Summary: These are the five novella finalists for the 36^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (for stories published in 2021). They are a couple of don’t miss stories, A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (a complex alternate world piece in his “Sylvia Aldstatt” series which sees her reading the memories of a dead man in an attempt to find a crashed flying saucer) and The Realms of Water by Robert Reed (a “Great Ship” story where a group of travellers are stranded and one of their number listens to the potted life history of a near-immortal alien). One of the other stories by Greg Egan, Light Up the Clouds, is a near-miss that, with its story of humans living on floating plants in the atmosphere of a gas giant, may interest some.
The other pieces are mediocre (a padded murder mystery cum family soap opera from Elizabeth Bear, and a sanitised and formulaic Hollywood thriller about body swapping and white supremacist terrorists from Alex Irvine).
[Story links]

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Editor, Sheila Williams

A Blessing of Unicorns • novella by Elizabeth Bear ∗
A Rocket for Dimitrios • novella by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗+
Glitch • novella by Alex Irvine ∗
Light Up the Clouds • novella by Greg Egan ∗∗+
The Realms of Water • novella by Robert Reed ∗∗∗+

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A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2021) gets off to a promising start with Police Sub-Inspector Ferron getting stabbed in the foot by a mini-unicorn while she is investigating a missing person’s apartment with her colleague, Senior Constable Indrapramit:

Around Ferron’s foot clustered a dozen or so jewel-hued, cat-sized, bioprinted synthetic unicorns, stomping their cloven hooves and tossing their rapier-like horns. It was the sharp edge of one small hoof that had laid her flesh open. Now the toe was bleeding copiously, as foot injuries often do.
“Don’t just stand there. Bring me the first aid kit.”
Gingerly, Ferron set her sandal down. Blood slimed between her sole and the shoe.
The most ferocious of the miniature animals, a sparkly, butterscotch-colored stallion, snorted and arched his neck. He defecated a marble-sized poop to let everyone know he was the boss of everything.
Ferron, who had never had much to do with farm animals, even tiny ones, did not find this charming.  p. 160

After Ferron treats her foot they receive a video message from the police network and see the missing woman, a social media influencer called Bel Hinti, enter the deserted police station with a gun (all, or nearly all, of the city’s police force work at home or out in the field in this future world). Hinti eventually surrenders the firearm to the virtual assistant and tells it that someone is trying to kill her. Then, at the end of the video, Hinti scribbles something on a piece of paper before leaving the station.
So far, so good, but, after Ferron and Indrapramit complete their search and head out into the bright night (a supernova has appeared in the sky and there is mention of a dead alien civilization), Ferron heads home, and we get a four pages of description about her domestic circumstances. This involves, variously, what she has to eat, her interaction with Chairman Miaow and Smoke (her pet cat and fox), and her relationship problems with her extended family and mother (who has had her virtual reality budget cut off and is making Ferron suffer):

Ferron’s mother’s name was Madhuvanthi, and Ferron was used to seeing her only in virtual space, or as a body dressed in a black immersion suit, reclining on a chaise.
Ferron would never say it, but her mother was bedridden not because of illness, but because of self-neglect. She needed—had needed for years—treatment for depression, anxiety, and withdrawal syndrome. She obsessively archived her virtual memories, racking up huge storage bills that Ferron had, until recently, bankrupted herself to pay.
Ferron had long ago given up trying to talk her mother into treatment, and she had no leverage with which to force the issue. Her sisters pleaded poverty and unemployment, though Ferron knew at least two of them did pretty well on the gray market. The truth was, nobody really wanted to deal with Mom.
Madhuvanthi did not look at Ferron as Preeti pulled the omni away. Ferron made her tone exquisitely polite. “Hello, Amma. Hello, Preeti mausiji, Bijli mausiji. It’s good to see you out of bed, Amma.”
Madhuvanthi kept her face averted, and her hand went to the skinpet adhered just below her collarbone. Velvety fur rippled as she stroked it, her touch followed by the rumble of a purr.
“But look at this, Ferron,” Preeti said. “Look what we have done for you!”
The past tense increased Ferron’s apprehension to outright dread. She knew better than to say anything. She braced herself and accepted the omni.
It was a matrimonial ad, and Ferron was horrified to realize that it wasn’t some man that her family was going to try to force her to write to—or worse, had already written to on her behalf. This was an ad for her, seeking a groom. And it wasn’t a draft, either. It had already been posted.  pp. 169-170

