch and try the conspirators. The story ends with clash-of-culture speeches from Highguard and Junior (who is renamed Peacesaver).
There is too much dialogue in this, and too much running around; it’s also derivative, and longer than it needs to be. All in all it resembles a dull story from a 1960’s issue of the magazine.
∗ (Mediocre). 21,000 words.

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Moral Biology by Neal Asher (Analog, May-June 2020) begins by introducing one of the story’s main characters in a passage that shows his enhanced senses, as well as the information density of the prose:

As Perrault entered the room he quickly closed the anosmic receptors running in lines across his face like tribal markings, retaining the use only of those within his nose. The air was laden with pheromones, and he really had no need for further input on Gleeson’s readiness for sex with Arbeck. Just walking through the door had been enough. Gleeson sat with her rump against her desk while Arbeck, his camo shirt hanging open to reveal the tight musculature of his chest, sat in one of the chairs facing her, his legs akimbo. Their conversation ceased and she looked up at Perrault, quickly snatching her hand away from fondling with her hair, doubtless aware of everything he could read. He glanced at them, taking in their dynamic and almost breaking into laughter at Arbeck’s pose, then focused on other aspects of the room as he headed for the other chair. He blinked through the spectrum, seeing the so recognizable heat patterns on Gleeson’s skin, listened in on the EMR chatter of the ship, then shut it out as irrelevant, measured shapes in conjunction throughout the space that hinted at shadow languages and esoteric meaning, and then shut that down too.
“Do we have further data?” he asked mildly.  p. 38

It soon becomes apparent from the conversation that follows that the three of them, Perrault, Arbeck (the science lead on their expedition), and Gleeson (a “Golem android”), are above an alien planet that has orbital defences pointing downwards rather than out into space—an attempt, they believe, to quarantine the planet. After they finish discussing their situation they prepare, alongside their accompanying troops, to go down to the planet. During this we further learn that (a) they will be encased in gel pods as they descend (in case they are attacked by the orbital defences), (b) that they are going to investigate a huge life-form that has been detected in the tunnels below, and (c) Perrault intends using a device called a “shroud” on the planet’s surface, a symbiotic biotech device that looks like a truncated stingray and with which he has a strange emotional and psychological bond.
As they descend, their craft is indeed attacked by the defence system but, as they expect, it does not entirely destroy them, and the pods are ejected. They all land safely but are widely scattered. When Perrault is subsequently contacted by Arbeck, the security team leader, he is told he will be recovered in several hours and to remain where he is. Perrault has other ideas:

Obviously Arbeck, despite being a Golem, didn’t have much idea of Perrault’s capabilities. He undid his straps, reached forward, and hauled up the shroud case. It had been his intention to put the thing on at a later juncture after Gleeson had studied some of the tunnels, but now was as good a time as any.
[. . .]
Every time he used the thing it became more difficult to take it off, and he became more eager to put it on the next time. It increased the functionality of his enhanced senses in ways that were addictive which, in itself, wasn’t a problem.
The problem was that the increased functionality in this respect made him a less able member of normal Polity society. It made him strange.
He opened his envirosuit, stripped it off his arms and upper body and folded it down to his waist, then, raising his backside, pushed it further down to his thighs, partially detaching the rectal catheter. He then opened the case, reached inside, and pressed his hand down on the fishy skin, chemically accepting its willingness to detach from its support gear. It rose up out of its packing, flexing its wing limbs, shivered when he took hold of the nodular mass at its head end. He lifted it up with both hands, leaned forward, and swung its heavy wet weight round onto his back. The tail inserted in the crevice of his buttocks and found the side port of the catheter—it would excrete its waste there. It clung to his back, shifting round into the correct position. He felt the junction holes open down his sides and in his spine and the cold insertion of its connectors. Taking off the pod goggles, he pulled open the nodular protrusion, then slipped it over his head where it formed an organic mask, probing to his anosmic and EMR receptors, and additional nerve clusters that linked to his brain. The whole thing began to settle.
He could feel the cold growth of the nanofibers in his spine and in his skull, and then came connection and his limited vista inside the pod opened out into a world. He felt complete. p. 43

Later, after Perrault has hacked the pod software and released himself, a group of alien spike gibbon aliens hunt him but, with the enhanced abilities the shroud confers, he is able to sense a range of electromagnetic, auditory, and chemical input—by the time Arbeck arrives, Perrault has learned the gibbon’s ultrasonic language and the shroud is manufacturing pheromones to control them.
The rest of the story sees the Arbeck and his security team collect Gleeson and the others, and their field work begins. Soon afterwards, though, they are attacked by spider-like creatures. After killing a number of them, Mobius Clean, the shadowy AI in the background of the story, tells Arbeck that it wants one of the spider creatures dissected to look for biotech (and also mentions that the creature in the tunnel isn’t native to the planet but a colonist).
Further complications ensue (spoiler): Gleeson finds the hard storage she was looking for on the bodies and attempts to decipher it with her “aug” (augmentation device), but it overwhelms her and gives her convulsions. Simultaneous with this Perrault senses a chaotic radio pulse, a burst of language that he initially struggles to process, but which eventually makes him think that the creature in the tunnels has a strong sense of morality (a feeling reinforced by the fact that, although they were attacked on their descent, they were not killed). Then there is a final onslaught by pig-like aliens, after which Perrault finally manages to speak to the creature below. It tells them it does not want them to approach it but, after a couple more attempts to dissuade Perrault’s team fail, it eventually gives up.
The final section reveals that the creature’s species originally used star-faring creatures to spread its seed throughout the universe, but that they stopped doing so for moral reasons. Hence their attempts to stop anyone approaching them, and subjecting them to the temptation to do so.
This story gets off to an engaging start, and there are many enjoyable sections along the way (mostly involving Perrault, the superman/super symbiote), but there is far too much description of matters that do not need a lot of detail. This means that the story is longer than it should be, and sometimes feels like it has the same pace throughout—regardless of what is happening. I’d add that this is more of a problem at the end of the story than the start as, in that first part, you are being treated to the highlights of the detailed universe created in a number of Asher’s novels (Perrault and his shroud, Arbeck the ex-war drone AI in a humanoid body, Mobius Clean, etc., etc.).³
For an example of this over-description, look at this passage from the penultimate section of the story:

They set off toward the mound, and Perrault soon found himself scrambling up a slope over boulders. At the top the soldiers cleared some debris then set out the tents. Dasheel began hammering in small posts all around. As Perrault moved out past these and seated himself on a boulder, the man then set up a couple of inflatable tripods and on each mounted pulse rifles. Shortly after this he set out with a handful of small silvery spikes Perrault recognized as seismic detectors. It seemed evident now Dasheel’s expertise, or at least one of them, lay in setting up defensive positions.  p. 66

At this point in the story (p. 28 of 33) who cares about such quotidian tasks as setting up a camp, or what Dasheel’s abilities are? This passage should have been one sentence, “When they got to the top of the mound they set up camp, and surrounded it with automatic pulse-rifles and the silvery spikes of seismic detectors.” Or even less than that.
Despite this grousing the story’s not bad overall, but it could certainly have benefited from some decent editing.
∗∗∗ (Good). 23,800 words.

•••

There is no doubt that Analog produces some decent or better stories (see two of the above, for instance) but my impression from reading the odd issue over the a last few years is that there is too much short material, and too much that is lacklustre. Notwithstanding this, the stories at the top of their annual poll are worth a look.  ●

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1.  All the stories are available for free on the Analog website.

2. Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro won the novella section of the Analog Readers Poll’ (The Analytical Laboratory) for 2020.

3. Moral Biology is set in Asher’s ‘Polity’ universe.  ●

Summary:
These are the top five novelettes¹ in the 2020 Analog Magazine Readers’ Awards. The only standout is Harry Turtledove’s The Quest for the Great Grey Mossy; most the others are at the lower end of the ‘good’ category (although the Chase story is better than that until it comes to an abrupt end).
[Stories]

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Editor, Trevor Quachri

Minerva Girls • novelette by James Van Pelt ∗∗
The Quest for the Great Grey Mossy • novelette by Harry Turtledove ∗∗∗∗
The Offending Eye • novelette by Robert R. Chase ∗∗∗
Sticks and Stones • novelette by Tom Jolly ∗∗∗
I, Bigfoot • novelette by Sarina Dorie ∗∗∗

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Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt (Analog, September/October 2020) starts with three precocious fourteen year old girls planning a trip to the Moon. Throughout the construction of their ship (or rather the adaptation of a gas station storage tank with insulation and an anti-gravity drive), Penny the narrator goes to summer school. As she struggles to master her geography lessons—a list of states, etc.—we see her situation in school, i.e. the tribalism, bullying, pettiness, and so on. When Penny isn’t in class, or hanging out with Jacqueline and Selena, she works in her (presumably widowed) father’s scrap yard, where she sources the parts needed for the ship.
About half way through the story a ticking clock is introduced in the form of Selena and Jacqueline’s parents plans to move away, and the trio rush to test the anti-gravity drive:

By the time we’d solidified the anchors and rigged the power source, the eastern sky had lightened.
We crowded into the crane’s control booth fifty yards from our test site. Selena connected the video game joystick to the wires that ran to the Distortion Drive. She held it out to Jacqueline. “You should do the honors.”
I had my phone out to film our results.
I guess I thought the Distortion Drive would rise up from the golf cart trailer until the cables stopped its progress. That, or it wouldn’t move, which seemed more possible. I steadied the phone and turned on the video.
Jacqueline took a deep breath, then pushed the joystick forward a tick.
I lurched against the glass, as if someone had tipped the control booth from behind. Selena squeaked and caught herself from falling.
Jacqueline bumped her head on the window. Then the control booth shifted back into place.
I said, “What happened?” while rubbing my shoulder.
“Dang,” said Jacqueline. “That’s going to leave a welt.” She sat on the control booth floor, her notebooks spilled around her.
“My machine!” Selena opened the door.
Jacqueline grabbed Selena’s leg. “Not yet.”
A clattering like hail rattled the control booth’s metal ceiling for a couple seconds. Gravel and marble-sized rocks bounced off the ground around the booth. My toolbox that I’d left next to the trailer slammed down along with the wrenches and other tools that had been in it.
“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jacqueline. “I’ll need to narrow the distortion field.”  p. 33

Eventually (spoiler) they set off on their trip, and Penny sees North America from orbit: now that the land isn’t an abstract shape on paper she can easily reel off the states and cities, and knows she’ll ace her geography test the next day. They continue on to the Moon.
I think I can see the attraction of this story, which is essentially a YA piece for teenage girls (although it harks back to the lone inventor trope it’s mostly about their personal tribulations). But I wonder if even that audience will manage to suspend disbelief at the thought of three fourteen-year-olds inventing a gravity drive and going to the moon.
I was also puzzled about the story’s appearance in Analog—I wouldn’t have though that the magazine’s readers would be interested in something like this but, surprisingly, it won the novelette section of the Anlab Awards for 2020. I suspect the (mainly) American readership like sentimental YA material more than I do.²
∗∗ (Average). 8,300 words.

•

A story liked a lot is The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy by Harry Turtledove. If you want a one line description of this, I’d say, ‘alternate-world dinosaurs do Moby Dick’. That is probably all the description that this review needs but for those who, like me, have not read the novel, the story tells of the dinosaur narrator’s (“Call me Milvil”) journey to Faraway town, where he joins a ship called Queepahd. He then meets the charismatic skipper, and learns of his obsessional quest for the eponymous whale. A previous encounter did not end well:

[The captain turned] to survey me. As he moved, his tail scraped against the deck beneath it. This tail was made from highly polished mossy bone, and attached to the stump of his gods-given appendage by a cunning arrangement of drosaw-leather straps. It was, I suppose, better than no tail at all, but not nearly so good as the one of which he’d been robbed by some catastrophe, I knew not what. That artificial tail was the most remarkable thing about him, but not by any great stretch.
He was the most weathered old salt I’d ever seen; his green-scaled hide was nearly as leathery as the straps sustaining his tail. Even his feathers were sad and draggled, showing the effect of sun and rain and storm. A great scar seamed his jaw and just missed his left eye.
That and its corresponder on the other side were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered.³ Not to put too fine a point on it, at first glance he terrified me, a sentiment that increased on further acquaintance rather than dissipating.  p. 55

Later on in the voyage, the depths of his obsession become clear:

Captain Baja had not yet finished. He took from a pouch on his belt another goldpiece, a great fat lump of the precious metal, all stamped to perfection and worth ten times the first one; worth, to be honest, many times the concatenated wealth of most of the crewfolk.
“By the gods and by the Great Egg from which the world hatched at the beginning of days, my rogues, do ye see this?” Baja cried.
For a moment, a moment that stretched and stretched, he got no response at all. Staring at so grand and gaudy a goldpiece paralyzed us all, as the sea serpent’s venom is said to paralyze whatever it bites, leaving the victim ready to be engulfed. But then we all hissed and snarled as if we were so many middle raptors, not properly men at all. What a hornface’s meaty carcass might do for hungry animals, gold does for—or, I might say, does to—hungry people.
“This,” Baja said, “this to the huzzard-eyed rogue who spots for me the Great Gray Mossy, to be paid after we lower and harpoon and try the monster!” He nailed the second coin to the mast, well above the first. With a fierce laugh, he added, “I’ve spiked it well, I have. No thief will walk off with it in the middle of the night! “
I would not have wanted to try that, not when it ran the risk of having the skipper—who seemed to sleep very little—catch me in the act. What would he do to me, or to any other foolish, luckless would-be thief? If he only fed the miscreant to the ever-hungry sharks, the fellow might well count himself lucky.  p. 59

I liked this story for its its vivid description and antiquated language, the waspish asides about mammals (“Like ticks and mosquitos, mammals are an unfortunate part of life”), and for its sheer readability. One for my hypothetical ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 16,300 words.

•

The Offending Eye by Robert R. Chase (Analog, July-August 2020) is a sequel to Vault (Analog, July-August 2019) and opens with the trial of a ship’s captain over the events that took place in that initial story:

The facts were undisputed. Captain Ludma Ednahmay had refused to relinquish command of the starship Percival Lowell when lawfully directed to do so by myself, the ship’s political officer as well as its doctor of physical and mental health. She then imprisoned me in my own quarters until I was able, with the help of the first officer and the ship’s AI, to freeze her out of the ship’s control system and confine her to her quarters for the duration of the mission. When testimony was complete, it took the three-judge panel less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Sentencing was all that remained.  p. 132

Dr Chaz, the narrator, then tells the court that he thinks that there is no more loyal officer than Ednahmay, and that she is no threat to the Stability. After the court dismisses Chaz the hologram dissolves and he finds himself in his boss’s office. General Kim tells Chaz that he is no longer involved in any matters involving the Cube builders (an alien race) or the imprisoned Spark (an existential threat), and that he wants him to conduct an enquiry into the ship AI’s actions during the mutiny.
Chaz then goes to meet a Doctor Vanya Zamyatin (Chase likes his science and SF references), who is an artificial intelligence expert from Turing University. Zamyatin will assist him in examining the ship’s AI:

“I’ve never met an Inquisitor before, Doctor Chaz,” she said.
“The term is Inquirer,” I corrected. “Inquisitors were on Old Earth. A very different group.”
“Really? Under the current administration, it’s hard to tell sometimes. In your case, especially. It was very difficult to get much information about you.”
“You should not have been able to get anything,” I said.
That earned me a reproving frown. “Please, Doctor Chaz, one must know at least the basics about one’s colleagues. So I have learned that you were a doctor of physical and mental health on a starship exploratory mission, the results of which appear to be so highly classified that God would be guilty of a security violation if He talked to Himself about them. However, during that mission, you interacted with the unit on my table and have made some unusual claims about it. Part of our job is to evaluate those claims; so drag up a chair, and let’s get to work.”  p. 134

She goes on to tell Chaz that the AI, who they call Percival, won’t talk to her until it gets a password, and shows him a screen saying “Magic Word”, with six spaces underneath. The screen flickers and then shows the message, “Riviere Chaz Knows the Magic Word”. Chaz thinks back to his interactions with Percival on the ship and tells Zamyatin to type in “Please”.
They then learn that Percival has become self-aware, and feels a compulsion to send a mission report back to its creators. When they examine Percival more closely they see that the AI was tampered with during its construction process, and has been augmented with a barely detectable electronic net around its brain.
Chaz then liaises with General Chan to see if they can get permission to let Percival send its message so they can discover who the electronic net’s creators were (the device is far beyond Stability technology) and, while Chaz is waiting for a decision, he interrogates the QA officer involved in the construction of Percival’s brain. Then, when Chaz and Zamyatin get the go-ahead to let Percival send a fake message, the QA officer suddenly decides he wants to move to the home planet of the Eternals, an immortal group of humans (the other major offshoot of humanity in this story are the TransHumans, who are a blend of body and machine).
After this the story moves off-planet as Chaz goes to question the Eternals’ spy chief about Percival (after getting a brain-fry chip in his head for protection in case he is tortured). Kim warns him before he goes that he must not allow his investigation to exacerbate tensions with the Eternals, as the Spark—and the race who recently tried to free it from the Cube—will need to be opposed by an alliance of the Stability, Eternals, and TransHumans.
After some further shenanigans (spoiler) Chaz finds that the mesh came from the TransHumans and, when he gets back to the lab, he sneezes out further TransHuman tech he has unknowingly been infected with. These nanomachines hijack Percival’s programs until it shuts itself down.
From the description above this probably seems too much of a kitchen-sink story, but everything is remarkably well balanced: the old-school start efficiently and clearly brings readers who haven’t read the first story (I hadn’t) up to speed, and the rest of it is a good blend of Chaz and Zamyatin’s interactions, the totalitarian society they operate in, and a backdrop of competing human sub-species—all of whom are threatened by an external alien menace. It reads like a pretty good collaboration between Isaac Asimov and Charles Harness.
The one flaw this has is that—a common series story failing—it comes to far too abrupt an end, otherwise this very readable and intriguing piece would easily have scored higher.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,200 words.

