Mon 6 Oct 2025
SF Diary Review: ANALOG SF – December 1967.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Magazines , Science Fiction & Fantasy[10] Comments
ANALOG SF. December 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover artist: John Schoenherr. Overall rating: ***½.
ANNE McCAFFREY “Dragonrider.” Serial; part 1 of 2. See report following that for the January 1968 issue.
ALEXEI PANSHIN “The Destiny of Milton Gomrath.” Men find their own level in life. (3)
JACK WODHAMS “Whosawhatsa?” Novelette. Judge Forsett’s latest case and nightmare is a comedy of sex changes, complicated by various pregnancies. Still, imagination can provide even more legal complication. The point is valid. (4)
PIERS ANTHONY “Beak by Beak.” Contact, but with the wrong inhabitants of Earth, For bird lovers. (3)
CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “A Question of Attitude.” The testing routine for joining the Interstellar Patrol requires that one look at both sides of the problem. (1)
MACK REYNOLDS “Psi Assassin.” A killer sent out by Section G on behalf of United Planets must be stopped before he eliminates the wrong man. Even the lectures are not new. (1)
October 6th, 2025 at 11:31 pm
The young writers in this issue are slightly surprising, though unsurprising that they are among my least favored of their generation. Seems like most of Reynolds’s best short work in the ’60s went to F&SF.
October 7th, 2025 at 5:07 am
Still, Reynolds was viewed at the time as the most popular writer in ANALOG. His socio-political-economic bent was much appreciated by Campbell and there was a time when you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a Reynolds story in ANALOG. Anvil was another on again-off again writer for the magazine. Both would have a resurgence thanks to numerous collections issued by Baen.
I never cared much for McCaffrey, which puts me in the minority. (I met her at one convention and she was determined that my name was Paul.) Anthony’s prolific output (as well as his acerbic personality) worked against him, IMHO; much of his work is entertaining, but, alas, you have to dig for it. Panshin produced some good stuff, then basically fell silent, fiction-wise, after producing only three of the intended seven volumes in his Anthony Villiers series, then moved on to SF criticism. I always liked Wodhams’ short stories, but never read any of his novels.
All in all, a fairly decent ANALOG of its time; most readers would rate it much higher than I do.
October 7th, 2025 at 11:37 am
I suspect most readers today, particularly, might very well Not rate it higher than you have, Jerry. New flavors of popular mediocrity these years.
October 7th, 2025 at 11:57 am
My rating of three and a half stars for this issue, or slightly above average, is skewed upward by the four stars I gave to the Wodhams story. It does not include whatever rating I might have given later to Anne McCaffrey’s.
Of the various authors in the issue, Wodhams is the least remembered today, and McCaffrey is the odd lady out. It is part of the Pern series that she is best known for, but as the books are generally considered science fantasy, to me they are not ANALOG material. It’s something of a surprise to me now that her story is even included.
The other authors, or their stories, otherwise tend toward mediocre, then as well as now.
October 7th, 2025 at 5:50 pm
Well, JWC always did love fantasy, and when he lost UNKNOWN/UW, his love just tended to express itself in psionics and dowsing and certain unfortunate religious organizations, and the kinds of stories that ran along those lines.
I’ve yet to read anything approaching first-rate from Panshin (very much including RITE OF PASSAGE, in which the young woman protagonist is part of at least something which approaches a warrior culture which expects its women as well as men to be Survivors, but she spends much of the book, up to the point I put it down forever, making noises along the line of “But I am just a girl…”, which makes no sense in that societal context.
Anthony’s self indulgence in more blatant sexist sexual matters has tended to put me off similarly…Richard Geis pegged (if you’ll excuse the resonance of the term) his verisimilitude problem in PA’s AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS contribution “In the Barn”, where his undercover interplanetary FBI-type agent is an arrested adolescent in his sexuality, not exactly a likely trait to be overlooked in the vetting process for that kind of role (at least, in an actually sensible agency thus, which can be thin on the ground or planet, but we are supposed to understand that in that case, he was Just a Regular Guy thus). Rather neatly put in perspective what I found unpalatable in all the Anthony fiction I’d tried up to that point, and had just started A,DV when I read that review.
And, of course, the ’60s was famously not one of the peak eras of JWC’s actually editing his magazine not on autopilot. The editorials seemingly more important to him than much of the fiction.
October 7th, 2025 at 10:27 pm
Your last paragraph, Todd, is I think the general consensus now, and a valid one, but back at the time, as only a reader, I had no idea of what was going on with Campbell. No filter, in other words, just my almost adolescent take on the stories.
October 7th, 2025 at 10:33 pm
PS. The Panshin story in this issue is only three pages long. I don’t remember it at all. I read two of his Anthony Villiers stories. I reviewed STAR WELL here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=910
but nothing else by him that I can think of.
October 8th, 2025 at 8:27 pm
His and Cory Panshin’s SF IN DIMENSION columns in FANTASTIC were often the low points of a given issue, as well.
October 8th, 2025 at 8:30 pm
And I’d say that your youthful impressions of the work in question isn’t particularly wrong-headed in any notable way. The fiction in question likely that much more callow than you were at the time.
October 8th, 2025 at 10:07 pm
Wrong-headed? Never! Callow? Well, maybe. But just maybe.