Saturday, October 8, 2011

Analog Science Fiction and Fact October 2011


A pretty good issue for most part.

Of Night • novelette by Janet Catherine Johnston
A story of a spaceship which seems to be haunted. Told as a campfire tale by unknown women who just happens to stroll to a camping place. After the crew (everyone, nobody stays on the ship) visits a planet the ship seems somehow strange and eventually people start to disappear. A few first pages were pretty good (in spite of the story inside a story structure which seldom works very well) but then the story went sharply downhill. It is supposed to be fairly common that spaceships have lunatic crews who abandon their ships without even the pilot staying behind? Doh.
The story falls fairly badly apart towards the end and writing seems to go in a worse direction. **
The Last of Lust • shortstory by Jerry Oltion
Scientists find out where lust is located in the brain and how to turn that off. Religious fanatics manage to turn off lust in everyone in the world. That leads to some unforeseen consequences. Pretty nice story. ***½
The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project • shortstory by Brad R. Torgersen
A man who runs a small community FM radio stations gets on offer that cannot be refused: he'll get all the funding he needs if he lends his signal o rich eccentric neighbor who wants to send it to space through a giant radio telescope he has built. It seems like a pretty good deal until the aliens appear...some problems with plausibility, otherwise an entertaining story which could have benefitted from considerable expansion. ****-
The Lycanthropic Principle • shortstory by Carl Frederick
A professor gets his email spammed by some extremely rude spam. He asks help from an internet whiz working in the same school, who claims to be werewolf. A pretty nice and entertaining story. ***½

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