•

Sticks and Stones by Tom Jolly (Analog, July/August 2020) gets off to a slow start with the narrator, Anita, watching the body of a suicide being put out of the lock of her relativistic cold-sleep spaceship Beagle-4. Afterwards Anita talks to the captain of the ship and a sentient slime called Rosie and, during this conversation, they receive a message from the Boden colony, which reports that there is a system near them with two odd planets, one of which is a gas giant, and another which may be hollow. The Beagle-4 sets off for the system. A year later the ship arrives and the remainder of the crew woken up from cold sleep.
Much of the rest of the first part of the story concerns their investigation of the second planet—Hermit’s Cave—which they decide is either (a) a hollowed out and reinforced planet or (b) a vast girder connected structure. Later a team is sent out to investigate and, as they descend between the huge asteroid-size chunks that are wired together, they discover an atmosphere and then, deeper down, an increasingly complex ecosystem of flying celephapod-like creatures:

Outside, the plants were starting to thicken. Marko slowed the ship again so they could observe the area in more detail. Vines crawled for hundreds of meters onto the interconnecting trusses, some completely covered as detritus from above filled in the gaps in the truss structure, creating bridges of soil between asteroids, though there was no indication of any corrosion on the trusses. The tops of many asteroids were also covered with soil and plants, from patchy collections of what looked like low mosses and lichen, to taller, broader plants farther in. Tendrils of vines hung from the sides of the asteroids like straggly beards. The terraced nature of the asteroids in the planetary bowl structure presented a bright edge at the side of the bowl that faded softly into deep shadows broken by intermittent slashes of light, the internal surfaces partly illuminated by the reflected glow of the hazy skies. Some flying creatures darted past the ship, startled from their perches on rocks and plants. They glided on thin membranes extending out from their sides, eyes forward, thin tentacles trailing behind.  p. 30

After the three crew land and disembark on one of the asteroids one of them is killed by a large flying creature, and Anita and Marko follow it to its lair to try and retrieve the body. While they are doing this they find a box in what looks like a control room, later found to contain documents that tell of a race of now extinct aliens which suffered disaster due to a wandering star and then built Hermit’s World from debris. The crew of the Beagle-4 work out that the aliens’ original home planet is half a light year away, and they once again set off on their travels.
The rest of the story is overtaken by the interplanetary politics that have been bubbling away in the background while all this has been happening, starting with the revelation by Rosie the slime that one of the crew members has messaged Garrison, a colony formed by a misogynistic leader who has since died. When the Beagle-4 finally gets to the aliens’ home world ships from Garrison arrive shortly after them, and more from Earth due soon—which will possibly lead to a standoff over the planet. However, during the long journey out the crew of Beagle-4 have also resurrected one of the aliens that created Hermit’s Cave. It is sentient, and therefore its home world cannot be appropriated by Garrison or Earth. All ends well.
If this review seems a bit of a mess then that is partially because (a) I read the story some time ago, and (b) the story is a bit of a mess too: not only is the first chapter probably redundant, there are too many characters, and it almost feels like two stories welded into one. That said, the Big Dumb Object at the heart of the story is fairly interesting, and so are some of the other parts (the relativistic ship travel taking years of time, resurrecting the dead alien species, etc.). Fairly good overall, I guess.
∗∗∗ (Good). 14,200 words.

•

I, Bigfoot by Sarina Dorie (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with a sasquatch called Bigfoot removing pictures of Jane Goodall (the actress who played Jane in Tarzan) from the tribe’s cave wall. As the females of the group ridicule him we learn that the pictures belonged to another male called Squeaker, who was banished by Old Grey Face for risking the tribe’s discovery by humans.
After brooding for a time Bigfoot goes out foraging, eventually ending up at a set of dumpsters. As he searches through the garbage for food he sees a magazine in the moonlight with what he thinks is a picture of Jane Goodall but, before he can examine it more closely, he hears a woman who is being chased by men. He jumps into in the dumpster to hide, and the woman joins him shortly afterwards. After a period she notices him, and at that point the story flashes back to Squeaker’s visit to a library—the one that got him banished—to hear Jane Goodall speak (this section is rather clumsily located at this dramatic point in the story).
Bigfoot eventually scares the men away and then, when she the teenage girl tells him she is a runaway, he takes her home. In return she tosses him a bag of things—which includes a tin opener to replace the one that was broken by the tribe, and without which they can’t open their store of canned food.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Bigfoot return to his tribe of sasquatches, where he is initially lauded for the goodies he has brought back. However, when Old Grey Face realises Bigfoot has been with a human his future looks in doubt—until one of the other males works out how to use the new-fangled can opener (Bigfoot failed), and then confesses that he learned from being near humans. Others join in with their confessions of proximity to humans and the subsequent argument splits the tribe in two.
This story has a rather unlikely premise but, if you can swallow the idea of hide-out sasquatches in the wilds around us, then it’s a pleasant enough read.
∗∗∗ (Good). 8,750 words.

•••

Although this group of Analog novelettes pretty much matches the quality of the Asimov’s finalists, I think I preferred the latter group. Part of the reason for that is that two of the above are more or less YA work (the Van Pelt and the Dorie), and two have structural flaws (the Chase and the Jolly). ●

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1.  All the stories are available for free on the Analog website.

2. The results of the poll are here.

3. Harry Turtledove’s phrase “[they] were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered” sounds a little odd.

Summary:
These are the top six short stories for the 2020 Analog Magazine Readers’ Awards. They are a mixed bag but worth a read (and are, overall, a slightly better bunch than the Asimov’s selection).
Don’t miss Eric Choi’s The Greatest Day.¹
[Stories]

_____________________

Editor, Trevor Quachri

Hive • short story by Jay Werkheiser ∗∗
Rover • short story by A.T. Sayre ∗∗∗
The Chrysalis Pool • short story by Sean McMullen ∗∗
The Greatest Day • short story by Eric Choi ∗∗∗∗
The Writhing Tentacles of History • short story by Jay Werkheiser ∗∗∗
Wheel of Echoes • short story by Sean McMullen ∗∗∗+

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Hive by Jay Werkheiser (Analog, January-February 2020) has a three-person Earth team observing aliens on another planet: the insect-like creatures live in hives and use pheromones to communicate, and the story concerns their reactions to the human vehicle that houses the researchers. While this is intellectually interesting for the most part, I’m not clear about what happened in the final scene where (spoiler) the aliens attack the human vehicle.
I’d also point out that the strangled scientific prose doesn’t add to the story’s clarity:

Crawler pheromone trails continue bringing detail from upfield. The markers defining the new body forms suddenly disappear from the information trails. Talkers search the trails closely for more detail. Nest marker pheromones, but appended with a propyl group indicating motion across field lines. Chirality of the propyl branch point indicates motion rotationward.
A moving nest? Could the new body forms be part of a hive? Excitory pheromones roil in the nest’s air. The surge drops off rapidly as directors one by one reach the same conclusion. Inhibitory pheromones dominate, mixed with comm markers, a reminder of the body forms’ lack of identifiable pheromones. How would it self-organize? How would it communicate with other hives? No, these are simply things, predators or prey.  p. 84

Good idea and background, but an awkwardly told story.
∗∗ (Average). 5,500 words.

•

Rover by A. T. Sayre (Analog, March/April 2020) opens with an AI rover prospecting on Mars; we learn that it hasn’t had any instructions from Earth for some considerable time and that it has been evolving during that period:

It had changed somewhat since its creation, as it had needed to take parts of other machinery left on Mars to keep going. A new wheel from the Russian probe, an optic lens to replace its own cracked one, a processor from another to subsidize its own when its performance had started to lag. It had taken solar panels from a Chinese machine with more receptive photovoltaic cells and mounted them alongside its original array to improve energy collection. It added another set of arms from an Indian rover, much better at gripping than its original four, connected by an extension of its chassis that it took from an American probe at the edge of the Northern ice cap.
And as always from the probes, landers, other rovers, it took the processors and data storage units, to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of its system. It grew smarter, more resourceful, capable of more and more complex problem solving and decision making. The rover had learned so much, had grown so much, it was barely recognizable as the simple machine that had touched down on the red planet so long ago.  pp. 171-172

While later traversing a ridge the rover falls over the side and damages a strut and, after the vehicle reboots, it then decides to proceed to a location 90km away, where it hopes to find a replacement part on an abandoned vehicle. While undertaking this slow and arduous journey the rover picks up a signal from what it thinks may be a human-manned ship and diverts course, but when the rover finally arrives at the site it finds a damaged ship and the body of one of the crew. The rover eventually manages to hoist itself up and into the vessel.
The last section of the story (spoiler) has the rover repair itself in the ship’s well-equipped workshop and then contact Earth, only to find that all Mars missions have been permanently suspended. Now that it is free to do as it wishes the rover converts itself into a drone, and the final scene sees it launch itself out of the ship to endlessly fly over the surface of Mars.
This is a well enough done piece, but I got the vague feeling that (for me, anyway) there was something missing. Maybe I just prefer stories where there is more focus on the personality of the AI.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,100 words.

•

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (Analog, September-October 2020)² has as its protagonist a lab technician called Lucian, and who gets a request from a psychologist called Alice Marshall to make a wearable device for Leo Hawker, one of her patients: Hawker apparently sees a naked water nymph whenever he goes near bodies of water. Lucian subsequently constructs a portable electroencephalograph for Hawker to wear but, against Marshall’s express wishes, he also includes a concealed camera to record what Hawker sees when he is having his hallucinations.
The next part of the story details a test run of the device and also gives us more information about the three characters. Then, when Lucian and Marshall are out for dinner one night, Lucian gets a notification that Hawker has gone out on one of his regular runs. Lucian leaves Marshall and goes back to his lab to watch the camera, and subsequently hears Hawker talk to someone who isn’t visible on the video feed. Lucian then sees Marshall fall face first into the pool and rushes to the location to save him, whereupon he briefly sees a woman dressed in a lab coat standing waist deep in the water. Later, when Lucian examines the ECG and the film, he sees no sign of a woman, and realises that what he saw does not match what Hawker has described seeing.
Four weeks after his near-drowning Hawker resigns from his job, sets up an investment consultancy, and starts associating with a more glamourous set of people; he also refuses Marshall’s requests for further brain scans. This change in Hawker’s behaviour (spoiler) prompts Lucian to speculate that there was another personality lying dormant within Hawker—one that revealed itself by the nymph hallucinations, and which was born during the period of oxygen starvation. This prompts Lucian go back to the pond to meet his own lab-coat dressed “nymph,” which he believes will birth, as it did with Hawker, the dormant chrysalis within him. However, Lucian turns away at the last moment, and nevertheless becomes successful anyway.
The problem with this story is that Lucian’s speculation about the chrysalis idea isn’t convincing, it is introduced too late, and ends up essentially unrelated to his concluding personal development (although there is a note of ambiguity at the end). That said, Lucian—a sly, unethical, and slightly chippy character—makes for an interesting narrator. So, in conclusion, a well told story based on an unlikely and/or unconvincingly framed idea.
∗∗ (Average). 6,450 words.

•

The Greatest Day by Eric Choi (Analog, January-February 2020)³ is an alternate world story about the space shuttle Columbia which, in our world, suffered wing damage on launch and broke up on re-entry. In this story’s time-line the operations personnel discover the damage and the narrative arc then works through some intriguing NASA politics, a planned rescue mission with a second shuttle, and (spoiler), when that fails, a bodged repair and attempt at re-entry:

Aboard Columbia
“Altitude 43,000 feet, speed 806 miles per hour,” Willie McCool called out.
Laurel Clark turned and saw blinking redand-white aircraft lights out the left-side window, just past Kalpana Chawla’s helmet.
“Houston, Columbia,”Ben Hernandez radioed. “It looks like we have company.”
“Roger, Columbia,” said Stephanie Wilson. “That would be Mike Bloomfield. He promised to come for you, and here he is.”
.
Mission Control Houston
A new window appeared on the screen, showing the feed from a night-vision camera aboard the T-38 chase plane flown by astronaut Mike Bloomfield. Columbia appeared as a ghostly image in shades of green against a black sky with greenish-white speckles of stars.
Audible gasps went through the room.
Some of the flight controllers stood front their consoles like an honor guard.
The hole in Columbia’s left wing was now an obsidian gash. There were black streaks over the wing and along the fuselage, and dark splatters on the left engine pod and tail—cooled residue of molten metal. The rudder and elevon were deflected, physical manifestation of the flight control system struggling to keep the ship steady.
A chill went down Wayne Hale’s spine. Columbia was mortally wounded, but she was still alive, still fighting to bring her crew home. She was simply a beautiful, magnificent, heroic flying machine.
“Don’t do it.”
Hale blinked. Had he said something aloud?
“Don’t anthropomorphize the vehicle,” said Joyce Seriale-Grush. “She doesn’t like it.”  pp. 99-100

The lean techno-thriller style used here makes this piece the polar opposite of the many bloated and navel-gazing works currently produced (and about which I regularly complain). That said, this story perhaps goes a little too far in the opposite direction (and the footnotes to the story state it is an abridged version of a much longer piece).⁴
If you like the movies Apollo 13, Gravity, or The Martian, then this will be right up your street. It is a very well done and would be in my ‘Year’s Best’.
∗∗∗∗ (very Good). 7,650 words.

•

The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with two eight-tentacled creatures (we later learn they are evolved squids or octopuses) examining a human hip-bone discovered long after an far-future extinction event for humanity. The dominant one of the pair, Mottled-Brown (they communicate by skin colour changes) is worried about the prospect of his archaeological dig being shut down, and he is due to appear before the Ruling Octet who will decide whether or not this will be the case.
When Mottled Brown appears before the Octet his female nemesis, Blue-Ripples, is also there. During their testimony Blue Ripples states that—despite the human hip-bone Mottled-Brown has just found—his theories are ridiculous, and that the dig is a waste of resources and should be shut down. The Octet decide to have further debate and analysis the next day.
After the adjournment Blue-Ripples approaches Mottled-Brown and tells the archaeologist of her further plans for him:

“One fossil won’t save you,” Blue-ripples said. Her words were tinged with black. “And your conclusion is ridiculous. Two arms indeed.”
Mottled-Brown concentrated on keeping his skin a neutral gray-brown. He wouldn’t let her goad him into a confrontation again. “Well see the words tomorrow.”
He turned to leave, but Blue-Ripples stopped him. “I’ve filed a reproduction claim on you,” she said.
He froze in place, his arms writhing. He felt his skin turn black. “It’ll never be approved. I’m still at the height of my career.”
“And if the octet closes your dig?” Her words shifted blue. “A fossilized historical scientist with little hope of any further contribution? They’ll give you to me before your third heart can finish a beat.”
“Slug slime! My contributions have been—”
“In the past. The only thing you have left to contribute to the next generation is your flesh. Our eggs will grow strong on it.”
He involuntarily pulled himself into an upright fighting posture, an instinct remaining from the presentient past. “The Ruling Octet will see the value of my dig. History is on my side.”
“The writhing tentacles of history have slashed many of your kind,” she said. Her arms began slipping through the port and out of the hall. Her mantle flashed one last thought. “You will be delicious.”
As the last of her mantle slipped through the port, he saw her skin turn bright blue.  pp. 135-136

The rest of the story sees Mottled-Brown talk to his assistant Gray-Ring about the day’s events—and the sexual encounters of his youth. Then, the next day, he appears again in front of the Octet where (spoiler), in an extended debate, he manages to use Blue-Ripples’ own mathematical models against her to suggest that humans may have been tool users and are therefore worthy of further research.
Most of this piece is talking heads (in some respects it’s a bit like an Isaac Asimov story), but the clever debate and conversation between the various players is well done, and I found it an engaging read (having one of the characters threatening to lay their eggs in the other is a novel type of jeopardy!) The only thing that slightly spoiled this for me is the last section, where Mottled-Brown and his assistant Gray-Ring discuss the extinction events that caused the demise of the humans and the reptiles before them. The closing mention of an asteroid impact is obviously meant to mean something, but I couldn’t work out what the point of the comment was. The story is better than my final rating for the most part, and probably would have scored higher but for this.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,050 words.

