Analog, Jan 1975: Larry Niven, Gordon R Dickson & Katherine MacLean

We just read four of Larry Niven's 1960s Known Space stories, two of them starring Beowulf Shaeffer.  Let's today read a 1975 Beowulf Shaeffer story, "The Borderland of Sol," which debuted in an issue of Ben Bova's Analog that has a great cover by John Schoenherr.  We'll read "The Borderland of Sol" in a scan of the magazine, which also includes stories by Barry Malzberg, Gordon R. Dickson, and Katherine MacLean.  Malzberg's "January 1975," an epistolary alternate universe thing that is apparently an attack on Analog's fanbase, I read in 2021 and declared weak.  The Dickson story looks like a bizarre experiment but we'll try it anyway.  Katherine MacLean I have never read before, but wikipedia has quotes from Damon Knight, Brian Aldiss and Theodore Sturgeon asserting "she has few peers," can "do the hard stuff magnificently," and employs "beautifully finished logic," so I guess I'll give her a try.

Before attacking the fiction I'll point out that I found P. Schuyler Miller's book column interesting.  He gushes about Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which I have not read, and also reviews Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, reacting to it much like I did, and E.C. Tubb's Zenya, which he seems to have liked more than did I.   

"The Borderland of Sol" by Larry Niven

"The Borderland of Sol" starts with lots of references to the adventures of narrator Beowulf Shaeffer that we read about in Neutron Star.  Two years have passed since he rescued and avenged that ten-foot-tall sculptor, and Beowulf feels like returning to Earth--the woman he is in love with, the woman who can't leave Earth for psychological reasons, is now the mother of two children by a friend of Beowulf's, genius scientist Charles Wu (Wu is so smart and healthy that the Earth eugenics bureaucrats who forbid albino Beowulf to breed on Terra have given Wu permission to have as many children as he can produce) and Beowulf wants to return to Earth to be a father to them.  It's a small galaxy, and Beowulf runs into Wu on a high gravity planet and the two of them decide to journey to Earth together on the heavily armed government ship that is disguised as a mundane cargo vessel; in charge of this interstellar Q-ship is a minor character from one of the earlier Beowulf Shaeffer stories, law enforcement official Ausfaller.

Ships have been disappearing in the further reaches of the Solar System, and theories as to why range from space pirates to space monsters; Ausfaller hopes to catch the mysterious menace with his camouflaged war machine.  Our three heroes get to the Solar System and are soon subjected to a mysterious force that makes their hyperdrive disappear.  Wu collects background data and reads theory as he puzzles over the question of what happened to their hyperdrive and all the lost ships (it is all linked to the question of whether we live in an expanding or a steady state universe, black holes, and the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite) while Ausfaller and Beowulf do the detective work of figuring out who is responsible for the disappearances.  Out here in the cometary region of the Solar System lives another genius scientist at his fully staffed research station.  Can this guy be the inventor or discoverer of a superweapon that is being used to destroy all those ships?  Even if he isn't responsible, it makes sense for Wu to pick his brain--maybe his fellow genius can provide clues as to what is going on and who really is to blame.

So, Beowulf and Wu pay this boffin a visit, bringing, hidden on their persons, advanced weapons and defensive equipment provided them by Ausfaller, who, for his part, stays behind, hidden aboard his warship.  The ending of "The Borderland of Sol is a little like a James Bond story, when Bond goes to visit the villain and we readers don't know if the villain recognizes 007 as a danger to him or not.  And like in a Bond story, Wu and Beowulf get captured.  Ausfaller's weapons and Beowulf's dexterity save our heroes, after the villain has fully explained his criminal enterprise as well as why he went rogue (women wouldn't have sex with him.)  The villain and his lead henchman are dramatically hoist by their own petard.  

I don't understand the science in "The Borderland of Sol"--the villain has control over a teeny tiny black hole and has been using it to cripple and rob ships and then dispose of the evidence, but the effects the black hole has on various objects seems pretty inconsistent--sometimes it makes entire ships and asteroids vanish in a flash, other times it makes a man disappear but another man in the same room is not affected.  Maybe it makes sense, and maybe I would understand it if I really put my mind to it, but life is short.  And "The Borderland of Sol" is still a decent adventure story.  

Decent enough to win the Hugo for Best Novelette!  "The Borderland of Sol" was later included in Niven collections like Tales of Known Space and a few anthologies like Jerry Pournelle's Black Holes.

"The Present State of Igneos Research" and "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" by Gordon R. Dickson  

This is an elaborate and silly joke.  "The Present State of Igneos Research" is a discussion of the poem that follows it, "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" ("igneos" is the scientific word for "dragon.")  The recently discovered manuscript of the poem, we are told, is written on medieval paper with medieval ink, but various clues indicate it was written by a modern person, and thus poem constitutes proof that dragons are real and can travel through time; the text of the poem is evidence that dragons are not the enemies of mankind but in fact have a symbiotic relationship with human beings.  