This domestic soap opera (supposedly set in the 2070s or 2080s I think¹) is a harbinger of what is to come in the rest of the story, which essentially devolves into a sequence of meals that Ferron has with or without Indrapramit, and tetchy encounters with her mother. This is punctuated with some light internet browsing and the odd trip out as the pair look for the missing woman. Eventually they find out (after a brief virtual reality episode) that another influencer from Hinti’s social media set is missing, which later leads them to suspect that a trustee or trustees of a fund the women belong to may be killing the beneficiaries to get control of the money.
The climax of the story comes after WhiteRabbit, a third influencer, (“Call me Rabbit”) turns up at Ferron’s house in the middle of the night, which prompts Ferron to meet Indrapramit at the station to look for the note that Hinti left but which no-one has been able to find . When they get there (spoiler), they see that someone has smashed the place up—and they are then held at gunpoint by Muhuli (the second of the missing woman), who is eventually shot by Ferron. Ferron then finds the note in the tea trolley, which identifies Muhuli as the villian—you cannot help but think that if the police search teams had done their job properly they could have saved Ferron and Indrapramit from a lot of eating and browsing. I’d also add that I would be surprised if any reader could work out that Muhuli was the murderer from the information provided.
By the way, Ferron suspects early on that Hinti’s body was dismembered and put through the bioprinter, turning the corpse into the unicorns found in Hinti’s apartment—but I can’t remember a CSI investigation for blood spatter, etc. when they can’t get DNA from the unicorns.
There is a very slight murder mystery story here, and it is buried under such a pile of extraneous description (food, pets, mothers, supernovas, aliens, etc.) that the piece eventually becomes do-not-finish tedious. Even though I, against my better earlier judgement, did, I had to take breaks and read it in three sessions.
Finally, I’d also suggest that, when most of a story is about the first three subjects in that list above (food, pets, mothers, etc.), you are looking at the work of someone who has burnt out as an SF writer.
∗ (Mediocre). 24,700 words. Story link.

•

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) is the second of his “Sylvia Aldstatt” stories,² and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a “terraplane” and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:

“So, you’re the girl that talks to dead people,” the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren’t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you’re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
“Sir, I’m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that’s what you mean.”
Maybe that would help him sort the word “girl” out of his speech.
He didn’t even blink.  p. 16

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as “The Fisherman”, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos’s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man’s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:

“There is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so—but we cannot be sure. We don’t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he’s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are”—he paused, considering his words—“compromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.”
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
“And then?”
“And then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.”
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man’s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains; then she sees him float in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her—something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read—and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos’s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer—as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character is (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, who reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos’s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I’ve read recently in Asimov’s) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer—and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants—and squeezed them into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won’t be.³
∗∗∗∗+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words. Story link.

•

Glitch by Alex Irvine (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with Kyle waking up in a medical facility and realising that he has been “recompiled” (uploaded) into a new body (he notes a missing tattoo, unpierced ears). His partner Shari tells him that he was killed in a terrorist bomb blast and that there has been a glitch in his persona upload (there are unconvincing explanations about why they have had to delete his backup and so cannot repeat the process). Then, when Kyle later remembers the attack from the bomber’s perspective, he realises that part of the terrorist’s persona has also been uploaded into his new body:

An image drifted through his head, smeary and fleeting. A toddler on the bricks of Monument Square, spilling out of a baby backpack. Eyes closed, mouth open, dust in pale streaks on his skin and in the black springs of his hair. An adult’s arm still twisted through one strap of the backpack. Blood dark on the bricks.
One more maggot won’t grow up to be a roach.
Kyle twitched and his eyes snapped into focus. God, what kind of a person—
The thought had come from inside his mind.
He leaned his elbows on the porch railing and rested his face in his hands. Imagine dying, he thought, and that’s one of your last thoughts . . . and now it’s one of my memories. Because he did remember it, and to his shame a part of him had felt a visceral satisfaction. That was the other person.
Brian. That was his name. Another neural pathway knitting itself into the gooey matrix that made Kyle Brooks who he was, and who he would be. Brian.
“You’re a fucking asshole racist, Brian,” Kyle said into his hands. “Sooner you’re gone, overwritten, forgotten, whatever . . . sooner the better. I hope nobody recompiles you.”  p. 19

