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Our December issue leads off with something a bit unusual for us: an alternate history by perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of that special subgenre. As you may have noticed, Analog seldom uses alternate history where the change leading to a divergent past is as small and human-specific as the outcome of a battle, or even a war, going a different way. But once in a while, you may have also noticed, we do feature an alternate history where the change is a bit bigger, as in Harry Turtledove’s “sims” series some years back, wherein the first European visitors to the New World found not the people we call “Native Americans,” but a different and older form of hominid entirely—and a whole “new world” that went with that change. Well, Turtledove has done it again, with a novella called “Audubon in Atlantis”—and that title means exactly what it says!
Fran Van Cleave, whose checkered past includes experience as a pharmacist, reports on possible uses of testosterone replacement as therapy that go way beyond the ones everybody knows and jokes about. We also have stories by Larry Niven, Robert J. Howe, and Carl Frederick, and something for the season from Scott William Carter. Plus, of course, Part 2 of Karl Schroeder’s serial Sun of Suns.
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Astounding Science Fiction Collector's Cards!
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Audubon in Atlantis
by Harry Turtledove
We’ve developed definite ideas about what a person should do, but we, too, are products of our time. In the face of irresistable historical forces, a person must consider what he can do. . .
Illustration by Broeck Steadman
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CHARLES L. HARNESS, 1915-2005
Charles L. Harness, well known for a unique kind of science fiction in Analog and elsewhere, died on September 20, 2005, after a long illness. Born December 29, 1915, in Colorado City, Texas, he attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., earning B.S. and LL.B. degrees from the latter. He worked awhile as mineral economist for the United States Bureau of Mines, and was for many years a patent attorney for the American Cyanamid Company and later W. R. Grace and Company in New York and Washington.
His intimate familiarity with the practice and oddities of patent law often made important contributions to his stories, which included half a dozen novels and many shorter pieces, but there was far more to them than that. He had an imagination not quite like anybody else's, often combining the rigors of both natural and human law with fantasy and mythological elements in intricate plots peopled by memorable characters. There weren't as many of them as his readers might have hoped for, but he produced more than his share of memorable stories in his six-decade career, which began with a cover story for Astounding in 1948 and will continue into the future with several new posthumous publications. Both he, a thoroughly professional craftsman and artist, and his work will be deeply missed.
He is survived by a brother, a daughter, a son, and their families, to all of whom we extend our sincerest condolences. Memorial donations may be made to the Kidron Bethel Retirement Village in North Newton, Kansas.
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