This parody of an academic paper is five pages long, and the poem (of 34 quatrains) is seven pages long, though much of those seven pages is taken up by illustrative cartoons by Jack Gaughan.  The poem is kind of annoying to read, the words being spelled in what I guess is Middle English fashion, or a joke version thereof.  The poem tells the story of a dragon who has grown obese, and can no longer fly.  A brave young man harasses the dragon, so that it runs and loses weight and can then fly; these two become friends and send each other a letter every Christmas thereafter.

A waste of time that nowadays is vulnerable to charges it platforms fatphobia and human savior narratives.  Dickson here also triggers one of my pet peeves, the story in which the traditional symbol of evil--the ogre, the vampire, or as here the dragon--is really the good guy.  MPorcius Fiction Log is anathematizing "The Present State of Igneos Research" and "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" but Dickson's capriccio has big league supporters; Ben Bova included this exercise in a "best of" Analog anthology and Stanley Schmidt included it in an anthology of joke stories from Analog.  

"The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" by Katherine MacLean       

The pleasant Kelly Freas illustration for this story is making me fear it is another joke story.

Like Freas' illustration, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" is pleasant but nonsensical.  In the way Ray Bradbury sometimes does, MacLean here transports into the future and into space stereotypical American people of the 19th or 20th centuries.  Our narrator is eleven and he lives a life much like that of poor rural folk in the period before space travel, but he's living it in the asteroid belt.  His family--a single mother, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of farm animals--lives in a small space station shaped like a barrel that I guess is the size of a suburban house, growing food inside the structure and trading with other such settlers of the belt as well as with a general store in a similar orbit.  As we'd expect of a single mother living in the rural South or Middle West, Mom is a dedicated Christian and she warns her kids not to get involved with gambling and with loose women.

The plot concerns how the narrator's older brother leaves to get a job in a foundry and on a visit home two weeks later brings with him a sexy dancing girl he met at a casino and whom he plans to marry.  Mom is not crazy about her son getting mixed up with a stripper, but she is quickly pacified when her son makes clear how serious he is about making his fiancé an honest woman.

Besides, the dancing girl was tricked into being what we might now call a sex worker.  She has an indentured servitude contract with the men who financed her trip to the casino from Earth and, having skipped out on them, they are after her.  Thinking the house is an abandoned ruin, the stripper's employers shoot at it in order to scare the stripper.  The narrator's family uses their ingenuity to neutralize these thugs and call for help.  In the end, the narrator's older brother buys out the dancer's contract, she gets a job in an office at the foundry and they live happily ever after; our narrator resolves to get a job at the foundry himself when he is older so he can snag a sexy girl of his own.

This is a trifling story, but entertaining enough.  I find the way MacLean has lifted her characters and plot from traditional mainstream fiction a little annoying--such people and problems are a product of their time and place, and the future in the asteroid belt would produce different personalities and challenges than rural America before the space race--but MacLean's style and pacing and descriptions are good, and she does come up with some interesting technical speculations, like how people patch their orbiting homes when hit by a meteor or gunfire.  

MacLean uses a strategy here in "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" that we see Heinlein use--keeping secret until the end of the story some fact that, when we learn it, might change the way we view the story we have just read.  We don't learn the age or sex of "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" until the very end of the tale.  Themes of self sufficiency and the character of people on the frontier also remind me of Heinlein.

I can mildly recommend "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl."  It would be reprinted in the MacLean collection The Trouble with You Earth People, the cover of which has the same Freas image as is found on the title page of "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" here in Analog, and in anthologies about the frontier beyond Earth: a 1979 one by Jerry Pournelle and a 1986 one by the team of Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh, this one directed at kids; in the intro to Young Star Travelers, Asimov tries to convince young people that their parents are overcrowding and polluting the Earth to the point that it will soon be unlivable and so "We simply need to get off Earth."  A downer, but more hopeful than the sorts of messages kids are getting today, I reckon. 

**********

I have problems with both the Niven and MacLean stories, but they still work as adventure stories that offer speculations about what life will be like in the spacefaring future, including fun ideas about what sort of equipment and supplies people will need to survive the inevitable mishaps that will occur out there in the vacuum.  While Niven and MacLean serve up traditional meat and potatoes SF fare, Dickson's contribution is on its surface subversive and experimental but in fact fundamentally hollow and frivolous and is being categorically rejected by this finicky eater.

I'll probably read more of Niven's Known Space stories in the future, and look into more stories by MacLean, but Dickson, I don't know.