This idea of being trapped inside your own head with a racist terrorist is quite a promising one (in a chilling way) and, for the first part of the story, it is reasonably well handled—we get further racist outbursts from Brian, and memories of bomb-making with his wife Marie, etc. (that said, his character is never really developed much beyond a sanitised version of a stereotypical white supremacist villain⁴). Then the Feds turn up to question Kyle, suspecting that he has some or all of Brian’s persona in him; they tell him that if they find out that is the case, they will (by some legal hand-wavium) arrest him.
Kyle then goes to see Abdi, a Somali business contact and hacker, who agrees to track down the source of the hack that corrupted Kyle’s persona backup (Kyle figures that if he can find out more about the bomber he can make a deal with the Feds). Then a ticking clock is introduced when Kyle learns that the Feds have an arrest warrant for him, and the tempo speeds up further when Kyle sees a second bomb in one of Brian’s memories.
The rest of the story sees Kyle and three of Abdi’s cog swapping friends (body-swappers) run around (directed by Abdi’s magical hacker skills) looking for the bomb and, in one sequence, Kyle cogswaps with a transgender woman and goes to a club looking for a contact of Brian’s. There are further convenient memory reveals from Brian which move the plot forward when Abdi’s computer isn’t doing so.
The action draws to a conclusion when (spoiler) Kyle finds the bomb and the real Brian at a house Abdi has located from his computer searches. Brian beats up Kyle and injures him, but Kyle is rescued by Chantel from the house fire Brian starts afterwards. Then Kyle, Chantel and another cogswapper have to chase Brian to a fairground where Kyle finds the bomb under a school bus. Then Brian finds Kyle, and Kyle has to deal with Brian, the bomb and (of course!) his own inherent racism:

Over the loudspeaker, Kyle heard a voice instructing fairgoers to please exit to the parking lots in a calm and orderly fashion. He unzipped the backpack, exposing the explosive charge. Through the fog of agony, the Brian in his head tried to stop him, but Kyle was in charge now. You’re just an ugly part of me that already existed, he thought. And because I died, you got a name. Once I accepted that, I understood how weak you are.
you’re not so different, I fit right in
Kyle’s heel gouged a furrow in the ground as Brian dragged him all the way out.
As he emerged into the light again, he remembered Marie’s hands. He remembered exactly what they had done. Anyone pulls the red wires, boom.
He heard both Brians at once. No no no don’t—
He pulled the red wires.  p. 48

Kyle awakens in a new body, and sees Shari and Abdi (who has edited out Brian from the new persona backup that he has conveniently been running for Kyle since earlier in the story). Kyle has no recollection of anything that has happened since the original bombing.
This story starts with a neat idea but it is one that is sloppily executed (how did Brian’s persona get mixed up with Kyle’s; why are there such stupid laws surrounding the backup technology and responsibility for criminal acts, etc.). Much worse is the second part of the story, which devolves into a sub-Hollywood cyberpunk thriller with good guys and bad guys. I lost interest halfway through.⁵
∗ (Mediocre). 21,600 words. Story link.

