Neqarly half of this 1976 issue of Analog is taken up with the first part of the serialisation of Robert Silverberg's 'Shadrach in the Furnace'. I had forgotten what a good writer Bob Silverberg actually is.The other stories are fairly unmemorable; Eric Vinicoff & Marcia Martin's 'Render unto Caesar' is a pretty unpleasant piece of Republican flag waving; companies are as good as nation states, if not better, the UN is evil, taxation is slavery and the means always justify the ends (especially if you sign up to the previous four ideas). Fortunately, there is some balance through an interview with Carl Sagan, though the interviewer wastes everyone's time by asking Sagan's opinion of Velikovsky's theories and spending half the available space banging on about it. Sagan is remarkably tolerant. There's one of Bertram Chandler's tales of Commander Grimes which is quite amusing but resolutely old-fashioned - the spaceships are all rocket-shaped for a start off.

Finally, there is a little Easter Egg for the modern sf reader right at the end of this issue; a letter from John Gribbin on the search for magnetic monopoles and why it probably will fail; but as a good scientist, he does not rubbish the article he is writing about, simply points the reader to better sources and gives an example where one theory has been superceded by another but still satisifies most practical uses in the real world. Just as any good scientist should do.

Enjoyed the ingenious 'Shadrach...' serial. ( )