Wheel of Echoes by Sean McMullen (Analog, January-February 2020) starts with its voice-actress narrator arriving at a recording company in London, where she meets another invitee, a pompous professor of Shakespearian English. An executive called Elliot greets them, and then takes the pair to listen to, and comment on, several voice recordings:

Elliot [asked,] “What did you make of that fifth actor? Kirsty?”
“From his accent, American. Loads of hiss and crackle, so it was recorded a long time ago.”
“Professor?”
“American, backwoods northeast coast, and recorded in the 1920s. The accents of that region were an acoustic time capsule from seventeenth-century England. “
“Actually, the recording was made in London. Would you like to try again?”
“Maybe Welsh?” I replied.
“London?” said Wilson, frowning. “Probably someone who heard the 1920s recordings from the Appalachian Mountains and was using that accent to do a lash-up of a seventeenth-century English accent. Of course for Shakespeare it doesn’t work. “
“Why not?”
“Listen to Cumberbatch performing Hamlet, then go down to the corner pub and chat to one of the locals. Both are from twenty-first-century London, but they speak quite differently. The Appalachian recordings were of farmers and hunters, not Shakespeare’s actors.”
Have you ever met one of those people who gets his opinion accepted by sheer bluster? When Wilson gave an opinion, he left no room for doubt. Pompous git, I thought. Hope you just screwed up totally.
“Good point,” said Elliot.  p. 74

Elliot then shows them a large clay wheel, and explains that it is a primitive recording device which has been recently unearthed. After a demonstration of machine, which plays a primitive recording, Elliot gives them the startling information (spoiler) that the voice is Shakespeare’s. The professor does not respond well to this as it upends his beliefs.
After this climactic scene, the rest of the story is essentially an extended data dump explaining the details behind what has gone before.
Notwithstanding the story’s slightly odd (early climax) structure, I thought this was a pretty good story, especially if you are interested in stories about lost knowledge. The London setting was a bonus.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good).

•••

Although this group of Analog short stories match or surpass the quality of the Asimov’s finalists, that can’t be said about the overall quality of its short stories.  ●

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1.  All the stories are available for free on the Analog website.

2. Rather surprisingly, McMullen’s The Chrysalis won the 2020 Analog Readers’ Poll (Analytical Laboratory) for Best Short Story. Or maybe not a surprise, given SF readers’ penchant for latent supermen stories (Slan, etc.). The results are here.

3. There is a podcast of Eric Choi’s The Greatest Day here.

4. Eric Choi kindly provided (email, December 2019) this background information about The Greatest Day:

The story is adapted from a novelette called “A Sky and a Heaven” that was written for an anthology called Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People edited by Andrea Lobel and Mark Shainblum. There are two main differences between the versions for Analog and Other Covenants. First, the anthology version is very much centered on Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who in my alternate history is shot down during the 1981 Israeli air strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq and ends up years later in America as the lead NASA flight controller for the ill-fated Columbia mission (instead of Wayne Hale in the Analog story). The second significant thread in the anthology version concerns an Israeli scientist and Holocaust survivor named Joachim Joseph, who as a child at Bergen-Belsen was given a secret bar mitzvah ceremony and entrusted with a miniature Torah scroll that decades later flew aboard Columbia with Ilan Ramon (or in my story, the fictional Israeli astronaut Yael Dahan). So, the Analog short story is essentially a standalone adaptation of the engineering elements of the novelette.  ●

Summary:
This issue is (based on my limited recent reading of the magazine) a better than usual example. Apart from striking and redesigned (retro) cover, there are two very good alternate world stories from Harry Turtledove (The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy, a dinosaur/Moby Dick mash-up) and Eric Choi (The Greatest Day, an alternate world take on the space shuttle Columbia disaster). There are also notable stories by Sean McMullen (lost medieval tech in London) and Matthew Claxton (time travel and dinosaur pets); and good work by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion (a classic reprint), A. J. Ward (a promising debut), Gregor Hartman, and Richard A. Lovett.
There is the usual non-fiction, which includes a guest editorial by Stanley Schmidt that introduces the reprint and mentions the magazine’s 90^th year anniversary plans. There is also the 2019 Index and Analytical Laboratory ballot. [ISFDB]

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Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary
John Loyd, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

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Fiction:
The Astronaut from Wyoming • reprint novella by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion ∗∗∗
The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy • novelette by Harry Turtledove ∗∗∗∗
Wheel of Echoes • short story by Sean McMullen ∗∗∗+
Hive • short story by Jay Werkheiser ∗∗
The Greatest Day • short story by Eric Choi ∗∗∗∗
The Evolutionary Alice • short story by Rachel Rodman –
Bulkheads Make the Best Neighbors • short story by Ian Randal Strock –
Welcome to the New You: Terms and Conditions for the Icrispr Gene-Editing Kit • short story by Douglas F. Dluzen ∗∗
The Grass Bows Down, The Pilgrims Walk Lightly • short story by Izzy Wasserstein ∗∗
All the Turns of the Earth • short story by Matthew Claxton ∗∗∗+
One Lost Space Suit Way • short story by A. J. Ward ∗∗∗
Around a World in Ninety-Six Hours • short story by Wendy Nikel ∗
Bird of a Feather • short story by Gregor Hartmann ∗∗∗
Guns Don’t Kill • short story by Richard A. Lovett ∗∗∗
Q-Ship Militant • short story by Joel Richards ∗∗
The Shocking Truth about the Scientific Method That Privatized Schools Don’t Want You to Know
• novelette by Sarina Dorie ∗∗
Hubble Rising • novelette by C. Stuart Hardwick ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Tomislav Tikulin
Interior artwork • by Kevin Speidell, Vincent Di Fate, Kurt Huggins
Guest Editorial: A Major Milestone and Places We’ve Been • by Stanley Schmidt
Making Waves: The Inventions of John W. Campbell • science essay by Alec Nevala-Lee & Edward M. Wysocki, Jr.
In Theory • poem by Rebecca Siegel
Saving Columbia: An In-Flight Options Assessment • science essay by Eric Choi
Ghost Transmission • poem by Robert Frazier
The Alternate View • science essay by John G. Cramer
In Times to Come
The Reference Library • book reviews by Don Sakers
Brass Tacks • letters
The 2019 Index
Analytical Laboratory Ballot
Upcoming Events • by Anthony R. Lewis

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I don’t normally begin these reviews by discussing the Cover but in this case it is justified as, for their 90^th anniversary year, Analog is using “retro” cover designs.¹ This gives us the excellent result above, which not only sports a great piece of artwork by Tomislav Tikulin (you can’t beat dinosaurs as sailors/pirates), but also a design that addresses a persistent criticism I have, i.e. that the cover art is defaced by the story titles and the names of the authors. If I have one minor criticism it is that the “g” of the Analog and the top of the Turtledove story title crowd the artwork—why can’t they nudge the text in the top and bottom blocks up and down?² Still, an A cover if not an A+ one.

The fiction leads off with another anniversary year feature, a classic reprint. This issue’s choice, The Astronaut from Wyoming by Adam-Troy Castro & Jerry Oltion (Analog, July-August 1999), is introduced by ex-editor Stanley Schmidt in Guest Editorial: A Major Milestone and Places We’ve Been. He discusses the magazine’s anniversary year plans before discussing the story:

“The Astronaut from Wyoming” grabbed me as soon as I started reading it, and I knew I’d found something very special. I remember telling myself, and later my wife and colleagues at Analog, “You’ll be seeing this one on the award ballots.” I said it not as a speculation, but as a mere statement of fact—and I was right, even more right than I realized at the time.
For starters, as you well know, Analog has its own awards: the annual readers’ poll called The Analytical Laboratory (or AnLab). “Astronaut” not only placed first in the novella category for 1999, but did so with the highest score, and the biggest lead over its competition, of any story I can remember during my tenure.³  p. 4

The Astronaut from Wyoming tells the story of Alexander, a baby boy born with Drier’s Syndrome:

Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the cesarean.) His eyes were about three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small, little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin, pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes.
[. . .]
It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.  pp. 9-10

Of course the media go nuts, and then the lunatic fringe of the public arrive in droves at the family’s house, all of which causes problems for them. At one point the husband considers taking National Enquirer money, exchanging a story where he and his wife ‘admit’ their son is a creature from outer space for the money needed to improve their security, but she refuses.
The next part of the story charts Alexander’s childhood, which involves, among other things: watching TV and seeing Saudi astronauts on the Moon destroying the profane equipment left by previous US and Japanese missions; his father struggling to cope with the media pressure and eventually leaving; his schooldays; and a trip to Washington where he is finally interviewed by the media. The remainder of the story’s narrative arc is set up by his statement that that he wants to be an astronaut—not “the boy from space”, but “the astronaut from Wyoming”.
In the next part of the story he meets the (until then, off-stage) narrator, Colin Forsyth, a bed-bound teenage genius with muscular dystrophy (there is an explicit nod to Heinlein and Waldo). Forsyth starts mentoring Alexander to help him gain a place in the Mars mission (as well as obliquely helping out with other matters, such as his love life).
The final section details Alexander’s eventual recruitment to the Mars mission (through an unlikely equal opportunities program), the politics of his selection (aided by a contrived car accident involving one of the initial crewmembers), and (spoiler) the tragic outcome of his flight to Mars.
I can see why the story was so popular at the time, and how it was a finalist in several awards, but I found it much more of a mixed bag (and understand why, as mentioned in the afterword by the writers, Scott Edelman of SF Age rejected it). The good parts are the childhood scenes, some technically interesting passages, and that Alexander finally achieves his destiny. The parts I liked less include the near constant moan throughout the story about the tabloid media, and their horoscope and alien-obsessed readership (this is almost hectoring in places). Apart from giving the impression that all news media are like this, it seems a bit dated now (mostly because this kind of nonsense is now on the internet). Paradoxically, it also has a contemporary tone (‘Why, oh why, isn’t the world and its history the way I want it?’). The writers also grind their axes about Saudi Arabia in a couple of places, and about manifest destiny (I’m guessing, I forget) in Alexander’s final speech. More of a problem than this are the already mentioned plot twists.
Overall I liked this, but not as much as some.
A story that I did like a lot is The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy by Harry Turtledove. If you want a one line description of this, I’d say, ‘alternate-world dinosaurs do Moby Dick’. That is probably all the description that this review needs but for those who, like me, have not read the novel, the story tells of the dinosaur narrator’s (“Call me Milvil”) journey to Faraway town, where he joins a ship called Queepahd. He then meets the charismatic skipper, and learns of his obsessional quest for the eponymous whale. A previous encounter did not end well:

[The captain turned] to survey me. As he moved, his tail scraped against the deck beneath it. This tail was made from highly polished mossy bone, and attached to the stump of his gods-given appendage by a cunning arrangement of drosaw-leather straps. It was, I suppose, better than no tail at all, but not nearly so good as the one of which he’d been robbed by some catastrophe, I knew not what. That artificial tail was the most remarkable thing about him, but not by any great stretch.
He was the most weathered old salt I’d ever seen; his green-scaled hide was nearly as leathery as the straps sustaining his tail. Even his feathers were sad and draggled, showing the effect of sun and rain and storm. A great scar seamed his jaw and just missed his left eye.
That and its corresponder on the other side were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered.⁴ Not to put too fine a point on it, at first glance he terrified me, a sentiment that increased on further acquaintance rather than dissipating.  p. 55

Later on in the voyage, the depths of his obsession become clear:

Captain Baja had not yet finished. He took from a pouch on his belt another goldpiece, a great fat lump of the precious metal, all stamped to perfection and worth ten times the first one; worth, to be honest, many times the concatenated wealth of most of the crewfolk.
“By the gods and by the Great Egg from which the world hatched at the beginning of days, my rogues, do ye see this?” Baja cried.
For a moment, a moment that stretched and stretched, he got no response at all. Staring at so grand and gaudy a goldpiece paralyzed us all, as the sea serpent’s venom is said to paralyze whatever it bites, leaving the victim ready to be engulfed. But then we all hissed and snarled as if we were so many middle raptors, not properly men at all. What a hornface’s meaty carcass might do for hungry animals, gold does for—or, I might say, does to—hungry people.
“This,” Baja said, “this to the huzzard-eyed rogue who spots for me the Great Gray Mossy, to be paid after we lower and harpoon and try the monster!” He nailed the second coin to the mast, well above the first. With a fierce laugh, he added, “I’ve spiked it well, I have. No thief will walk off with it in the middle of the night! “
I would not have wanted to try that, not when it ran the risk of having the skipper—who seemed to sleep very little—catch me in the act. What would he do to me, or to any other foolish, luckless would-be thief? If he only fed the miscreant to the ever-hungry sharks, the fellow might well count himself lucky.  p. 59

I liked this story for its its vivid description and antiquated language, the waspish asides about mammals (“Like ticks and mosquitos, mammals are an unfortunate part of life”), and for its sheer readability. One for my hypothetical ‘Best of the Year’ collection.

Wheel of Echoes by Sean McMullen starts with its voice-actress narrator arriving at a recording company in London, where she meets another invitee, a pompous professor of Shakespearian English. An executive called Elliot greets them, and then takes the pair to listen to, and comment on, several voice recordings:

Elliot [asked,] “What did you make of that fifth actor? Kirsty?”
“From his accent, American. Loads of hiss and crackle, so it was recorded a long time ago.”
“Professor?”
“American, backwoods northeast coast, and recorded in the 1920s. The accents of that region were an acoustic time capsule from seventeenth-century England. “
“Actually, the recording was made in London. Would you like to try again?”
“Maybe Welsh?” I replied.
“London?” said Wilson, frowning. “Probably someone who heard the 1920s recordings from the Appalachian Mountains and was using that accent to do a lash-up of a seventeenth-century English accent. Of course for Shakespeare it doesn’t work. “
“Why not?”
“Listen to Cumberbatch performing Hamlet, then go down to the corner pub and chat to one of the locals. Both are from twenty-first-century London, but they speak quite differently. The Appalachian recordings were of farmers and hunters, not Shakespeare’s actors.”
Have you ever met one of those people who gets his opinion accepted by sheer bluster? When Wilson gave an opinion, he left no room for doubt. Pompous git, I thought. Hope you just screwed up totally.
“Good point,” said Elliot.  p. 74

Elliot then shows them a large clay wheel, and explains that it is a primitive recording device which has been recently unearthed. After a demonstration of machine, which plays a primitive recording, Elliot gives them the startling information (spoiler) that the voice is Shakespeare’s. The professor does not respond well to this as it upends his beliefs.
After this climactic scene, the rest of the story is essentially an extended data dump explaining the details behind what has gone before.
Notwithstanding the story’s slightly odd (early climax) structure, I thought this was a pretty good story, especially if you are interested in stories about lost knowledge. The London setting was a bonus.

Hive by Jay Werkheiser has a three-person Earth team observing aliens on another planet: the insect-like creatures live in hives and use pheromones to communicate, and the story concerns their reactions to the human vehicle that houses the researchers. While this is intellectually interesting for the most part, I’m not clear about what happened in the final scene where (spoiler) the aliens attack the human vehicle.
I’d also point out that the strangled scientific prose doesn’t add to the story’s clarity:

Crawler pheromone trails continue bringing detail from upfield. The markers defining the new body forms suddenly disappear from the information trails. Talkers search the trails closely for more detail. Nest marker pheromones, but appended with a propyl group indicating motion across field lines. Chirality of the propyl branch point indicates motion rotationward.
A moving nest? Could the new body forms be part of a hive? Excitory pheromones roil in the nest’s air. The surge drops off rapidly as directors one by one reach the same conclusion. Inhibitory pheromones dominate, mixed with comm markers, a reminder of the body forms’ lack of identifiable pheromones. How would it self-organize? How would it communicate with other hives? No, these are simply things, predators or prey.  p. 84

Good idea and background, but an awkwardly told story.
The Greatest Day by Eric Choi⁵ is another alternate world story, this time about the space shuttle Columbia which, in our world, suffered wing damage on launch and broke up on re-entry. In this story’s time-line the operations personnel discover the damage and the narrative arc then works through some intriguing NASA politics, a planned rescue mission with a second shuttle, and (spoiler), when that fails, a bodged repair and attempt at re-entry:

Aboard Columbia
“Altitude 43,000 feet, speed 806 miles per hour,” Willie McCool called out.
Laurel Clark turned and saw blinking redand-white aircraft lights out the left-side window, just past Kalpana Chawla’s helmet.
“Houston, Columbia,”Ben Hernandez radioed. “It looks like we have company.”
“Roger, Columbia,” said Stephanie Wilson. “That would be Mike Bloomfield. He promised to come for you, and here he is.”
.
Mission Control Houston
A new window appeared on the screen, showing the feed from a night-vision camera aboard the T-38 chase plane flown by astronaut Mike Bloomfield. Columbia appeared as a ghostly image in shades of green against a black sky with greenish-white speckles of stars.
Audible gasps went through the room.
Some of the flight controllers stood front their consoles like an honor guard.
The hole in Columbia’s left wing was now an obsidian gash. There were black streaks over the wing and along the fuselage, and dark splatters on the left engine pod and tail—cooled residue of molten metal. The rudder and elevon were deflected, physical manifestation of the flight control system struggling to keep the ship steady.
A chill went down Wayne Hale’s spine. Columbia was mortally wounded, but she was still alive, still fighting to bring her crew home. She was simply a beautiful, magnificent, heroic flying machine.
“Don’t do it.”
Hale blinked. Had he said something aloud?
“Don’t anthropomorphize the vehicle,” said Joyce Seriale-Grush. “She doesn’t like it.”  pp. 99-100

The lean techno-thriller style used here makes this piece the polar opposite of the many bloated and navel-gazing works currently produced (and about which I regularly complain). That said, this story perhaps goes a little too far in the opposite direction (and the footnotes to the story state it is an abridged version of a much longer piece).⁶
If you like the movies Apollo 13, Gravity, or The Martian, then this will be right up your street. It is a very well done and would be in my ‘Year’s Best’.
The Evolutionary Alice by Rachel Rodman is a ‘Probability Zero’ mashup of Alice in Wonderland and evolutionary theory. Alice falls out with the Queen (an advocate of intelligent design), and the story finishes (spoiler) with Alice waking up and finding it was all a dream. Pah.
Bulkheads Make the Best Neighbors by Ian Randal Strock has two characters in orbit having a conversation about smashing up asteroids to form a barrier between them and the irritating groundhogs. Apart from the fact they sound like rednecks in space, this is a notion, not a story. Double pah.
Welcome to the New You: Terms and Conditions for the Icrispr Gene-Editing Kit by Douglas F. Dluzen uses various T&C’s to show us a world of gene-editing at home. Okay, I guess.

