The April 2009 issue of Analog features one novella, two novelettes, and three short stories.

Oh, the myths we weave. One of the fondest pulp imaginings was that outer space was going to be like the American Wild West. Well, they’re both frontiers, aren’t they? As the space age slowly pushes past its first half-century, it is becoming more and more apparent that the high frontier most resembles Antarctica in hostility and development, in as much as it has any earthbound analogue. Therefore it is with some trepidation that one approaches Adam-Troy Castro’s “Gunfight on Farside.” Is Castro aiming for pastiche in his novella or is he intent on committing some sort of embarrassing travesty?

He starts off with a deconstruction of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (and the various media representations of it, some yet to come) that shows he is well aware that the Old West is largely a mythological construct. He goes into such detail that it comes as a slight surprise to find out that his narrator is, in fact, a woman. She’s called Jessie James. Castro makes his readers sweat for the first page or two before they gratefully settle down with what appears to be a deconstruction of the only shoot-out to have taken place on the moon. James has been dropped off near the survivor’s cabin, and her plan is to gain access to someone who hasn’t been seen in decades. Malcolm Bell (a fine Scottish name!) has his supplies dropped off as part of his pension deal, in case you are wondering how he survives. James and Bell warily circle each other (conversationally) as each of them teases out the other’s story. Bell’s version of the lunar gunfight has the ring of authenticity. The guns were improvised; it was scary rather than glamorous; and his opponent was deranged. James turns out to be from the tax office, which is why she has tracked down Bell. His affairs are in order, but she is there unofficially because she has spotted an anomaly. Bell is not the only hermit, but all of the others were connected to the gunfight in one way or another, and they have all received generous pay-offs. The gunfight, as James discovers, was easily the most boring thing happening on the Moon that day. James does eventually have her curiosity sated and becomes a hermit herself in time. How much more should one say about this story? It genuinely surprises, and it is quite wonderful. Nothing else in this issue comes near to matching it.

The two novelettes in this issue are both set on Martian colonies. Mary Turzillo’s “Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin” is another that attempts to play with the reader’s expectations with its title. In this case, it uses the old trick of a non sequitur to arouse curiosity. The story certainly doesn’t fail to be weird, and I’m still trying to work out what it means.

Gari Babakin is one of several underground Martian settlements. It’s a very laid-back place, and the reason for this is that all of the inhabitants have been infected by a mutated parasite from their mutated cats. The effect of this has been to make the women shallow but sexy, and the men somewhat ditzy. When an inspector calls to investigate a cure, it turns into a battle of wills between him and local girl Lucile. Lucile uses all of her feminine charm on him, and the poor guy wilts. It’s a comedy of sorts, obviously, and it is entertainingly told, but its aims remain obscure. Gari Babakin’s trademark food is under an embargo until the parasitic infection is wiped out. One of the developments in the story means that the embargo might be lifted after a year, but that seems to be ignoring fear and the excuse for economic protectionism that would surely be rampant amongst the other settlements. It’s a minor point, but in Britain, the fallout from the BSE crisis meant that meat products were embargoed for much longer than that. Do the people of Gari Babakin have the right to live their lives the way they choose? If you answer “Yes,” then you also have to acknowledge that the other settlements have the same right. And, given that Mars is an extremely hostile environment, anything that impedes reason may lead directly to disaster. A generous view of this story would be that it is open-ended, but it could just as easily be stated that it is confused in its objectives.

Mark Rich’s “Foe” is another novelette that takes place in a sealed Martian settlement and again tells the story of an outsider who arrives to put the place in order. Much simpler in ambition than Turzillo’s story, but consequently more lightweight, it is unlikely to be remembered for long. The narrator is the acronym of the title: the Face of Efficiency. Again, as Mars is such a hostile environment, it obviously stands to reason that there can be no slacking. The narrator has fallen into his job almost by accident and has no real feel for it, and it is pretty clear that the people of Dometown 26 have no love for his type. His obvious way out is to be inefficient at what he does. He starts ordering people to relax, to go to concerts, and to take time out to walk in the park. Surprisingly (at least to everyone in the story), this actually improves overall efficiency.

Eric James Stone’s “The Final Element” similarly suffers from being second-guessed by the reader. A specialist has been flown in to investigate a crime. A Stradivarius has been stolen and replicated at an atomic level, and the specialist has to decide which of the two is the original. He is a specialist in nanotech manufacturing, not music, and he comes up with a solution that hinges on carbon-14 dating. There is, of course, an obvious twist, and there is also the suspicion in the reader’s mind that a replicator that could copy something at an atomic level would be able to circumvent carbon-14 dating anyway.

Jerry Oltion’s “A Jug of Wine and Thou” has a teenage boy showing off to a girl in his aircar when it crashes in the wild and leaves them stranded and unprepared for nature. It’s a nicely observed story, full of warmth and adolescent angst, but the aircar could easily have been replaced with a light aircraft. The science-fictional element is merely cosmetic.

H. G Stratman’s “The Invasion” is a first-contact joke. With the exception of a scientist, all of the characters are referred to by their job titles, which tells us that this has no ambitions beyond being a shaggy dog story. The president, his top politicians, and the heads of the military are gathered together to switch on an alien communicator for the first time. They get spammed. Stratman manages some good jokes, but he has a tendency to belabour the point. The payoff can also be spotted coming from a considerable distance.

