Headline story in this issue of Analog is 'Home is the Hangman' by Roger Zelazny. This is a fairly standard sf adventure story, padded out at length with philosophical musings on life, existence and whether there is a role for God in the creation of artificial intelligences. I found those musings quite turgid - unusual for Zelazny - and felt that the story could have had them excised; but then it wouldn't have been a novelette, just a short story.

Other stories include a Spider Robinson 'Callahan's Crosstime Saloon' story which comes over now as very old-fashioned in both style and attitudes; and contributions from Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin, Joseph Green, and Don Tuite. These are mainly unspectacular but competent.

For me, the highlight of the issue was a factual piece by James Oberg on 1970s proposals for rescue from Earth orbit. It started with the reconfiguration of an Apollo spacecraft to bring back the astronauts on an early Skylab mission - this was never actually used, but the addition of two more crew couches below the three existing crew couches seems to have influenced the design of the Orion capsule some forty years later. The Apollo craft in question was later used for the Apollo/Soyuz Joint Mission, testing out what was to be come the universal docking interface, something that Oberg predicts for future projects. (Of course, it has become standard on the International Space Station as it was on the Shuttle.) The article then goes on to discuss various speculative projects which have not come to pass, although the device to allow a single, unprotected astronaut to re-enter Earth's atmosphere was used in a short story by Paul Preuss a few years later.

Interestingly, some of the NASA visuals illustrating the article relate to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a US Air Force project to put reconnaissance crews into orbit using an expansion of Gemini technology. MOL was cancelled (and we'll ignore the basic chauvinism in that name), but it's interesting to see that it was not a wholly classified project.