The Grass Bows Down, The Pilgrims Walk Lightly by Izzy Wasserstein has two narrative threads: the first is a moderately interesting one that has a biologist called Erika negotiating with the representative of an advanced alien species. If she can work out why the grass on the alien planet lies down in front of them as they walk towards it, the aliens will share their advanced tech. The second thread contains the now seemingly obligatory relationship/angst material about Erika’s failed relationship: they separated because she wanted to stay on Earth to reintroduce dolphins while her partner wanted to explore the Galaxy. There is also some unnecessary interstitial material—short, portentous passages of Norse myth. I was not surprised to find out from the author notes that the writer teaches writing and literature at university.

All the Turns of the Earth by Matthew Claxton starts with a young boy who is temporally displaced to prehistoric times. He learns to survive there, and eventually seeks refuge on an island. Then one day a herd of pterosaurs fly in and nest there. The young boy steals an egg and it later hatches . . . .
The second half of the story has quite a lot going on (spoiler: he is catapulted forward through time before returning years later), and some readers may struggle with a suspension of disbelief. Personally, I liked this piece, and found it an engaging tale that packs a lot of event and wonder into its short space.

One Lost Space Suit Way by A. J. Ward is about an autonomous spacesuit on an alien planet that escapes from its owner rather than go to the scrap dealer. Over the subsequent decades the suit wanders all over this world (which the settlers are terraforming), and we learn of its many adventures and experiences. During its journey animals start to use it as a home:

Once charged, I left the lumber station. I headed up the foothills into the new growth that didn’t interest the loggers. Earth plants grew here and there: graceful Frangipanis and strangling Bougainvillea amongst native nymphtrees. After several weeks I found a cat! I knew about them from back in the mines, where they watched the miners at work from the dormitory windows. The cat was black and red, and not all the red was from its fur. I opened my helmet and swallowed her up, warming my interior and providing water and air. The cat thrived and was soon joined by five kittens. During the day, she would haul the kittens by the nape of their neck to watch the forest go by from my helmet. At night, they scratched at my visor to be let out. Mother would go out and teach them to hunt, returning with red and blue stained mouths and paws, often leaving some viscera or head at my boots as an offering.  p. 135

At the end of its design life the suit returns home, and finds a “Lost” sign put up decades previously by the original owner. It eventually finds one of his descendants, and the story comes to an elegaic end.⁷
This is an interesting and quirky debut that probably shouldn’t work but does. I enjoyed it.
Around a World in Ninety-Six Hours by Wendy Nikel tells of an interplanetary circumnavigation race between a sister in a Venusian research balloon her brother in a high speed rover on Mars. The brother has a minor mishap that damages the rover’s gps, and then cannot be contacted.
The resolution (spoiler) revolves around the comm link that they use (apparently established just for them) and the fact that both of them know Morse code. This is well enough told but it just doesn’t suspend belief (apart from the personal comm link, the idea of the brother driving like a maniac on Mars doesn’t wash). You can also see the end coming a mile off.
Bird of a Feather by Gregor Hartmann is a partly tongue-in-cheek, partly gonzo-ish story of an astronomer whose revolutionary astronomical telescope (lasers and glitter) is sidelined by his boss so as not to upset the progress of a more expensive project. Matters look as if they are going to take a turn for the worse when the astronomer goes home to find his footloose twin brother has unexpectedly arrived:

“Yo, Frankie, long time no see.”
Rivo, his older brother, last reported adrift in Southeast Asia, had set up camp in the living room. A backpack the size of a washing machine threatened one wall. Pale purple smoke rose from a long bamboo pipe that jutted from the corner of Rivo’s mouth like a smoldering fuse.
Frank ducked under a parachute cord slung from window to bookcase. He squeezed between two flower-print sarongs and slammed his briefcase on the coffee table. “How’d you get in here?”
“It’s only four stories up. Easy peasy free climb. You really should lock your windows. Say hi to my fans.”
He was wearing a headband with a tiny camera like a high-tech miner’s lamp. Rivo said, “Camera start recording,” and a red light lit.
“Peeps! Meet Frank, my kid brother, who emerged from the same maternal womb six minutes later, after I told him it was safe to come out. Dr. Frank is a brainiac space scientist here in La La Land. He’s invented a humongo cosmic kaleidoscope, the better to spy on the Universe.”
“Knock it off,” Frank snarled. “I’m not in the mood.  p. 146

The rest of this entertaining tale tells how the visiting brother helps, with the aid of his posse, to get his brother’s telescope into orbit.
Guns Don’t Kill by Richard A. Lovett has AI meeting gun control in three short vignettes of near future armed encounters (hunting and police situations). It is wrapped up by (spoiler) two AIs discussing how to go forward with their different agendas. This is a slight piece but has a neat idea, and you could view this story as the first step on the road to the weapons in A. E. van Vogt’s ‘Weapon Shop’ series (which only work in self-defence).
Q-Ship Militant by Joel Richards tells of a sentient spaceship called Militant acting as a decoy to lure slavers. The narrative alternates between the ship’s point-of-view and that of Calderon, a human mercenary who works for it. Although this gets off to quite a good start, the ending, where they (spoiler) engage in space combat with a slaver and its two prize ships, is routine.
The Shocking Truth About the Scientific Method That Privatized Schools Don’t Want You to Know by Sarina Dorie has an awful title but is, I guess, an okay semi-satire about the travails of Ms Torres, a science teacher in a future education system where sponsors determine what is taught. Torres responds by using a lunchtime science club to teach the children proper science, and the story is about her subsequent problems with the pupils and the system.
The weak twist at the end, when she finally gives up and transfers to another school, is that it is (spoiler) funded by various crank organisations. This all seems a little far-fetched, although this perhaps easier to say from a European perspective than an American one.
I note in passing that the story does the same moaning-about-human-idiocy thing as The Astronaut from Wyoming.
Hubble Rising by C. Stuart Hardwick is another story set in the near future, and this time concerns a private space crew attempting a repair on the Hubble telescope. There are various problems for them to overcome before they can dock with the Hubble, not least its odd wobbling motion. When Kylie, a female astronaut, finally gets onboard, a previous rocket drone attached to the Hubble fires and pushes her and the telescope away from her ship.
The rest of the story is about how she saves herself, which is partly a hardware thing, and partly about her fear of heights. This unlikely phobia mars the story, as does the recounted childhood trauma that caused it (the characterisation in the story comprises this and selections from a music playlist that she plays throughout).⁸ Okay I suppose, just Analog-formulaic.

I’ve already mentioned the Cover above, but there are a number of pieces of Interior artwork by Kevin Speidell, Vincent Di Fate, and Kurt Huggins. I sometimes wonder why they bother with these little spot illustrations (I think they are larger and more impressive in the print edition than the ones I see on my Kindle iPad app), but I liked the Kurt Huggins one for A. J. Ward’s story.
There are three science articles, the first of which is Making Waves: The Inventions of John W. Campbell by Alec Nevala-Lee & Edward M. Wysocki, Jr. This examines Campbell’s sideline as a hobbyist inventor, and includes boring explanations about the operation of a couple of devices (one was patented, and looks related to John R. Pierce’s article in the Feb 1944 Astounding—well, it looks like it’s made from valve amplifiers, anyway).
At the end of the article we come to the nub of the matter:

Campbell never ceased to hope that a great discovery would emerge from the magazine, and this impulse—which had led him to support dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard’s “modern science of mental health,” which survives today as the Church of Scientology—contributed to his almost messianic sense of mission. He badly wanted to come up with an invention that would make him rich, not just for the obvious financial rewards, but for the legitimacy that it would confer on both him and the genre. He once wrote to his sister, “The larger-scale crackpot has to be a millionaire to be a genius, and I’ll be a millionaire.”
The reference to the “crackpot” was especially revealing. Campbell embraced a vision of scientific discovery that was produced by outsiders, as embodied by the tinkerer in his workshop, much like the heroes of his early superscience stories. For most of his life, he described himself proudly as an amateur, which led him to champion fringe beliefs while remaining out of step with the some of the most important research of his time. Campbell enjoyed visiting labs and universities, but he was too independent to participate seriously in the collective efforts—exemplified by the Manhattan Project and the space program—required to meet challenges that were too complex for any one individual. Science fiction had dreamed for decades about atomic power and the Moon landing, but when those goals were fulfilled at last, they arose from the contributions of thousands of professionals, not a few lone geniuses.
In the end, Campbell was left behind by the changing nature of scientific research. He clung throughout his life to an anachronistic notion of the heroic engineer and inventor—which, paradoxically, turned out to be one of his most significant contributions to the culture of the twentieth century. The competent man of science fiction was an unapproachable ideal, but it encouraged countless readers to enter engineering and the sciences, becoming part of the vast communal enterprise in which Campbell himself was never at home. Without the romantic vision of discovery that he presented, however, these fans might never have decided to devote their lives to science. Its values may have prevented Campbell from becoming the inventor he wanted to be, but the community that he created instead turned out to be his one great invention.  p. 50

It’s worth reading the article as context for this last passage.
Saving Columbia: An In-Flight Options Assessment by Eric Choi is an interesting follow up essay to The Greatest Day, the author’s story in this issue. It is an account of the Columbia space shuttle accident and the findings of the subsequent inquiry (this includes material about the options covered in the story). It ends with this:

[The] conclusion of “The Greatest Day” is absolutely the most optimistic possible outcome of the repair scenario. That is a rather sobering thought.  p. 107

The Alternate View by John G. Cramer is a short column about the irreconcilability of quantum theory and general relativity that mostly went over my head (my physical science degree’s quantum theory semester was a long, long time ago) but the conclusion is clear enough:

Contemporary theoretical physics finds itself in a difficult situation: it has become clear that the workhorse theories of QED and QFT, pillars of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, are fundamentally flawed, in some cases give ridiculously wrong predictions, and are in urgent need of replacement. However, no such replacement is on the horizon. New approaches are badly needed.  p. 118

The Reference Library by Don Sakers starts with a short introduction about the lack of empathy in SF, especially in war/conflict fiction, before reviewing four books that could be unsympathetically described as ‘space opera/SF combat filler’ (they seem mostly about humans fighting aliens, or each other, in space). My eyes started glazing over midway through the third review.
Fortunately, there are also four anthology reviews of more interest.⁹
Brass Tacks has three letters, one of which defends John W. Campbell against inappropriate comments made by Jeanette Ng at last year’s Worldcon Hugo Award ceremony.
There are two poems in this issue (neither of which did anything for me), In Theory by Rebecca Siegel and Ghost Transmission by Robert Frazier, and the usual departments, In Times to Come, and Upcoming Events by Anthony R. Lewis.
As it is the first issue of the year there is also The 2019 Index, and the Analytical Laboratory Ballot.

In conclusion, this issue is the usual wild mix of quality that I’ve grown to expect from Analog, from material that is very good to work (almost always at shorter lengths) that is just terrible. This time around there is a lot more good work than bad, and this issue is perhaps the best of the half dozen or so I’ve read over the last few years.

PS As you can see at the top of the page, I’ve decided to start adding a summary. This is not only for another type of post I intend doing, but also because it occurred to me that maybe not everyone wants to read five thousand word reviews about a single issue of a magazine (I’m not sure I’d want to myself).  ●

_____________________

1. Whether they will use the design above on all of this year’s Analog covers (I hope so) or whether they will use a variety (more likely) remains to be seen. This one hails from the early 1960s:

If they cycle through all the cover designs, then we can probably expect something like this for the next issue:

2. Let the cover art breathe (LHS original/RHS edit):

3. Although The Astronaut from Wyoming won that year’s Analytical Laboratory Best Novella category it didn’t do quite so well elsewhere. Its other award wins and nominations are listed on the story’s ISFDB page.

4. Harry Turtledove’s phrase “[they] were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered” is not the most elegant I’ve encountered.

5. Another 90^th anniversary innovation is the production of a podcast: Eric Choi’s The Greatest Day is here.

6. Eric Choi kindly provided (email, December 2019) this background information about The Greatest Day:

The story is adapted from a novelette called “A Sky and a Heaven” that was written for an anthology called Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People edited by Andrea Lobel and Mark Shainblum. There are two main differences between the versions for Analog and Other Covenants. First, the anthology version is very much centered on Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who in my alternate history is shot down during the 1981 Israeli air strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq and ends up years later in America as the lead NASA flight controller for the ill-fated Columbia mission (instead of Wayne Hale in the Analog story). The second significant thread in the anthology version concerns an Israeli scientist and Holocaust survivor named Joachim Joseph, who as a child at Bergen-Belsen was given a secret bar mitzvah ceremony and entrusted with a miniature Torah scroll that decades later flew aboard Columbia with Ilan Ramon (or in my story, the fictional Israeli astronaut Yael Dahan). So, the Analog short story is essentially a standalone adaptation of the engineering elements of the novelette.

7. If you like autonomous spacesuit stories I recommend Iain M. Banks Descendant (Tales from the Forbidden Planet, Titan, 1987).

8. If you use music playlists to characterise the people in your story, can I suggest that you don’t pick One Way or Another by Blondie (a sixty-year-old man’s choice) for a young, female, future astronaut.

9. Sakers’ comment about the anthology Footprints in the Stars’ striking cover made me track it down on Amazon:

This is a much cleaner cover layout than you normally get from US books, and is closer to UK design. I like it. Yes, I am aware of the irony of this given my comments about type defacing cover artwork.
I ended up buying the first book in this anthology series (another striking cover):

If We Had Known, edited by Mike McPhail (eSpec Books, 2017) is available on Amazon UK/ USA.  ●

Edited 10th July 2021: minor text edits.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary
John Loyd, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Trevor Quachri; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes • novella by Howard V. Hendrix ∗∗∗∗
To See the Elephant • novelette by Julie Novakova ∗∗
The Chatter of Monkeys • short story by Bond Elam ∗∗
A Grand Gesture • short story by Dave Creek
Decrypted • short story by Eric Choi ∗∗
Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut • short story by Dominica Phetteplace ∗∗
Focus • short fiction by Gord Sellar ∗
Ténéré • short story by Manny Frishberg and Edd Vick ∗∗∗
The Final Nail • novelette by Stanley Schmidt ∗
The Speed of Faith in Vacuum • short story by Igor Teper ∗∗
Facebook Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate It • short story by Sam Schreiber ∗∗
Vulture’s Nest • short story by Marissa Lingen ∗∗
In the Mists • short story by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg ∗
The Return • short story by Bud Sparhawk ∗
Lips Together • short story by Ken Brady ∗
The Banffs • short story by Lavie Tidhar ∗∗
Where the Flock Wanders • short story by Andrew Barton ∗∗
Proteus • short story by Joe Pitkin ∗∗∗+
Kepler’s Law • novelette by Jay Werkeiser ∗

Non-fiction:
Region NGC 6357 • cover by NASA
Interior artwork • by Kevin Speidell, Vincent Di Fate, Kurt Huggins
Science Fiction and the Virtue of Simplicity • editorial by Richard A. Lovett
Alien Archaeology: Searching for the Fingerprint of Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilizations • essay by Michael Carroll
Strangers • poem by Allina Nunley
Our Leaking Universe • Alternate View essay by John G. Cramer
In Times to Come
Our Religious Conversion • poem by Ken Poyner
The Reference Library • book reviews by Don Sakers
Brass Tacks • letters
Upcoming Events • by Anthony R. Lewis

_____________________

The Girls with Kaleidoscope Eyes by Howard V. Hendrix starts with a female FBI agent tasked to investigate the attempted mass-murder of a group of ten-year old girls by one of their teachers. Over the first half or so of the story Agent Onilongo interviews several people and learns of some perplexing events. Most notable is that all the girls were all conceived on the night of the Big Nodoff, an occurrence which involved everyone in the town falling asleep for an hour early in the morning. After this event a number of the pregnant women reported seeing an angel or other visitation, and this was subsequently interpreted as a divine event by the polygamous Mormon sect that constitutes most of the local population. Also, the nearby NSA base has a secret project that involves an autonomous quantum AI called Sifter, whose role is to analyse all the agency’s information and make predictions.
Apart from these plot elements the story touches on a number of other issues along the way, some significantly, and some fleetingly and perhaps satirically: how humanity’s pervasive use of technology may be transformative, gender, post-humanism and machine evolution, childhood bullying, inclusivity and diversity, etc., etc. I can’t recall reading anything by Hendrix before so if I had to give a one-line pitch for the story it would be (spoiler) ‘Greg Egan vs. The Midwich Cuckoos’, although that may undersell this dense and, at times, fascinating story (it has a slow beginning but a great second half). One for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.