David Bartell’s “Armchair Scientist” is this issue’s Probabilty Zero column, and it can be thought of as a work of fiction. At less than a page long, it is much more economical in its use of satire than “The Invasion,”and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. It is a pastiche of a rejection letter that pokes fun at laziness, and I suspect that Bartell tried to get the title as close to Scientific American as he could.

This issue also has a meandering astronomy article by Kevin Welsh and book reviews from Richard Foss, as well as the usual features. It’s a very uneven issue, but Castro’s story alone makes it worthwhile.

Plunging circulations means that newspapers are trying all sorts of tricks to hold on to their reader base. You can hardly pick one up without being assaulted by free gifts and subscription offers. Serial fiction is another thing that is being tried, whether it’s the first publication of an awaited novel from a famous author or it’s specially written for the paper in question. I’ve seen round robins, daily instalments, and even one with a structure based on a chess game. Serials are in a very healthy state at the moment.

But not, alas, in the science fiction field. The plunging circulations that are troubling newspapers have pushed science fiction magazines into a place that makes them unfriendly towards the serial. F&SF has just gone bimonthly, which probably means that its occasional two-parters will vanish, much as Interzone’s did when it moved to the same schedule. Analog and Asimov’s are the only two magazines left with a monthly schedule (which these days means a mere ten issues—it doesn’t seem like all that long ago that they were producing 13 issues a year). Asimov’s never really went in for them, so that just leaves us with Analog. A recent personal favourite was Karl Schroeder’s “Queen of Candesce,” which gripped from the beginning. Robert J. Sawyer’s “Wake” (Analog November 2008 – March 2009) is less immediate, and it is fair to say that if I hadn’t been reviewing it, I might have abandoned it after the first part. If, however, I’d first met it through its third part, I would have been strongly tempted to track down the earlier parts or buy the full novel. This is why it is probably a bad idea to review serials on an episodic basis. There are, as I’ve just hinted, serious flaws. Many of them are due to the fact that, even in four parts, some of the novel seems to have been cut to fit the allotted space. Others may be integral to the original.

The serial starts with a quote from Helen Keller, and then goes on to give a brief description of what existence must be like for someone without contact. Then, slightly confusingly, the narrative jumps to the viewpoint of 15-year-old Caitlin. Caitlin is blind (but not deaf) and is certainly not cut off from the rest of humanity. She has just started a new, regular school in Canada and is also connected to the web through talking software and braille keyboards. It later transpires that the opening passage was referring to an evolving consciousness. Caitlin is the subject of an experimental procedure to restore her sight by a Japanese scientist, Doctor Kudora, and her position becomes analogous to the web consciousness. She also provides the intelligence with a window to the outside world, even as she gradually becomes aware of its existence. This provides the main plot of the serial. The evolving consciousness is superbly rendered, and Caitlin feels right as well (although, admittedly, I am not, and never have been, a teenage girl). Her own teenage tribulations sit well in the story, but it is her exploration of language theory that seizes the SFnal reader. Did I mention that she is a maths whiz?

The consciousness arose through conditions similar to those in a theory by Julian Jaynes concerning the evolution of awareness in humanity. It sounds far fetched, but it doesn’t matter in the context of “Wake.” An outbreak of bird flu in China leads its authorities to seal off China from the outside world for several days while they exterminate a village. When China comes back online, the artificial consciousness seems to jump up a level of awareness. The China portrayed seems alien to those of us used to seeing pictures of their spaceships and skyscrapers. The villagers stare in amazement at a helicopter, for example, and the authorities look out on an ornamental landscape from their offices. The only part of their recent history that they mention is the ‘89 Tiananmen Square Massacre, although they are familiar enough with Walmart and the Kent State Massacre to toss them around in conversation without the need to explain them. Another little peculiarity occurs when the Chinese president receives a briefing from a think-tank that predicts the fall of the communist party in the next 50 years. No reason is given, and we are left to wonder if this ironically Marxist interpretation of the future comes from the characters or the author. The reason for this slapdash approach soon becomes apparent when, from the second part onward, the three Chinese threads are dropped except for an occasional background rumble as a news story. Sawyer was basically uninterested in some of them, but he seems to have felt that he needed something to kick-start his machine intelligence. Dramatically, he was right, even if the execution (if you’ll pardon the pun) leaves a little to be desired.

The second part starts with a new plot thread concerning the study of awareness in apes. One, a bonobo/chimpanzee cross named Hobo, shows particular ability when it comes to representational art. We are not talking Rembrandt here, but it is a step away from the usual abstract expressionism that they are so fond of. The apes can sign, and communicate with one another though webcams on occasion, which provide a two-dimensional way of looking at the world. There are obviously two variables to be explored to discover the root of Hobo’s genius, and Sawyer leads us off on another fascinating journey. One of Hobo’s problems is that the foreign zoo that lent him to the Californian institute where he now lives wants him sterilized in order that he doesn’t contaminate the bloodlines of the two endangered species. Maybe he could be the first of a new race of semi-intelligent beings, but this storyline is just dropped without a satisfactory resolution. It doesn’t even tie in with Caitlin’s story. One suspects that the novel will resolve such things when it appears, unless it is merely the first part of a series (as some rumours suggest). And it will be a good novel, although some imperfections will probably remain.