Summary: Analog, 2008

Analog published 68 pieces of short fiction in 2008. plus various parts of three serials. The serials were complete ones by Joe Haldeman ("Marsbound") and David Palmer ("Tracking"), as well as the first two parts of Robert J. Sawyer's "Wake". (One name titles are evidently in vogue.) Of the 68 shorter pieces, 4 were novellas, 25 were novelettes, and 38 were short-stories, 7 of the latter being short-shorts (Probability Zero pieces mostly). This was about 734,000 words of fiction, about 530,000 words of it short fiction. The total word count is about the same as last year's, but the short fiction count is much lower, due to quite a few serial parts.

Novellas

The best novella by far, and the best story in Analog in some time, was Dean McLaughlin's "Tenbrook of Mars" (July/August). This is a very moving story of a Martian colony marooned for 20 years, and the engineer who becomes the leader, and pulls them through against all odds until help can arrive. It's very old fashioned, yes, and thoroughly effective.

One way or another I enjoyed each of the other novellas, without loving any of them. Catherine Asaro's "The Spacetime Pool" (March) is a bit too obviously only part of a novel, and a bit too blatantly accepts category romance cliches, but it still entertains, telling of a mathematician from our world drawn into a parallel world, wherein she is immediately embroiled in dynastic struggles. My notes for David Bartell's "Test Signals" (May) say "Interesting but flawed" -- I though the setup for this story about the ownership of genetic characteristics (even arguable flaws, like the protagonist's extra arms) very intriguing, but I couldn't quite buy the working out, nor like the characters. And Richard Lovett's "Brittney's Labyrinth" (June) is an entertaining sequel to last year's "The Sands of Titan", about a frontier type in the Saturn system whose AI has gone sentient and has the personality of a teenaged girl.

My Anlab votes: "Tenbrook of Mars" -- and the other three could go in any order. This year there is really truly no contest for first place.

Novelettes

I thought these were the best novelettes from Analog this year: J. Timothy Bagwell's "Tangible Light" (January/February), Geoffrey Landis's "The Man in the Mirror" (January/February), Craig DeLancey's "Amor Vincit Omnia" (April), Carl Frederick's "Greenwich Nasty Time" (November), and Joe Schembrie's "Moby Digital" (December). The Bagwell story was (like the Bartell novella mentioned above) interesting but flawed -- I quibbled throughout but was intrigued by the idea, concerning a young man given a chance to travel in a Galactic society and study the history of people with genomes like his -- eventually making decisions that will affect Earth's fate. Landis's story is a well-done riff on the notion at the central of Ross Rocklynne's classic '30s story "The Men in the Mirror". De Lancey posits a secret group of high-achieving orphans, linked for a particular reason, who, it turns out, have plans -- plans that I read as being of ambiguous morality -- for the world. Frederick's "Greenwich Nasty Time" is a fairly unusual time travel story, as a couple touring the Isle of Wight (and, it turns out, many more people) end up a millennium or so back in time. And Schembrie's "Moby Digital" features a VR sim based on Moby Dick which has been taken over by a newly sentient computer virus of sorts. Other interesting novelettes came from Thomas R. Dulski, from Michael F. Flynn, from Frederick again, and from Robert R. Chase.

My Anlab votes are up in the air -- I could put the five stories mentioned above in almost any order. For now let's say: 1) Schembrie, 2) Bagwell, 3) DeLancey.

Short Stories

Stories that impressed me this year included Wil McCarthy's "How the Bald Apes Saved Mars Crossing" (January/February), Jerry Oltion's "The Anthropic Principle" (April), David W. Goldman's "Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers" (September), and Jason Sanford's "Where Away You Fall" (December), with other good stories coming from Carl Frederick, David Grace, Alan Dean Foster, Juliette Wade, Sarah K. Castle, John G. Hemry, Mia Molvray, and Richard A. Lovett and Mark Nieman-Ross. McCarthy's story is goofy and smart, concerning an unexpected human intervention in alien war. Oltion features a scientist confronted with the suggestion that his discoveries are uniquely dangerous to the universe. Goldman posits an evil interstellar society with harsh methods of gaining new territory, and looks at how one planet resists them. And Sanford's story is about a future in which access to space is restricted, especially affecting a young woman who had been part of an anti-tech cult.

Anlab Ballot: 1) Oltion 2) McCarthy 3) Goldman.

Statistics Corner

Average Novella length: 24100 words. Novelette: 10300 words. Short Story: 4500 words.

Gender Balance: 8 of 68 stories, as far as I can tell, were by women. That's just under 12%. Last year the proportion was close to 13%, so really a fairly consistent proportion.

Fantasy/SF split: not surprisingly, I think 100% of the stories in Analog this year qualify as SF, though as noted elsewhere, one story (Thomas R. Dulski's "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can"( is arguably not SF or Fantasy at all.

Tags: 2008, magazines, yearly summaries