To See the Elephant Julie Novakova grabbed my interest straight away with its clearly drawn characters and setting: an aloof animal psychologist called Adina Ipolla has flown in to a future Kenya to investigate a behavioural problem with a male elephant. The rest of the story concerns her investigation, during which she uses an implant that lets her experience what the elephant is feeling. Unfortunately, the story is too often written (later in the story, at least) in the language of a Biology Ph.D. thesis (the writer’s profession):

Ipolla started explaining: “His amygdala, especially in the right hemisphere, shows quite high activity. The whole HPA axis is firing a lot. The right prefrontal lobe and left inferior frontal gyrus also. I can’t get sufficient spatial resolution from EEG data but I’d say the left insular cortex is also above the norm—though one cannot derive much from these data without context and reliable reference.”
“But—what does it mean for Mgeni?” Robert ventured as he saw the blank faces around him.
“It likely means that he’s experiencing a lot of emotion, especially of the negative kind. Yesterday’s results from the fecal sample showed elevated androgens and glucocorticoids. That is in accord with the HPA axis activity. Basically, these data indicate stress and anxiety. I’ll be able to provide a less obvious insight after I have observed and felt his activity for at least twenty-four hours. “
Kimaiyo stood up. “Alright. Do just that.”
Ipolla shot him a sharp glance. “I intend to, I assure you.”   p. 60-61

She eventually solves an esoteric biological problem, which involves (spoiler) the discovery of an intersex condition.
The Chatter of Monkeys by Bond Elam is initially quite a good story about a young woman who meets an alien robot on a future, poisoned Earth. The Alliance forces in orbit want the robot and pursue her and it into an underground tunnel complex.
This has quite good world building but the ending is a little weak and not entirely convincing (spoiler: the robot has a cure for Earth’s problems but is sent as a bomb to the Alliance craft. I was unsure if it was the real robot she sent or a dummy.)
This story is the first of no less than fifteen short stories included in this issue. I think that this number of short stories in a single issue is a mistake for a couple of reasons. First, when you only have one novella and three novelettes it makes the entire issue feel unbalanced. It is also quite hard to get into the issue: no sooner have you started one story you are on to the next. Second, the sweet spot for short SF is the novelette—good short stories are more difficult to write.
To that latter point, nearly all the short work in this issue is deficient to a greater or lesser extent; some are little more than notions that go nowhere, others don’t develop the idea properly. Some are unconvincing, partly because they don’t hang around long enough to suspend one’s disbelief. You’ll hopefully see what I mean as we go on.
A Grand Gesture by Dave Creek is about two explorers on an alien planet. My eyes tripped over the second sentence:

He and his shipmate, Amaia Moreau, trudged across a planetary surface covered with a tar-like substance.  p. 78

It took me a moment to realise what was covered in tar. Half a page later we get this:

Kayonga felt they should’ve brought a third crewmember with them to stay aboard the shuttle in case of an emergency, but the Belyanka’s commander, Gina Marianthal, overruled that decision, saying they’d never had a problem with two-person exploratory teams before.  p. 78

‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘idiots on an alien planet’ (a common plot device: the movie Promethus, the Werkeiser novelette later in the issue, etc.). Straight away you know the pair are going to get into trouble and, sure enough, en route to a diamond crater on this carbon based planet, they find three small alien creatures in a cave . . . which turn out to be the offspring of the angry adult heading towards them. They end up in the cave with the young aliens, holding off the adult with their stunners (these, by the way, and the scanners they also have, make it read like a defrocked Star Trek story). While all this peril plays out we get a back story full of emotional and interpersonal angst, as if that’s what people would be talking about while menaced by an alien creature.
The planet and aliens are not badly done, but the rest of it reads like something from a poor 1950’s Amazing.
Decrypted by Eric Choi is an interesting piece about quantum computers ending the use of classical encryption techniques, and the resultant change in society (cash and signed credit card clips, long queues at banks, the unmasking of online trolls, etc.). These events are seen through the eyes of a bank teller who ends up at the receiving end of a beating when an online comment he made years ago (and mistranslated from his then native Russian) is traced to him. I liked this but it ends rather abruptly, and so it falls into the ‘not fully developed’ category above.
I thought, before I started it, that Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut by Dominica Phetteplace would be one of the highlights of the issue (I loved her recent series in Asimov’s as well as other work I’ve seen). Unfortunately, this is a low-key and rather glum work about a woman biologist on a Mars colony who can’t get her plants to survive. Paralleling this is an account of her feelings for one of the astronauts. Relationship angst, basically.
Focus by Gord Sellar is about riots triggered by two teenage school kids in a world where the workforce is dosed with a drug called Focus. One of the teenager’s fathers gets caught up in the riots (spoiler) and later dies. This is has some interesting ideas but it didn’t work for me as I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on nor was I convinced by what I did understand.

Ténéré by Manny Frishberg and Edd Vick has a camel caravan in the relatively near future arrive at a wadi to find no water and the surrounding plants burnt. This is not the first time this has happened to the travellers, and they are running short of water. That night, the Arabs in the caravan, who are idealists recreating/re-enacting a lapsed way of life, see the light of a local industrial complex and decide it may be causing the destruction of the wadis. So they go to the plant.
Once there they take over the plant and eventually find that the plant’s process—atmospheric carbon capture for graphene manufacture—is releasing an excess of oxygen, causing not only plants at the local wadis to catch fire, but other problems (increased corrosion at the plant, etc.). After a tense stand-off both sides manage to agree on a solution. This is an interesting story, and certainly better than most of the others, but the ending is a little unconvincing in its idealism.
Breaking up the (seemingly endless) run of short stories is The Final Nail by Stanley Schmidt. This is about a rural doctor who starts seeing a number of ‘alpha-gal’ cases. These are normally caused by tick bites and result in the victim having an anaphylactic reaction to mammal meat, which they can therefore no longer eat. The doctor later develops this condition after meeting another of his colleagues at a restaurant to discuss the clusters of cases that have started appearing all over the world.
After a lot of research (which comprises most of the story) and with the help of a geneticist, he discovers (spoiler) that this condition is spread by genetically engineered mosquitoes. Along the way he gets a number of emails that attempt to warn him off his investigation. There are also a number of mentions of an old patient of his, the daughter of a wealthy man, and her decision to become a vegetarian at age six. She later became a geneticist and, predictably, is eventually linked to the emails. The doctor cannot convince her to stop her militant vegetarianism so he calls in the Feds, who arrest her.
For the most part this is a readable and interesting, if predictable, story. Until, that is, the ending, when the doctor meets Darlene and explains that he stopped her because she hadn’t considered the consequences of her plan:

“I sympathize with what you were trying to do, Darlene. I really do. I admire your empathy for your fellow creatures, and the fact that you can extend it beyond your own kind. A lot of people can’t do that.” He paused and she said nothing. “But you were so intent on protecting them from being eaten that you didn’t think beyond that. You didn’t think about what would happen if you succeeded in getting everybody to stop eating them. “Let me ask you a question, Darlene. Why do cows and pigs and sheep and chickens exist?”
Her frown deepened. Finally she said, “What do you mean?”
“Domesticated food animals are only alive because people raise them to eat, Darlene. If nobody eats them any more, nobody will raise them any more.
“So they’ll go extinct. And the final nail in their coffin will be your attempt at kindness. “
She had gone positively pale. Evidently she really hadn’t thought about it. Or maybe she had, but had deluded herself that it wasn’t a real concern. Fanaticism can do that to a person. But she was too smart to deny it when he said it out loud, and it was hitting her hard.
“Furthermore,” he went on, “there will be rippling side effects. If nobody can eat beef or pork or lamb any more, they’ll turn to other things like poultry and seafood. That’s already starting to happen. The economy’s getting shaky—and it will get worse—because ranchers can’t sell their livestock the way they used to, and chicken and fish farmers can’t keep up with demand. Vegetable growers will have the same problem. If you’d been allowed to keep working and got people to stop eating chicken and fish, those would go, too. And then—”
“Okay, okay, stop!” she said suddenly. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “How could I not have seen . . . That’s not what I wanted, Dr. Strassman! I only wanted to help. …” Her voice trailed off in sobs.
“I know,” he said gently. He wished he could reach through the glass and pat her consolingly. He never wanted to hurt her, either. “But good intentions aren’t enough. You have to think about all the consequences of what you do.”  p. 124-125

The ridiculousness of this passage probably speaks for itself but, if it doesn’t, let me suggest that most vegans or vegetarians would rather have a massive reduction in the number of cows, sheep, pigs, etc. in the world than having them born to a ghastly existence in the meat industry. Even to the point of extinction (although, no doubt, some would be kept in zoos, as pets, etc.). As to vegetable growers not being able to keep up with demand, it takes less land, water, etc. to produce vegetables than meat. Chicken and fish farmers not being able to keep up with demand is only a problem of consumer choice and nothing else.
The thing that really grips me about this story is that it fails to understand that all industries are eventually disrupted. If, in the future, you can grow protein that is indistinguishable from the real thing, the moral issues around killing animals for food will become much starker; if you can do it more cheaply, then the economic forces will be unstoppable (do you think McDonalds is going to use real meat in their hamburgers when they can get an indistinguishable synthetic alternative for half the price? Even if they do, how long do you think they will stay in business when their competitors switch?) The other factor affecting this industry will be future population growth and prosperity, both of which may massively increase the demand for meat. As this happens the amount of land and resources required will eventually become unsustainable (not to mention the methane related greenhouse gas effects). It’s a pity Schmidt didn’t write that story rather than one that panders to the current status quo.
In The Speed of Faith in Vacuum by Igor Teper, a spaceship full of ‘immortals’—humans using cryogenic-sleep on long journeys—returns to a colony after three hundred years. Since their last visit the colony has struggled to survive against the ‘Red Mold,’ a lethal organism. Grigorily, the protagonist, tries to force the returning crew to give them the help they need, rather than that which they are prepared to provide. During this (spoiler) he finds that the ‘Immortals’ are not that well positioned themselves, but they maintain a pretence to keep hope alive on the handful of surviving colonies. I just didn’t find this convincing but, apart from that, it is competently enough done save for an awkward first line that I had to read three times to get its meaning:

The white arc of their trail slicing the ever-flawless lavender sky into before and after, the Immortals descended.  p. 128

I don’t think this is Yodish¹ (the variant of English that Yoda from the movie Star Wars uses) but it’s close. Why not ‘The Immortals descended, the white arc of their trail slicing the ever-flawless lavender sky into before and after’?
Facebook Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate It by Sam Schreiber is an okay piece about an online AI that eventually does what the title says.
Vulture’s Nest by Marissa Lingen starts with the Yaw family decontaminating and salvaging a ship in the Oort. When they get back to port they find there is a surviving family member who owns the ship and he is not happy about what they have done. The rest of the story is about the fallout, and that the narrator’s family are regarded as ‘vultures’ and accordingly harassed. There is a lot of data dumping going on for a short story, and the events that occur don’t justify the amount of world building done. It should have been a longer piece with a better plot or arc, and I suspect it is a chunk of a novel in progress.
In the Mists by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg has a man stranded on an alien planet. Initially we learn that the other two crew members died on arrival but, after various diarised delusions, nightmares and recovered memories, we find out what really happened. Unlikely, unconvincing, and too straightforward.
The Return by Bud Sparhawk and Lips Together by Ken Brady are notions and not much else. In the first, an early and now very elderly astronaut (Buzz Aldrin I think) moans about how easy space travel is in the future. The second has a Japanese woman travel to the USA to transmit a bacterium that will eradicate tooth decay.
The Banffs by Lavie Tidhar is about a writer (I guess Tidhar himself) who starts circulating in the company of ultra-rich and (spoiler) alien beings. He eventually becomes a house-sitter for their many homes and sees a lot of strange things:

He took me down to the basement the one time and showed me the antique, steam-powered computational devices he kept there, in carefully controlled temperature and humidity. I could not guess at the nature of the brass rings and cogs that I saw there, but was overwhelmed by their complexity.
“The Antikythera Mechanism,” he said, referring to the two thousand year old device found off the coast of Greece, “was merely the tip of the iceberg, you know. The Greeks had an advanced culture of analog computing they inherited from Atlantis, before it sank under the waves. “
I nodded, because I didn’t know what to say.
“Babbage was merely reconstructing the technology,” he told me. “From the technical writings of the Arab scholars who studied the remnants of the technology centuries later. “
They talked like this, sometimes. They’d make references to hunting Yetis in the Himalayas (“Disgraceful sport,’’ Helene once said), or talk about an abandoned colony under the South Pole (“Only Elvis lives there now, the poor creature,” Victor Victor said) or how the Ark of the Covenant was really a communication device (“But I don’t know how the Hebrews got hold of it in the first place,” Felipe said, “considering it was lost in the crash, at least we thought it was”).  p. 158

This is moderately entertaining but the story just fizzles out (and so it is little more than an extended idea).
Where the Flock Wanders by Andrew Barton has two explorers in the rings of Saturn looking for ‘Precursor’ artefacts when they discover a wrecked Earth warship. On board they find a safe and, inside, a sealed letter. They disagree about whether to open the letter (they may cause further tension between Earth and the outer planets if it contains what they think it does). One of them, Rho, later does so anyway, and finds out that it is a love letter left for one of the crew. The other crewmember, Static, finds Rho opening the letter and relations between them deteriorate. Okay, but another one that doesn’t amount to much.
Proteus by Joe Pitkin is the second of his ‘John Demetrius’² stories. In this one a woman called Epic Khorasani and a man called Linus Pauling Moody sign up as crew for a shuttle that will run supplies to Proteus, a gigantic airship that flies the skies of Venus, and which is involved in terraforming the planet. Epic and Moody are really spies, and they are travelling to Proteus to gather evidence of breaches of the Human Transgenic Act.
During her long stay (the launch window for the return trip to Earth is five hundred days after their arrival) she learns that altered Proteans, the lilith, are being hidden away on the lower decks while they are there. A chameleon like human—a clear violation of the Transgenic Act—presents himself to Epic, and takes her below to see them:

They came into what seemed a long workroom. Computer workstations, monitors as broad as landscapes in a museum, stood at intervals along the walls. Natural light streamed in via tubes in the floor, the Sun’s reflection on the luminous acid clouds of Venus.
As if in ignorance of the station’s artificial night, two dozen creatures sat or stood or perched at the workstations. “These are shedim,” Glass said, and though he said it softly, every one of them turned to look at her: leopard skinned people and owl-faced ones, a woman with hands of articulated spindles like slim winter branches of oak, a towering hairless figure as muscular as a Canaanite idol. Epic scratched her bare shoulder in the innocuous way that activated her black widow camera.
“Why are you showing me this?” she asked Glass. Glass seemed just a pair of eyes and a dark mouth where he opened it. “We’re not monsters, Epic. We’re people.”  p. 172

This is head and shoulders above the rest of the short fiction in the issue, not least for its concise and lucid prose.
The issue’s fiction ends with Kepler’s Law by Jay Werkeiser. This one is about a mission from a doomed Earth to a planet called Kepler. I didn’t much like this for a variety of reasons. First off, a few of the characters seem entirely unsuited to the mission (one makes a reckless descent in her shuttle and causes a hard landing which damages it and the radio, thus rendering them conveniently incommunicado; another two crewmembers wander off to explore even though it is against the rules, etc.). Secondly, there is too much chatter between the crew about their personal and cultural differences (the pair above include an introvert Japanese and an extrovert American, the latter with an unlikely personality (reckless) and accent. Finally, the maguffin (spoiler) is an obscure biochemical one involving RNA or enzymes in the rain eating away human flesh like acid.

One of Analog’s strengths are its covers, and Region NGC 6357, an astronomical photograph from NASA does not disappoint. There are a few postage stamp-size pieces of Interior artwork by Kevin Speidell, Vincent Di Fate, and Kurt Huggins. If you are going to pay for artist’s work (this page is from the Kindle version of the magazine):

. . . why not use a larger version of the illustration?

Science Fiction and the Virtue of Simplicity by Richard A. Lovett is an editorial that starts with a discussion of the primacy of special effects in SF movies/drama over story telling. This is probably best summarised by this passage:

We simply don’t need all the fancy high-tech eye candy we’ve become so accustomed to seeing.
It’s something we knew long ago as children. How many parents have been startled to discover that their kids would rather play with the boxes their fancy toys came in than with the toys themselves? But when you think about it, it’s not so surprising. The toy is constrained to be whatever its manufacturer created it to be. A box can become anything: rocket ship, racecar, sailboat, time machine—children’s imaginations know no bounds.
Science fiction has long been called the literature of ideas, not the literature of special effects. Could it be that all the high-tech details are too often nothing more than over-engineered toys that strangle our imaginations and stop us from flying to the moons of Procyon IV in cardboard boxes of our own imagination?  p. 6

The last page talks about the continual presence of electronic devices making it difficult to take the time to just sit and observe. I didn’t see the connection between the two parts.
Alien Archaeology: Searching for the Fingerprint of Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Michael Carroll is a science article that starts with the Fermi Paradox (if there are aliens why haven’t they contacted us yet?) and covers a number of other topics, including observational methods of detecting inhabited planets and systems, robot sentinels, travel to other stars, etc. Some of the latter was already familiar to me (e.g. the nuclear bomb powered Orion project), and I started skimming.
There are two poems in this issue. I thought Strangers by Allina Nunley was fairly good (a man’s ancestors lived their lives within five miles of home, but he meets his soul mate in another part of the Universe). Our Religious Conversion by Ken Poyner is about aliens and religion.
Our Leaking Universe is an ‘Alternate View’ essay by John G. Cramer about the Hubble constant, dark matter and unimodular gravity that was way over my head.
The Reference Library by Don Sakers starts off with a potted history of post-apocalyptic SF before the reviews. There are two or three of the reviewed books that sound interesting (and an inexpensive one I bought straightaway, the ‘lost’ novel by Gordon Eklund). I like the useful prefatory information that heads up the reviews, which includes the number of pages and the sub-genre(s) he thinks the book belongs to.
Brass Tacks is only three pages long this issue and has letters commenting on issues of the magazine from the middle to the end of 2016. There is one that mentions a ‘principle/principal’ typo: I spotted a few in this issue myself, many more than I notice in Asimov’s or F&SF (but fewer than here . . . .)

