Analog - Jan/Feb 2007

I read an entire Analog for the first time in a very long time, perhaps ever, and I now understand what people mean when they call something "an Analog story". I found these stories ... well ... obvious, blatant, or some adjective similar to those. The stories usually seem to contain a quite intriguing premise, but then the story is advanced almost completely through narrative exposition or expository dialogue.

I thought that the "world exploration" was, at times, quite clumsy and handled in a manner similar to what people often (negatively) attribute to "old time" science fiction or modern Star Trek (a la, "As you know, Doctor, the prothalium drive is a simple extension of the hypertrophic Quanset Field").

To me the best stories were less obvious and (somewhat) more subtle in their presentation. They also had in common that they were simpler in scope and character. For this issue, my favorites were "Super Gyro" by Grey Rollins (in a world of meta-humans, a fast food worker tries to handle a robbery gone sour) and "If Only We Knew" by Jerry Orton (a man in for a simple insurance exam discovers that he is more special than he could have imagined).

But even these stories, in my opinion, suffered from being too "surface" and not going deep enough into the characters and the implication of their setup. Even these stories also tended to have a "pithy one-liner" ending that went for a small chuckle (usually sexual in nature) that, for me, undercut the potential depth of the story.