Analog 6

I like the idea of this anthology. The editor John Campbell picks what he thinks were the best and/or most interesting stories from a (then) recent year of Analog Science Fiction Magazine. A Year's Best from one source. This series only lasted for 9 years and I only have two of them. We have 14 stories and a lengthy introductory essay by the editor. The stories are all from 1966, exactly 50 years ago, and was assembled and published in 1968.

• Introduction • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
• Prototaph • shortstory by Keith Laumer
• Bookworm, Run! • novelette by Vernor Vinge
• The Easy Way Out • shortstory by G. Harry Stine as by Lee Correy
• Giant Meteor Impact • essay by J. E. Enever
• Early Warning • shortstory by show more Robin Scott Wilson
• Call Him Lord • novelette by Gordon R. Dickson
• CWACC Strikes Again • novelette by Harry Harrison as by Hank Dempsey
• Stranglehold • shortstory by Christopher Anvil
• The Message • novelette by Piers Anthony and Frances Hall
• Light of Other Days • shortstory by Bob Shaw
• Something To Say • novelette by John Berryman
• Letter from a Higher Critic • shortstory by Stewart Robb
• . . . Not a Prison Make • novelette by Joseph P. Martino
• 10:01 A.M. • shortstory by Alexander Malec

One of these stories is one of my favorite short stories of all time; "The Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw is something of a classic of science fiction - the development of slow glass which captures light from one side and very slowly passes it through to the other. Imagine if this were real and you could sit in your house and the view coming through your window is what was there many years before, or somewhere else and the window might show you a beach scene or the heart of a city - or it could show your life and family many years or decades before - wherever it was long ago. Sort of like us looking at the stars ... the stars are not making this light now - it was sent long ago. This is a great story even after all these years. I've read it a number of times since discovering it long ago.

Unfortunately the rest of the stories don't come close to this classic, and most are pretty uninteresting. There are some good ideas (and some lame ones) in some of the stories but frequently it seemed the storytelling didn't quite rise to the task. Several of these stories tried to be clever and cute - maybe they were in 1966, but now, not so much.

A few comments on the stories I thought were more memorable:

I thought Vernor Vinge's "Bookworm, Run!" had an interesting story idea with some bits of humor and cleverness mixed into the storytelling that even if a little lame by today's standards still managed to entertain. A chimp has been wirelessly connected to a supercomputer and once he figures out how to make some sense of everything, off he goes.

"Call Him Lord" by Gordon R. Dickson was perhaps the second best story in this collection. Don't want to spoil this powerful story but it is about the measure of a man who would be king who comes to earth. Sad story.

John Berryman's "Something To Say" was a bit long and very dated, but was an interesting and enjoyable first contact story with a lot of aeronautics.

Overall this falls into the lower end of an OK read. I think the "New Wave" of science fiction in the 60's as a backlash to the sorts of stories included here. Something new was needed. show less

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A 1968 anthology of stories (and one factual piece about meteor strikes) from Analog magazine. Some of these were irritating one-nifty-idea tales, but most were at least decent. The standout piece is Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days", also the only one I was already familiar with. The best known of the other stories is Gordon Dickson's "Call Him Lord" which is actually a story about a society with a rather brutal honour code, more fantasy than sf though the setting is Earth in a future Space Empire.

But really, considering what else was going on in sf at the time, what strikes one about these stories is juts how old fashioned they are; most of them ("Light of Other Days" being the clear exception) show more would not have been at all out of place in the Astounding of two or three decades earlier. show less