So, overall, and with the obvious exception of the Hendrix and Pitkin pieces, I found this quite a poor issue of Analog. There are far too many short stories. They slowed down my reading rate as, after one of two of these average or mediocre pieces, I was not motivated to keep going. One other thing: considering that Analog readers are (I presume) intelligent, science-orientated people, I would suggest a reduction in the number of idiots in the stories.

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1. A link to a page on Yodish, here is.

2. This information comes from Pitkin’s blog post about the story.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

Edited 9th August 2018: formatting changes.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Colleen Chen, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary
John Loyd, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Trevor Quachri; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
Nexus • novella by Michael F. Flynn ***
Europa’s Survivors • novelette by Marianne J. Dyson *
Eli’s Coming • short story by Catherine Wells ***
Time Heals • short story by James C. Glass *
Shakesville • short story by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro ***+
Host • novelette by Eneasz Brodski **
The Snatchers • short story by Edward McDermott *
Unbearable Burden • short story by Gwendolyn Clare **
Hidden Intentions • short story by Mary E. Lowd
Grandmaster • short story by Jay O’Connell ***
Alexander’s Theory of Special Relativity • short story by Shane Halbach ∗∗
Concerning the Devastation Wrought by the Nefarious Gray Comma and Its Ilk: A Men in Tie-Dye Adventure • short story by Tim McDaniel *
Ecuador vs. the Bug-Eyed Monsters • short story by Jay Werkheiser *
The Human Way • novelette by Tony Ballantyne ***+
Plaisir d’Amour • novella by John Alfred Taylor ***

Non-fiction:
Cover • Tomislav Tikulin
Interior artwork • Vincent Di Fate, Kevin Speidell, Josh Meehan, Joel Iskowitz
Future-Proofing the Near Future: Design Fiction for Global Education • editorial by Nickolas Falkner
Sustainability Lab 101: Cuba as a Simulation of Possible Futures • essay by Stanley Schmidt
Barriers • poem by J. Northcutt, Jr.
Hypothesis/Assertion • poem by Daniel D. Villani
Testing the Neutrino Hierarchy • essay by John G. Cramer
In Times to Come
The Reference Library • by Don Sakers
Brass Tacks • letters
Upcoming Events • by Anthony R. Lewis

There are two particularly good stories in this issue: the first is The Human Way by Tony Ballantyne. This starts with the narrator driving in a Ferrari 456 on an almost completely deserted planet. It isn’t long before we find out that an autonomous AI built the infrastructure for human settlers who never arrived. We also learn that the (female) narrator is a soldier in the second Antarctic Army, and they are on the planet looking for the kidnappers of an alien ‘S.’ As she is driving she sees a woman and two children:

My attention focused in on what the scanners revealed to be a woman and two children, standing blown by the sea breeze at the edge of a wide parking area. I opened up a visual channel, zoomed in. They’d seen me coming. They were waving at me to stop.
“Can you see this, Captain?”
“Uh huh.”
I tapped at my console, brought up the weapons systems.
“I’ve got a clear line on their upper vertebrae. If I take out the adult first, I’d be able to pick off the children before they make it for cover. Get the heads plugged into life support before brain anoxia sets in…
Captain Elton thought it over.
“. . . no. The scan shows the area’s clear. We’ll take a risk. See what they want. “
We’ll take a risk? I thought. What’s this “we”? Still, that’s what I was there for. . .
“Yes, Sir.”
I stepped down my weapon systems. I could see the woman clearly with my own eyes, now. She was shortish with dark curly hair and looked nothing like a soldier. Still, who does nowadays? I guided the car to a halt right beside her and pushed open the passenger door. p. 147-8

The rest of the story involves the army’s search for the S, and it is a fast paced, lively and inventive account:

. . . And all the windows on the train shattered, all at once. A wide band of dust arced to the side, flickering as it engaged with a bullet pattern sweeping down from my right, and then I was rolling, checking the feed from my satellite, firing off to the top corner, rolling again, off the platform, onto the tracks, four more shots. . . .
That’s the euphoria of battle. You need to take a couple of hours to sit back and replay it in slo-mo if you are to truly follow what has happened. In real time, this battle ended in less than fifteen seconds with me pushing a metacarbon knife deep into the belly of a Dalkeith mercenary, just as he grabbed hold of Joanna, me using my body mass to push him off his ridiculous chicken legs and bear him to the ground, my face up close to his, watching the life ebb from those grey eyes as I twisted the knife and sent the narcotic shock into his system.
And then normal time resumed, and I was panting, looking up at Joanna, seeing the horror in her eyes, aware of the blood on my face, hearing the shushing noise the magnetic dust swarm made as it returned to the container on my back. p. 155

The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was what the kidnappers hoped to achieve by kidnapping the S. It is explained earlier in the story that The Human Way wanted to start a war, but the final rambling conversation loses that focus somewhat. If it hadn’t been for this slight failing it would have been a very good story.
Sharing the honours with this story is Shakesville by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. This is a dense, philosophical piece about a man who has fifty quantum echoes of himself from the future in his apartment. They have all traveled back to warn him about a soon to occur fulcrum event that will decide his future path in life. But only one of them is the real ‘him.’

He was the one who told Me that the fifty familiar strangers who had just rung my doorbell, who had waited for Me to open it and had then marched through the threshold, were not of equal legitimacy.
Though they looked like the Me of tomorrow, the Me of five years from now, the Me of forty years from now, the Me who I could aspire to and the Me who I desperately needed to avoid becoming, and though they all claimed to have traveled here from their own particular versions of my future to offer vitally important but mutually contradictory advice, though they are all only projected duplicates who do not need to eat and drink and eliminate wastes, one of the fifty is more real than the others, since he reflects my true future and all the rest are merely flawed reflections created by an error in chronal translation. I did not have to reconcile the paradoxes. I just had to understand that the rest of my life depends on figuring out which Me is giving Me the proper information. p. 88

I’m not as familiar with Analog as I used to be, but this strikes me as a rather atypical piece for the magazine. It is also a very Malzbergian piece, both in its dense style and solipsistic agonising. I am not entirely sure what the story is about. Is it about the unknowability of the future? Not second guessing the life choices we make? Seizing control of our lives? Probably all of these and more. This is one that will reward repeated rereadings (maybe in the Best of the Year anthologies).

Following closely behind these two (perhaps it should be in the same group) is Plaisir d’Amour by John Alfred Taylor. This has a sociologist called Ben who joins the inter-solar system ship Agricola to do research on their society. A new species of humanity crews the ship:

Ben had watched videos of gibbons after someone told him that Ceelies reminded him of the great apes. Not really like gibbons, he decided now, though his companions had the same long arms and short legs. But their chests were narrower, and their wrists normal—not the ball-and-socket joints that allowed gibbons to brachiate from tree to tree. No need to brachiate here.
Ben marveled at the arrogance of last century’s genetic engineers, their ruthless decision to remake humanity for space. Homo sapiens sapiens caelestis. He wondered how happy Ceelies were in their niche. p. 161

Over the next few months he roams the ship interviewing and observing the inhabitants and their society:

Wu messaged Ben that he’d want to attend the mass wedding. Ben wouldn’t miss it for the world, because it was a ritual special to what he privately called his tribe.
Ellen couldn’t come—something about a new crop of lettuce.
The stretch of Main Street outside Wu’s office was magic with blue light. There was low synthesizer music, seemingly East Indian with a drone, but shot through with pizzicati-like birdsong. Wu was holding onto the apex of a conical frame with his toes, and the couples to be married were in an arc at the base. They were dressed fresh from the ship’s fabbers: the grooms, whether immigrants from L5 or citizens of Agricola, wore navy blue studded with tiny gold stars; the brides wore peach. Ben was close in because he wanted to hear the words, but there was no need—the ceremony was unobtrusively amplified.
The marriage service was simple and dignified. After the wedding vows, the newcomers promised to accept and uphold the ship’s articles, and Wu granted them a share in Agricola. Ben realized they weren’t just marrying their partners, they were wedding the ship as well: a new twist on exogamy. p. 174

During his stay, Ben falls in love with Ellen, the woman who was his guide when he first arrived. Both of them are aware that their relationship will be strictly time-limited and that he will leave the ship at the end of his visit.
And that is pretty much it for this low-key slice-of-life piece. There is no plot as such, and only the slightest of narrative arcs, so it is a measure of the writer’s skill that this is an absorbing story.
I have a minor criticism, which is that the first line of this piece is one of the worst I’ve read:

Ben Niehaus knew all about tribes and moieties and phratries, endogamy and exogamy, as well as the pitfalls of participant observation, but never imagined falling in love. p. 161

I had to look up four words and, even after I had, that sentence still didn’t make much sense.

There are other good stories in the issue too, three of which are time travel stories (this is one of the themes of this issue). Nexus by Michael F. Flynn initially appears as if it is just a straightforward example of that sub-genre, but it ends up with considerably more moving parts. But I’m getting ahead of myself. . . .
It starts with a time traveller in a bar who recognises a woman on the TV news (she has just saved a baby from a burning building). He realises that he recognises her from a earlier trip to the past, and wonders if she is the person who has wiped out his timeline. When he leaves the bar two events happen in short succession: he gets in a fight with three guys trying to steal his van, which is actually a time machine in disguise, and sees them off, only to have a monstrous alien appear and pursue him as he is getting in the van. He quickly shifts to another time. Later, he picks the woman up and interrogates her, coming to the conclusion that he may actually be the one who has annihilated his timeline.
After this relatively straightforward opening, the tale becomes considerably more complicated, and introduces (multiple spoilers) an Air Force officer called Zendahl who is actually a member of a secret alien community on Earth called the Apakallu (some are purebred, others are ‘reverts’ or are genetically modified to fit in with humanity like he is). They have noticed the alien creature’s appearance on Earth: it is an aggressive species they call a headhunter, and an enemy of their race from the ancient past. He and two others are tasked to investigate.
In short order we find out more about the alien, who may cause the end of life of Earth if it gets its ship repaired and summons the rest of its people, and are also introduced to a Pentagon analyst called Annie, who is actually an android, as well as Jane, a telepathic PI, who is investigating the fire the baby was saved from. This may all sound a little kitchen sink, and it feels a little like that to begin with, but the writer manages to blend these various elements together quite well. I didn’t entirely buy it, but it is an entertaining enough piece.
Eli’s Coming by Catherine Wells is a time-travel story that gets off to a clichéd start in the present (arrogant CEO/founder/owner swans around the company building doing his own thing) but improves as he travels to 67 CE, just as the Romans are due to breach the walls of Masada. The people inside the town are about to start committing suicide to avoid falling into the hands of the Romans.
This is one of those time travel tales that are really a historical story in disguise, but there’s a clever twist ending I didn’t see coming.
Grandmaster by Jay O’Connell opens with a woman writer reading her sleeping husband’s overnight work on a collaborative manuscript before she continues the piece. A knock at the door disturbs her, and she opens it to find that the visitor is a strangely dressed young woman. The writer invites her into the apartment and discovers the woman is a time-traveller who can only stay for five minutes in this time period. The time-traveller wants to use that time to tell the writer that she should have been given a Grandmaster (Nebula) award in the future but wasn’t. The time-traveller shows the writer a smartphone with a mocked-up picture of the award, explaining she couldn’t bring any physical objects back. The writer asks:

“No twonkies allowed?”
The girl shakes her head. “Artifacts brought back from the future? No’’
“It’s not fair that you know my made up words but I don’t know yours.”
The girl shimmers. “No it’s not, I guess.”
“Memories?” the woman says quickly. “You leave those?”
The girl nods. “Oh yes! Yes, you should remember this. Um.” She checks her screen. “There’s more I wanted to say but the ligature is collapsing. I’m almost done. Can we hug?” She asks.
The woman nods grimly. “Why not?”
The embrace lasts only a few seconds. “Thank you,” the words whispered hotly in her ear smell like peppermint. And without any transitional oddness, the woman finds herself completely alone again, the whiff of candy still in her nostrils. p. 125

The ‘twonkies’ reference suggests the writer is C. L. Moore (and the sleeping husband Henry Kuttner). I didn’t quite understand the point of the piece until I had a quick look on Wikipedia,¹ which states that a later husband quashed the proposal of a Nebula Grandmaster Award for Moore due to the writer’s advanced Alzheimer’s, for fear of the upset and confusion it might have caused her.
The story is a touching tribute, and it’s fitting that it has appeared in Analog (Astounding published many of Moore/Kuttner/Padgett/etc.’s best stories).
One minor point: the Vichy France references at the beginning made me think the story was set there until I was further on.

The also-rans include a few that are OK, such as the Brodski and Clare stories, but don’t entirely work for whatever reason. Host by Eneasz Brodski is about a boy called Julian, who lives on an outer system habitat and regularly skips school. During one of these absences he attempts to get to the other side of the habitat and reunite with a friend who has moved. During this preamble we also learn of the Abominations, who have attacked and destroyed habitats around Neptune. Once Julian arrives at the other side of the habitat he is caught up in an attack. The Abominations are zombie/Borg-like humans whose bite infects the recipient and thereafter links it to the hive mind. There are also a number of sidebars that present more philosophical material. Ultimately there are interesting parts to this but it doesn’t entirely convince.
Unbearable Burden by Gwendolyn Clare Is narrated by an AI who talks about his own existence and that of several others, one of whom has committed suicide. This is quite interesting as far as it goes but is little more than the opening act in a longer piece. The obvious editorial response should have been, ‘Where is the rest of it?’
Alexander’s Theory of Special Relativity by Shane Halbach has a time machine malfunction causing a woman to return to her partner after eleven years in the future, whereas only ten minutes have passed for him. Relationship difficulties ensue.

Europa’s Survivors by Marianne J. Dyson has a narrator called Carrie, a scientist with terminal cancer who goes to a research outpost on Europa. On landing her spaceship punches through a thin ice layer to the station which is below below a thicker protective one, the ship damaging one of the pumps that stops the access shaft freezing shut on the way through. After landing she meets Dr Lee, her fellow research scientist, and Olsen, who runs operations. Lee then goes out in a pod to recover a filter on the damaged pump, runs into difficulties, and gets stuck in ice at the surface, a high radiation environment. Cassie goes out in another pod to rescue him.
The other part of the story is the science nugget, which is about the bacteria in the filter. These bacteria may be of Europan origin (or are maybe just contamination from Earth). The scientists want to recover them as they are radiation resistant and propagate few mutations in their DNA.
For some, this will be an OK story, I guess, but there are several things you’ll need to overlook to think so. Apart from the two-dimensional characters (Cassie and Olsen start flirting like teenagers almost immediately they meet), I could also have done without the cutesy artificial pets they all have to monitor their health. There is also a ridiculous attitude to risk for people in such a hazardous environment: when Lee is in trouble, Cassie just decides she is going to go off and rescue him. No risk assessment, no chain of command, etc. I would suggest this is just not how people would conduct themselves in this type of environment. Well, not unless they all want to experience quick and horrible deaths. There is also an ending that you can see coming a mile off and one which is far too pat, not to say mawkish (you can probably guess what it is from what I’ve described already).

Time Heals by James C. Glass has a man going back in time to kill the abusive stepfather he had as a boy. He learns something that makes him change his mind about the man. A rather unengaging by-the-numbers time-travel story, with any possible paradox questions sidestepped; and another mawkish ending.
The Snatchers by Edward McDermott is about ‘snatchers’ who go back in time to seize the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery from Corsica in1944. Once the narrator and his female accomplice get there they start carrying out their plan. This is well enough done for the most part—there are various complications, including Time’s attempt at killing them to restore the status who—but its pessimistic end is rather abrupt.
Hidden Intentions by Mary E. Lowd is an awful, twee Probability Zero piece (is there any other kind?) about a dragon like alien being irritated by a small child she is babysitting. Solution: put her in a spacesuit and fool her into going into the airlock, before spacing her for an hour’s peace and quiet.
Concerning the Devastation Wrought by the Nefarious Gray Comma and Its Ilk: A Men in Tie-Dye Adventure by Tim McDaniel starts with a man waking up in the middle of the night to find two men digging up the plants in his garden. They later explain to him that these plants attract butterflies, and that certain instances of butterflies flapping their wings cause tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes, etc. Leaden humour.
Ecuador vs. the Bug-Eyed Monsters by Jay Werkheiser is an SF sports story: these are generally not my cup of tea and this one proved no exception. An Ecuadorian football team play football in an orbiting alien habitat where the low grav environment and Coriolis effects caused by its rotation cause the players difficulties. Added to this are a rivalry between two players for a woman, and suspicion about the opposing alien teams’s intentions. I found the game play descriptions boring and ended up skimming through those parts of the story.

