New Ideas in Contemporary Science Fiction
New Ideas in Contemporary Science Fiction
Our June issue features "Sidehunter," a wild and wooly adventure by Rajnar Vajra, set on a colorful and very alien world that allows no dull moments. But no matter how hostile the world, a troubleshooter may find that the problem has at least as much to do with the people who hired her. Wolf Read, of course, is the perfect artist to bring such a place to visual life, and he’s provided a spectacular cover and opening spread.
Our fiction line-up also includes a new Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven tale (set in the same future as "Choosing Life" in our January issue), a worthy successor to Jerry Oltion’s "Astral Astronauts" story in the May issue, the first new "Victor" story in way too long from Grey Rollins, and a haunting and thought-provoking short by Amy Bechtel.
Dr. Richard A. Lovett, fast becoming one of our best sources of fact articles, offers a new one on "Subsisting on Oxygen Lite"–a look at the adaptations needed to live and function in some of the most alien parts of our own planet, and what our experiences here may suggest about other, really alien worlds.
Astounding/Analog (often all-encompassingly just called ASF) is often considered the magazine where science fiction grew up. When editor John W. Campbell took over in 1938, he brought to Astounding an unprecedented insistence on placing equal emphasis on both words of "science fiction." No longer satisfied with gadgetry and action per se, Campbell demanded that his writers try to think out how science and technology might really develop in the future-and, most importantly, how those changes would affect the lives of human beings. The new sophistication soon made Astounding the undisputed leader in the field, and Campbell began to think the old title was too "sensational" to reflect what the magazine was actually doing. He chose "Analog" in part because he thought of each story as an "analog simulation" of a possible future, and in part because of the close analogy he saw between the imagined science in the stories he was publishing and the real science being done in laboratories around the world.
Real science and technology have always been important in ASF, not only as the foundation of its fiction, but as the subject of articles about real research with big implications for the future. One story published during World War II described an atomic...