The Cover by Tomislav Tikulin illustrates the Flynn story. I’m not a big fan of alien covers, at least not on current day magazines.
There is the usual postage stamp size Interior artwork by Vincent Di Fate, Kevin Speidell, Josh Meehan, and Joel Iskowitz. I’m curious: is the art the same size in the physical edition? I presume they shrink it for the digital version, but can’t think why.
Future-Proofing the Near Future: Design Fiction for Global Education by Nickolas Falkner is an interesting editorial that if, I recall correctly (my summary note disappeared), starts off talking about the moon landings and segues into ‘design fiction’ being written to aid education in the future. I think these two quotes will give you a flavour:

Many works by science fiction authors in the area of space exploration are examples of what Bruce Sterling has referred to as “design fiction,” a term coined by Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory.’ Design fiction is “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” This is not just storytelling; this is designing prototypes and examples of a world that has somehow been changed. In this changed world, we now have new possibility, and this provides room in which creative human thought can posit solutions and pathways to reach this new state.
The design fiction may not be real, but it allows visions of new possibilities. p. 5

Many authors portray a system rejected by the American pragmatists one hundred years ago, not reflecting what we do in 2016. Education has changed and improved. Active learning, where students participate in the educational activity, is now used much more frequently, because it increases student performance. Student creativity is harnessed. Groups are used to form highly effective learning clusters. Educators now have serious debates as to whether they should expose students to a sequence of lectures (with an information retention rate around 20%) when they could be working with the students in active learning (retention around 60%). p. 6

My heart sank a little when I read the last sentence: when I completed a postgraduate teacher training course in the mid-1990s, the lecturers were trying to nudge the profession to adopt pupil-centred learning (which I presume is analogous to active learning). To find they are still having a debate about it some twenty years later is really quite depressing. The idea that you only need to stand at the front of a class and talk at your pupils—thereby filling them up with education as if they are empty vessels—belongs with the dinosaurs.
Sustainability Lab 101: Cuba as a Simulation of Possible Futures by Stanley Schmidt is another interesting piece, this time about Cuba’s ‘Special Period,’ when the country had to make massive changes to its society in the late 1990s to respond to cancelled Russian oil imports. Schmidt notes that, while the Cubans managed this very well, and that the change to a lifestyle (more work on the land, more use of pushbikes, etc.) has health benefits, it would be better to not get into the situation in the first place, as they now have less leisure time, ability to travel, etc.

People who don’t have to live it have often extolled the supposed virtues of “the simple life.” Even this magazine, back in its Astounding days, published Fredric Brown’s short story “The Waveries,” in which some rather unusual aliens quietly made it impossible for Earth’s humans to continue using electricity, and everybody wound up happier with the quieter, more limited life that resulted. Much as I admire Fredric Brown, it has always seemed to me that that particular story glossed over the difficulties of the transition way too casually and made the end result look a lot rosier than I think it would be. p. 46

He then goes on to discuss the issue that almost no one mentions when they talk about resources or global warming, which is that any advances you make in tackling those problems will be undone by an ever-increasing population, and that latter issue is the one that needs to be urgently addressed. It’s hard not to like an article that reinforces your own opinions!
There are two poems in the issue, Barriers by J. Northcutt, Jr. and Hypothesis/Assertion by Daniel D. Villani, both of which struck me as rather ponderous.
Testing the Neutrino Hierarchy by John G. Cramer is a rather rarefied article on neutrino mass hierarchy.
The Reference Library by Don Sakers starts with a potted history of action/adventure SF. Unfortunately, this kind of thing just brings out the nit-picker in me:

The New Age period of the 1960s and 1970s was largely idea-oriented, although quintessential New Age author Michael Moorcock produced his own share of action/adventure SF. p. 194-195.

It’s ‘New Wave’ not ‘New Age,’ an error that occurs twice. Although he did produce some adventure SF during that period (The Ice Schooner) Moorcock produced mostly fantasy.
Some of the reviews are of work that could be described as ‘product,’ i.e. StarCraft Evolution by Timothy Zahn, an entry in a ‘military science fiction media franchise,’ but there are also reviews of books from Bova, Spinrad, Dickson, etc.
Brass Tacks has an interesting letter form Robert P. Odenweller of Bernardsville, New Jersey:

I first started reading Astounding in 1948 or 1949, and have been a subscriber for almost all of the years since. Until recently, I have read each issue from cover to cover, but some stories in the last few years have just not worked; they happen to be those written in present tense, with a few notable exceptions.
Where this style of writing came from puzzles me, but I’ve been told that it is normal for People magazine, which I have never seen, so cannot comment. The voice of the story is important, and this style loses me. One such story recently was so difficult to follow that I gave up on it, a great rarity for me. p. 200

That is almost seventy years as an Astounding/Analog reader.
There is also this from Elka Tovah Davidoff of Malven, Massachusetts:

I was frustrated that the Journeyman story in June didn’t have any “previously appeared in” notes. I spent the whole story trying to remember what had happened previously, and which characters we had seen before, which made it much harder to immerse myself in the story.
Conversely, I was thrilled that “Fall” in July /August started with a synopsis. I was able to begin the story with the backstory firmly in mind, and therefore enjoyed it much more. Please continue doing this for serial stories! p. 201

I mentioned the potential problems with series stories in a recent F&SF review. These sound like they are badly written and/or structured.

Overall a mixed bag, but there is a lot of good longer work so worth a look.

1. From Wikipedia: She developed Alzheimer’s disease but that was not obvious for several years. She had ceased to attend the meetings when she was nominated to be the first woman Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America; the nomination was withdrawn at the request of her husband, Thomas Reggie, who said the award and ceremony would be at best confusing and likely upsetting to her, given the progress of her disease.

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ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Bob Blough: Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: TPI’s Reading Diary
John Loyd: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Sam Tomaino: SFRevu
Various: Goodreads

Editor, Trevor Quachri; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
The Proving Ground • novella by Alec Nevala-Lee ♥♥♥
Twilight’s Captives • novelette by Christopher L. Bennett ♥
Orbit of Fire, Orbit of Ice • short story by Andrew Barton ♥
Long Haul • short story by Marie DesJardin ♥
Catching Zeus • short story by Tom Jolly ♥♥♥
Drifting Like Leaves, Falling Like Acorns • short story by Marissa Lingen ♥
Throw Me a Bone • short story by Stanley Schmidt ♥
Dall’s Last Message • short story by Antha Ann Adkins ♥
The Last Mayan Aristocrat • short story by Guy Stewart ♥♥
The Shallowest Waves • novelette by Thoraiya Dyer and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro ♥♥♥
Necessary Illusions • short story by Tom Greene ♥♥♥+
Paradise Regained • short story by Edward M. Lerner ♥♥♥+
Briz • short story by Jay Werkheiser –
Split Signal • short story by Joel Richards ♥♥♥
After the Harvest, Before the Fall • novelette by Scott Edelman ♥♥♥
Whending My Way Back Home • novelette by Bill Johnson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Kurt Huggins
Interior artwork • by Eldar Zakirov, Josh Meehan,
Canons to the Left, Canons to the Right • editorial by James E. Gunn
Poetry • Ken Poyner, F. J. Bergmann
Rendezvous with a Comet: How ESA’s Rosetta Mission is Decoding Ancient Planetary Mysteries • science essay by Richard A. Lovett
The Discovery of Planet Proxima B • science essay by John G. Cramer
Biolog: Tom Greene • autobiographical essay by Richard A. Lovett
In Times to Come
The Reference Library • book reviews by Don Sakers
Brass Tacks • letters
2016 Index
It’s Anlab Time Again: The Analytical Laboratory
Upcoming Events • by Anthony R. Lewis

There are a couple of particularly good stories in this issue and a handful of good ones. The two that fall into the first category are the stories by Tom Greene and Edward M. Lerner.
In Necessary Illusions Tom Greene appears to be channelling early 1950’s Charles Harness, and I mean that in a good way:

Ilra took the corridor from her armory-boudoir and came into the Ouranos by the hidden door at the back. Her brother Pallaton already stood in his place on the raised Pontus at the center of the dome. Prismatic light from overhead colored the white skirts of his allcover, a twin of her own. Ilra walked with the small steps that her armored skirts allowed and mounted the Pontus. She found her place on Pallaton’s left, as always, by feeling through her slippers for the depression in the marble where generations of Successors had worn away the stone. p.118

She looked up at the inner surface of the dome, six meters overhead, at the amphorae in their copper brackets. Though most believed them to be purely decorative, the whole room was in fact a relic of the Ship, its secrets intelligible only to those in the line of succession. Ancient sensors, also salvaged from the Ship and concealed in commemorative arches built in every population center on Iolus, collected data on the emotional state of citizens who passed near them. Those data were transmitted here and rendered as a real-time map of the collective mood of the citizens in each region. There, in a scattering of vessels small as perfume bottles, twinkled the amber sense of purpose that suffused the pioneers in the Ilgezg mountains. There, in a barrel-sized tank representing the coastal towns, glowed the teal satisfaction of the newly prosperous merchant class. And here, at the apex of the dome, shone the steady crimson of the capitol itself. The sensor network had been used for the same purpose during the long generations of the Passage, giving the Auruspex ample warning of where trouble lay well before it could manifest. p. 120

This tale of the brother and sister rulers of a five hundred year old Terran colony called Iolus, and the Dey and Rakane representatives of a Galactic Empire seeking to absorb it, is gripping stuff. If it hadn’t been for the fact that it tails off a little towards the end this would have been a four-star job. Even with that minor criticism its engaging plot and succinct, lucid prose makes this a striking example of the ‘Good Old Stuff,’ and hopefully it is the start of a series. I look forward to seeing more of this writer’s work regardless.
The Biolog by Richard A. Lovett that follows the piece identifies Tom Green as an English professor at a community college in Massachusetts. It is not the kind of story you would expect from an academic.
The other highlight of the issue is Paradise Regained by Edward M. Lerner. This starts off as a fairly standard generation starship/devolved civilization story, although in this case the settlers reached their destination before it all started going wrong.
The hunter/gatherer-like protagonist wanders the winter landscape until he sees that his father has not completed the daily flag change at the ship. When he goes there he finds his father has died. Later, he has a conversation with the ship:

“Ship? How can I help you?”
“I don’t think you can.” As always, Ship’s colored lights blink just a little faster when it speaks. I do not know why. “At least not yet.”
“How did Father help you?”
“He taught you to read. And he waited.”
“Waited for what, Ship?”
“For me to finish.”
Father said Ship is always right. That, I remember, though I do not understand. Why make me promise to come back? To wait? To do nothing?
I say, “You must need something.”
“Yes,” Ship says. “I need helium-3.”
I think I understand. When his leg went bad, Father could not walk. “I will go. Where can I find this . . . helium?”
“Nowhere on Paradise,“ Ship says. “Perhaps on what you call Big Ship.”
I twitch. “How can I get to Big Ship?”
“You can’t.”
“What can I do?”
“Read the diary.”
I do not understand how reading helps Ship or me. “What else can I do?”
Ship says, “You can wait.” p. 132

The second part of the story recounts, through his examination of the diary entries and the ship’s explanations, what happened when the ship arrived, which was the genetic modification of the livestock and humans on board to enable them to survive on the planet. As a result, humans are now compelled by pheromones released by native vegetation and each other into certain behaviours. These involve avoiding each other in the winter months, and children leaving their families at the onset of puberty. All this has had an adverse effect on the level of civilization that humanity has been able to maintain.
Meanwhile, the ship is running out of fuel but, before that happens, it is trying to create a retrovirus to undo the changes.
When I started reading this my initial thoughts were that we didn’t really need any more generation spaceship gone wrong stories, but this is a pretty good and interestingly novel variation on the theme.
Finally, I’ve criticised a couple of stories recently for not really having an appropriate last line or paragraph. Look at the final two paragraphs and last line of this one when you get to them: they are spot on.

The stories that fall into the ‘good’ group start with The Proving Ground by Alec Nevala-Lee. This novella is set on the Marshall Islands (the location of Bikini Atoll and the H-bomb tests). It is a mixture of Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, corporate skulduggery, and the island’s residents attempting to engineer their way out of a global-warming induced sea level rise.

The atoll had an average elevation of two meters, and the estimated increase in sea level meant that the high tide would sweep over the few spots of land that survived. If they wanted to remain a country, at least in the eyes of the courts that would award reparations from developed nations to regions destroyed by climate change, they had to make some new real estate of their own. Seen in the right light, it was almost comical. A country could be compensated for the loss of its territory, but without any land, it would not be considered a country.
Hence the artificial island. Turning back to the seastead, Haley reminded herself that it was only a beginning. They had a few decades to set up wave turbines, to make the bases of the wind towers watertight, to build up fish farms and bioreactors until they could live here indefinitely on their own, no matter what happened elsewhere. It had all been born of trial and error, and they had made big mistakes already. But as she looked out at the lagoon, reflecting on what else lay sunk below its surface, she knew that she could not trust anyone except for herself. p. 13

It’s a slightly uneven read (it has a rather humdrum start) but by the end it manages to have covered quite a lot of ground, and it also provides a scientific explanation of the birds’ homicidal mobbing behaviour.
Catching Zeus by Tom Jolly is set in an iron-rich area of Quebec where two scientists are searching for a naturally occurring superconductor—when the Russians aren’t slashing their tyres or the Chinese shooting at them. This has a breezy, engaging style and reads a little like a modern Western.
The Shallowest Waves by Thoraiya Dyer and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has a narrative with two strands. The first is about a scientist called Charlotte who is trying to get money to send a probe to Europa to search for life. Her story is set in a future Norway that has been subject to extreme climate change (the Gulf Stream has stopped) and involves her young son. The second story is set over a hundred years later on Europa and concerns a diver called Jurek. His job is as a diver in the Europan waters, sampling for native life-forms.
Both of these threads are neatly tied together at the end, and I enjoyed the story well enough, but there were a number of aspects that had me reaching for my wannabe editor’s hat.
First off, there is enough drama in here for the Christmas Special of Eastenders (foreign readers insert your own national soap opera here). We have (spoiler): a child’s death, a suicide, and a character’s major emotional angst about leaving his mum in an old folk’s home on Mars. I realise there wouldn’t be a story without the first, but the second is just superfluous.
The other problem I have is with Jurek. Apart from his ever present angst, he is one of those law-unto-himself types who continually breaks the rules (he modifies his telemetry data and ignores his suit alarms while diving in this extreme environment). You would hope that people like that would be weeded out in the selection process before their reckless behaviour killed them and/or their crew mates. Oh, and spare me the data-dump reveries about your mother when you are supposedly in the middle of a hazardous mission: I’m pretty sure your mind would be otherwise occupied.
Two minor observations about the first couple of paragraphs:

Clouds catfight over the isolated island, hissing lightning and pissing rain.
Distantly, on a horizon only made visible by a silver glimmer on the night-time sea, a small cloud clearing allows the moonlight through, and Charlotte hopes it’s a sign, even as she taps her earpiece to turn the wide balcony door from window in to smartscreen. p. 106

I don’t have a problem with bad language (Bug Jack Barron could have done with being swearier if you ask me) but ‘pissing’ is a completely inappropriate word choice given the tone of the rest of the story, never mind that there is a quote by Ovid preceding it. Also, by ‘a small cloud clearing’ do you mean ‘a small clearing in the clouds,’ or maybe ‘a break in the clouds’? And yes, I’m aware I’m lobbing bricks out of my greenhouse here.
Split Signal by Joel Richards starts off with a female PI being hired by a dead writer, or more accurately his computer persona. She is briefed that an unauthorised copy of the writer’s persona was made during the upload process, and it is currently being held captive by a sleazy computer consultant and forced to produce new best-selling books.
Slicky written and cleverly worked out, this (spoiler) climaxes in a courtroom scene that determines whether personas have the same rights as humans.
After the Harvest, Before the Fall by Scott Edelman tells of a group of people who are born to be ‘harvested.’ It starts with their religious leader, Daniel, waiting at the gates of their reservation to collect ten new arrivals (babies) and take them back to his village. En route he encounters Erza: he is a rebel who will not submit to the harvestings that periodically occur. Daniel tries to change his mind, driven by an intensely religious belief that this is the destiny of the people in the reservation.
Once back at the village Daniel distributes the babies to various families. By the next morning they have grown into young children. Soon after they are led astray by Erza, and are missing when the soldiers turn up to undertake a harvesting, i.e. take some of them away so their bodies can be used as hosts for the personalities of the wealthy people who live in the city outside the settlement.
To be honest the story’s set-up is a little hard to accept, but there is an interesting tension between religious belief and atheism in the story that makes up both for this and an ending that isn’t as good as the rest of it.
It is probably the most un-Analog-ish story here and I wonder if it was submitted to Asimov’s SF first.
Whending My Way Back Home by Bill Johnson is the third story in his ‘Martin & Artie’ series. Martin is a time-traveller and Artie is the AI he has plugged into his head. It would appear that Martin is stranded in the past and cannot time-travel to the future. If I understand the concept correctly, the only way Martin can get ‘home’ is by ensuring his current timeline evolves the way he wants it to, while Artie the AI maintains his body. Presumably this means he is going to live thousands of years in the process.
In the meantime, the pair collect information from the natives while Martin makes beer and carves arrows out of flint. One female time traveller departs and another one arrives. She contracts the plague and is cured by Martin using tetracycline in his beer. At the end, (spoiler) two individuals from the future come for Martin, a priest and a military man, but they don’t manage to prevent him from eliminating a certain type of wheat mutation that would keep the course of history on their timeline (Hannibal would be able to feed his army and take Rome), and they disappear.
I enjoyed what I read here and kicked myself for not reading the two other stories first: the rating partially adjusts upwards for my omission. I’ll dig the other two stories out directly.
One minor point: the proofreading generally seems quite good in Analog: how did the unnecessary possessive apostrophe in ‘“The army protects its’ own,” Ianna said.’ on p. 173 sneak through?

Of the rest of the stories The Last Mayan Aristocrat by Guy Stewart is the only one I’d rate as OK. This is about the last of the Mayan princesses and an alien who convinces her to take his bones, after he has died, to a meteorite crater so that his people can find them when they return to Earth. This is well enough told and has an interesting setting, but the story doesn’t quite convince: what was her motivation to do this exactly?
I didn’t much care for the following, and would note that this group contains the majority of the short work: there is a marked quality versus length correlation in this issue.
Twilight’s Captives by Christopher L. Bennett is set in the author’s ‘Only Superhuman’ series and has a human-alien conflict where children are being held hostage. Trying to negotiate their release is an ambassador called Madeleine, so long-lived that she has twenty six generations of descendants.
There is quite a lot I didn’t like about this one. To begin with, the alien names are hard to follow, which is not helped by the now hackneyed habit of shoving an apostrophe in the middle of them.¹ It also goes on for far too long, the entire story being little more than a marathon talking-heads session as Madeleine tries to negotiate the release of the children (it didn’t surprise me to later find out that most of this writer’s output is at novel length). Finally (spoiler), it climaxes in a mawkish ending where, essentially, the mothers on both sides sort things out by exercising their maternal common sense in the middle of an armed uprising. All of which leaves you wondering why you had to read through thousands of words of negotiations in the first place.
Orbit of Fire, Orbit of Ice by Andrew Barton sets two astronauts aboard a derelict future Skylab to move it from its collision course with another satellite. After the manoeuvring burn their shuttle malfunctions and they are stuck in a decaying orbit. They (spoiler) go EVA to attempt a high-risk rendezvous with their shuttle.
All the above is pretty much by the numbers. I also found the emotional state of one of the two completely unconvincing (Chizuru withholds information from the other astronaut and acts semi-hysterically and suicidally at points—there is a subsequent data dump about childhood trauma and the fact she ‘has no-one left’).
Long Haul by Marie DesJardin has Jubrin, a cargo pilot, visit a pet shop while wandering around town. She buys a translucent, tentacular alien, and time passes. Later, when revisiting the same port, her alien is mistreated by one of the dock workers. She subsequently hooks up with a bar owner. The final section (spoiler) has the dock worker killing Jubrin’s pet (even though it is locked up in her spaceship at the time) and then she kills him in a fight before fleeing the planet.
Apart from its simple, depressing plot (woman buys dog, man kills dog, woman kills man) this has a style that doesn’t match its content and is, at times, quite crudely written. The pickup scene between the bar owner and Jubrin is particularly cringe-inducing:

Nirmalia was a reassuring bulk against her breastbone, dozing in the dim light. But Jubrin was keenly aware of the warm body next to hers, its owner exuding confidence and strength. Her mouth grew dry.
“You don’t know me from Hesperus,” Molk continued. “And there’s no hard feelings either way. But if you want someone to keep the hounds at bay—and I don’t mean that backbiter Halik, but the dogs that gnaw at your soul in the reaches of the void, well—I’ve been there. It’s the touch of a human hand you need, the warmth of good rich blood under the skin. “ He lightened his tone. “There. I’ve said my piece. But let me add, no one’s ever left my place with a heart heavier than when they came in. And both couch and bed are very comfortable!”
Jubrin chuckled. “Do you mean comfortable for two people together, or one in each?”
“I would say that’s up to you. Talk is another kind of bridge, only thinner. “
“A bridge?”
“To humanity. To what you are.” Gently, Molk caressed the back of her neck, gathering her hair into his huge hand. Jubrin closed her eyes, relishing the touch. “Talk helps, too. You’d look fine sitting in my room, with the yellow light touching your skin. But finer still with your soft hair spread over the pillow, your lovely eyes closed, and a smile on your face. “ p. 70-71

Drifting Like Leaves, Falling Like Acorns by Marissa Lingen is set in an army fort in an alien jungle. Here the protagonist issues the veterans psychotropic frogs to calm them. Nearby there are modified humans called gliders that are later tasked to carry bombs to the enemy.
I wanted to like this odd and quirkily engaging story more than I did, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.
Throw Me a Bone by Stanley Schmidt is a Probability Zero (tall) tale about a palaeontologist whose career is ruined when he finds a single huge bone. You may be more entertained by the punch line than I was.
Dall’s Last Message by Antha Ann Adkins is set in an alien ecosystem and involves a sea saucer being captured by a water wraith just as it is about to harden and leave its last message. This one is a bit pointless.
Briz by Jay Werkheiser introduces aliens that communicate by magnetic fields and absorption emission spectra.

Proximity to the ship’s prime was a rare pleasure. Briz studied her light curve, radiating far up the infrared and studded with absorption lines in a pleasing pattern. Her magnetic field washed over him enticingly, rippling with information.
Important information.
He cooled his blackbody temperature apologetically.
Her magfield hissed at a frequency indicating the ship’s fusion reactor, while her light curve intensified to show danger. Magfield modulations conveyed detailed information—explosion, hull breach, a pod of workers and much of the boron-11 fuel vented to space. p. 140

The ship is compromised and there is an onboard rivalry between two pod leaders to savage the ship. They end up heading towards a hot star with anomalous transmissions. Presumably this is Earth and this is the first in a series of stories.
This is all rather hard to follow, as you can probably gather from the extract above.

The Cover by Kurt Huggins is done in a flat comic book style that I don’t particularly care for (and I note that F&SF have done something similar with their last two issues as well. I hope this is not a new trend in SF cover artwork.) There is some Interior artwork by Eldar Zakirov and Josh Meehan but the illustrations are (in the electronic edition anyway) rather small and inconsequential. I’m not really sure why they bother.²
Canons to the Left, Canons to the Right is a short editorial by James E. Gunn about the books that he used in teaching a course on SF.
Rendezvous with a Comet: How ESA’s Rosetta Mission is Decoding Ancient Planetary Mysteries by Richard A. Lovett examines the discoveries made by the Rosetta probe. If, like me, you kept an eye on the TV news about this mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov—Gerasimenkot, you’ll find this article particularly interesting. It discusses what was learned, mostly summarised in the penultimate paragraph:

That means that for writers, Rosetta is a godsend. It shows that comets have jets, giant pits, caverns, amorphous ice, goosebumps, D/H ratios worth studying, wildly complex topographies, and escape velocities so low you could accidentally leap into orbit . . . and who knows what else. The Rosetta scientists have even seen windblown dust dunes on the comet’ s surface, something that’ s only possible if gases are spewing out at speeds up to three hundred meters per second—a staggering 670 miles per hour. On a body with an escape velocity of only 2.2 miles per hour, you would not want to be stepping at the wrong time across a fissure from which such a jet might emerge. p. 38

The Discovery of Planet Proxima B by John G. Cramer is another science essay, and it looks at the habitability of the nearest planet to our solar system, Proxima B. This is concisely done, but given the planet’s distance, and the speculative nature of much of the information used, it seems a rather pointless exercise.
There is Poetry by Ken Poyner (which I thought was OK) and F. J. Bergmann.
The annual Circulation Statement shows an average print circulation of almost 20,000 copies.
In Times to Come starts off with a notice about the change in publication schedule to bimonthly before discussing next issue’s contents.
The Reference Library by Don Sakers looks at several books, including one that appears to be self-published (A Crack in the Sky Above Titan by Andrew D. Thaler). Sakers says it ‘is the sort of story you’d expect to be the two-part serial starting in Analog’s next issue.’
There is a very short Brass Tacks letters column, and a 2016 Index plus its associated It’s Anlab Time Again: The Analytical Laboratory annual reader’s vote. Finally there is a list of Upcoming Events by Anthony R. Lewis.

To conclude, there is some interesting material in this issue, mostly at longer length. I note that the weakest of the material is much poorer than the equivalent in Asimov’s SF or F&SF.

1. Try saying  Aksash’sk, Ch’kihha or Mufii-kalaa out loud a few times. How well can you remember their names a few minutes later?
2. One of the internal illustrations:

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

Other reviews:
Colleen Chen, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)

Fiction:
Seven Ways of Looking at the Sun-Worshippers of Yul-Katan • novelette by Maggie Clark ♥
Soap Opera • novelette by Edward M. Lerner ♥♥
Alloprene • short story by Stephen R. Wilk ♥♥
Early Warning • short story by Martin L. Shoemaker ♥
Sleep Factory • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥
Most Valuable Player • short story by Eric Choi ♥
Diamond Jim and the Dinosaurs • novelette by Rosemary Claire Smith ♥♥
Playthings • novelette by Stephen L. Burns ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Diamond Jim and the Dinosaurs • cover by Bob Eggleton
Internal artwork • Tomislav Tikulin, Vincent Di Fate
The Autumn of Modern Science • essay by Michael F. Flynn
Maggie Clark • biographical sketch by Richard A. Lovett
Composing Speculative Cities • essay by Mark C. Childs
Final Dispatch • poem by Robert Frazier
A Certain Uncertainty • essay by Edward M. Lerner
In Times to Come
The Reference Library • book reviews by Don Sakers
Brass Tacks • letters
Upcoming • by Anthony Lewis

I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Analog for a few months now and should have really started with the January issue; however, I was so taken by Bob Eggleton’s beautiful cover for this one that I picked up it up instead. One of the criticisms I made of a recent F&SF cover was that its limited colour palette made it look rather bland; there is a limited palette here too, but the painting glows.
On the debit side, I’m not sure there is a T. Rex in Diamond Jim and the Dinosaurs, and it is a pity they couldn’t have moved the title of the magazine up the page and given the work a bit more room to breathe (the same criticism I have of Asimov’s SF).

Seven Ways of Looking at the Sun-Worshippers of Yul-Katan is the first of four novelettes in this issue. The main character is a woman who comes from a distant planet with a sun-worshipping religion, and she is on a science spaceship investigating a nearby planet when they pick up an emergency signal. They retrieve a lifepod and find one of the seventh plateau priests from her home world in stasis. This is surprising in a couple of ways: first, he is far from home; secondly, a priest’s final journey on his Ascension would be to the heart of the sun….
As they are trying to revive the priest from stasis, other members of the science team on the nearby planet are taken hostage and one of them is killed. The rest of the story concerns the resolution of this hostage crisis and her subsequent journey back to her home world for answers to why this happened.
This isn’t a bad story but I couldn’t really get into it, probably as there is nothing here I haven’t read a thousand times before. I also thought the story too long and the resolution rather perfunctory.
Soap Opera by Edward M. Lerner is the second novelette and describes itself perfectly, but perhaps not in the way the author intended. This one is set at the end of the radio age and the beginning of the TV one. A soap powder magnate wants the live organ music on his sponsored radio show replaced with pre-recorded material on vinyl discs. Subsequently, sales soar….
Ultimately, this story focuses more on (spoiler) a radio engineer trying to prevent the married magnate seducing one of the female radio show members than on the show’s subliminal messages. So the SF element in the story is really just stage dressing to what is, as I said above, a soap opera. On the plus side, it is a readable enough story.

Next up on the fiction front are the four short stories, and they are all short, less than twenty pages combined. Alloprene by Stephen R. Wilk is an interesting story about a man and a small robot paired up to complete some physical tests as part of an experiment. The only thing that stops this from being rated quite good is that it fizzles at the end.
Early Warning by Martin L. Shoemaker is a rather unlikely story about a man going back in time to convince his younger self to make up with his girlfriend and avoid twenty lost years. He shows his younger self the time math to prove that he is who he says he is but (spoiler) although the younger man agrees to make up with the girl he has other ideas….
Sleep Factory by Rich Larson is about a Nigerian couple who work at a facility where they jack in to control drones in Dubai, London, etc. They are woken up at the start of the story when there is a ‘neural surge’ that kills one of the other workers. They then discuss if they are going to continue this hazardous occupation or quit. This is rather like Stephen Wilk’s story above in that I enjoyed reading it but it but ultimately doesn’t amount to much in the end.
Most Valuable Player by Eric Choi is a slice-of-life squib about a baseball player who has lost his hand and become embittered. His brother-in-law, who is a mathematician, has been working with batting averages. This is the second¹ of what will probably be several unrewarding stories about the minutiae of American sports that US magazine editors publish every year. I cannot recall one of these that has ever been any good.

The final two novelettes close out the fiction for this issue. Diamond Jim and the Dinosaurs by Rosemary Claire Smith is the cover story and is about biologists and diamond prospectors going back in time to Antarctica in the Cretaceous period. There is a certain amount of light corporate and dinosaur intrigue between the two teams that are there. It is an easy enough, if shallow, read.
Playthings by Stephen L. Burns is a strange story of a policeman in a hierarchical society who is attempting to solve the murder of ‘regulators’, fixers for A and B class citizens who are virtually immune to the law:

Jomo sighed. “The world works like this, John: Class A citizens, and to a lesser degree the better connected Bs, are denied nothing. If they want it, or want to do it, then it is by definition not only legal but also desirable. They are almost completely insulated from lower status people, and the needs, opinions, and desires of those of us below them mean almost nothing to them. With me so far?”
“Yes.” I had never heard the unspoken rules stated so baldly before. Or so harshly. Some would consider what he had just said subversion, others an expression of class warfare that rose to the level of treason. p.91

The policeman eventually discovers that the murders may be related to children abducted for sex and for organ transplantation, but his ability to pursue this is limited by his supervisory AI and a conditioning drug he takes called Cop.Ascetic:

You’ve been discouraged from thinking about it. By social rules, cop culture and structure, and chemically. “
I could not argue with this assertion. Most of the regulators were Cs, occasionally a B. As a D, I was not permitted to even consider questioning the privacy, motives, or activities of a higher status citizen, especially one invested with a semi-official status. As for his last assertion, there were times I wondered what other effects Cop.Ascetic might have on me, but the drug itself kept such questions from gaining any meaningful traction. p.90-91

He eventually starts trying to work around his restrictions and subsequently receives aid from another quarter.
I’m not entirely sure that this all hangs together but there is enough that is interesting here, combined with a certain darkness and a slight Dickian vibe, to make it quite absorbing.

As the title says ‘Science Fiction and Fact’, there is more non-fiction than in most other magazines. The editorial space this is issue is given over to The Autumn of Modern Science by Michael F. Flynn. This essay is about the problems science has in the modern age, I think. It was hard to tell: either I am a lazy reader or this bounces around all over the place and tries to cram far too much in to too small a space. Have a look at the summarising last section and you will see what I mean. I would also point out there are eighteen (!) footnotes for a three and a half pages of text.
Composing Speculative Cities by Mark C. Childs is a fact article about cities in fiction that started interestingly enough but I ended up skimming. Part of the reason for this was that, in places, it feels like an endless list of questions:

Of course, buildings are not living organisms interacting in the city ecosystem. But what if they were? In a literal ecosystem of buildings, how might mutualism, parasitism, predator-prey dynamics, species invasions, or climate shifts play out? Might an invading big-box store eat local corner-groceries, a grove of house-trees encircle a playground meadow, or garbage beetles eat the fur shed by buildings in the spring? Might the well-considered undertakings of intelligent semi-mobile beach houses escaping a rising sea provide insight into how we might leave the Outer Banks? p.33-34

A Certain Uncertainty by Edward M. Lerner is a short ‘Alternate View’ essay about quantum mechanics and causality.
The Reference Library is a book review column by Don Sakers that starts with an introduction about various SF awards before he moves on to cover the latest Nebula Awards anthology and other books. I thought this a pretty good essay, in particular the way he contextualises what is reviewed, e.g., the aforementioned introduction, the mention of those who have been in Analog, won awards, etc. When he describes one book which has a plot that sounds rather fanciful he reassures by saying that the ‘author [ ] somehow makes the gimmick work…’, which was just what I needed. I look forward to reading more of his review columns.
Brass Tacks, Analog’s letters column, is only a couple of pages long this month which, recalling some of the tedious and/or barmy letters of the seventies and eighties, was a relief. However, some of the letters are as, ah, ‘entertaining’ as ever. Richard J. Armstrong from Ontario, Canada, weighs in on interstellar travel:

An isolated small community cannot spare the resources required to deal with its misfits, be they physical or psychological. The disabled/handicapped/challenged/insane and the criminal will have to be eliminated. Special facilities are expensive, and consume valuable human resources. p.107

Am I the only one who thinks that there is no point sending humans to the stars if you leave their humanity behind?
Elsewhere, Don Baker of Tulsa, Oklahoma, lets the editor know he doesn’t like some of the fiction:

Since I subscribe to Analog for diversion and entertainment, I stopped reading Mr. Sparhawk’s story [“Footprints in the Snow,” December 2015] after a couple of pages. In my book, pounding A Significant Liberal Message into a short story, repeating the point every single paragraph, doesn’t make good science fiction. If I want to hear an over-the-top conservative caricature talk like that, I can go listen to some of my family. The hard SF stories that Editor John Campbell used to print make much better reading [ ] than some of the nihilistic, dead end and depressing stories that Analog has, for some reason, recently seen fit to print. p.106

John W. Campbell died in 1971, forty-five years ago, and I think it is fairly widely accepted that Analog was in the doldrums for some considerable period before that.²
There are also one or two other bits and pieces of non-fiction: a biographical sketch, a poem, an upcoming conventions page, a next issue page, etc.

Overall, this is quite a disappointing issue: not only is the fiction not particularly good (with the exception of the Burns, and perhaps the Wilk and Larson) it seems be rather backward looking. I don’t have problems with time travel (two in this issue) or space opera stories (one) but you need to bring some quality or something original to the table. I can’t say I was that enamoured of some of the non-fiction either. Here’s hoping that other issues will prove superior.

On final note: there seems to be a single page piece referred to in some of the reviews I have subsequently read, Lonely Hearts of the Spinward Ring by Paddy Kelly, that is not included in the Kindle version.

1. See also Diamond by Chris DeVito (F&SF, March-April 2016).
2. For reviews of early 1960’s Astounding/Analog’s have a look at Galactic Journey.