•

Light Up the Clouds by Greg Egan (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) begins with Anna landing a glider on a forest floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. After she disembarks she has a discussion with Tirell (the story’s main character), Selik, and Rada about her observations above the clouds, which includes a comment that “the Cousins might be back”. When Selik doubts Anna’s observations, Rada suggests that she take a fresh pair of eyes with her on her next flight—and so Tirell is recruited as her apprentice.
When Anna subsequently takes Tirell up on his first flight the thermals in the atmosphere soon take them above the cloud tops. There we see that Maldo, Anna and Tirell’s floating forest home is not the only exotic feature of this world, but so is the solar system they are part of: Tirell sees the small, bright Far Sun is just about to drop below the horizon, and that the massive, dull Near Sun is so close to them that it is siphoning gas from their planet, causing the Near Sun to heat up. Then, in the distance, at an equilibrium point between the planet and the two suns, are not three but now six bright points of light—the “Cousins”.
The middle part of the story develops this intriguing setup—we learn something of the history of this people from the frequent mentions of their Recitations, a verbal history that suggests that much earlier human settlers split into two groups to settle their solar system—and, when nineteen lights (now described as propelled asteroids) are later sighted, the decision is made to attempt to contact the Cousins. Unfortunately, the explanation of the construction of the catapult system later used to launch an unmanned glider to the equilibrium point is (a) overlong and (b) unclear,⁶ which means that the middle of the story comes close to grinding to a halt at points (although, that said, in among all this there is an undeveloped but intriguing scene where Tirell fertilises Delia’s eggs, a sign of how long this offshoot of humanity has been on its own, and how differently evolved it has become).
When there is no contact after the launch of the unmanned glider (and a subsequent observation flight sees even more asteroids at the equilibrium point and an increase in the gas loss) it becomes clear that the cousins are responsible for the siphoning (which is now causing the death of parts of Maldo). The group decide to launch a manned flight.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the problems of breathing (a canopy) and re-entry (a parachute) addressed before Tirell sets off in a glider to the equilibrium point. When he gets there one of the humans there deigns to talk to him but basically tells Tirell to get lost—the Cousins won’t stop the gas bleed as they need the Near Sun to heat up so they can settle two other planets in the solar system (we learn there are billions of them and only ten thousand of Tirell’s people). Tirell returns to Maldo to tell them the news, and then says he need to hear the full Recitation so they can prepare for their future.
This has a fairly good start and a decent enough ending but, as I’ve already mentioned, the middle is a drag, and I also didn’t buy that the Cousins would be so offhand—if they have the technology to bleed a planet and fire up a sun they could surely help or cope with ten thousand indigents/refugees. I don’t think this entirely works, but it is a pleasant enough tale and may appeal to readers of traditional science fiction (it doesn’t hurt that it has echoes of Brian W. Aldiss’s Hothouse and Bob Shaw’s The Ragged Astronauts).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 19,500 words. Story link.

•

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed is part of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled off into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words. Story link.

•••

This group of stories is a mixed bag. I particularly liked the Nayler and the Reed novellas, and suggest that you don’t miss them, especially as they are available free online—and the Egan may work for some people, especially those interested in novel ecosystems or Big Dumb Objects. I wouldn’t recommend the Bear or Irvine stories, which stuck me as formulaic and/or padded and/or boring. The results of the reader polls in one of my Facebook groups⁷ would appear to back this up (although it is a very small sample size).  ●

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1. Ferron, the protagonist of A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear, is born in the years after 2042.

2. The first published story of Ray Nayler’s “Sylvia Aldstatt” series is The Disintergration Loops (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios first.

3. The Nayler didn’t end up on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn’t available free online (or wasn’t that noticeable when it eventually was). It was also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books, and book voters outnumber short fiction voters. There are also other political and tribal reasons, I suspect.

4. Stephen King does a much better job of putting his readers in the heads of genuinely unpleasant characters, and you can’t help but think that if he wrote Glitch that Brian would have been portrayed in a considerably more realistic way. In particular, the absence of the n-word in a story that is about a racist terrorist shows the extent to which the author or editor or publishers (or all of them) are self-censoring. I can understand that any one, or maybe all, of the above may not want to use language like that in their work or magazine (and I’m not particularly keen on having to read it). But, if that is the case, I’d suggest that you may want to avoid using racist characters like this as convenient stereotypical villains, because all you are doing is presenting a filtered and unrealistic version of such people.

5. I think Jim Harris may have lost interest in Glitch before I did: he wrote a long blog post listing all the suspension-of-disbelief problems he had with the story. I see that he mentions that Irvine is a comic book writer, and I should have realised that from the mindless action in the second half, if not from the poor conceptualisation of the first.

6. Light Up the Clouds by Greg Egan was a recent group read in one of my Facebook groups, and several others struggled to visualise the catapult/launch mechanism.

7. We did these stories as part of a Group Read in one of my Facebook groups. Here are the results of the poll we did at the end of the novellas (I have transcribed the first set of results as Facebook have messed about with the polls, as of June 2022, which now (a) don’t rank the results, and (b) give percentages rather than votes):

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed, 8 votes
A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler, 7 votes
A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear, 2 votes
Light Up the Clouds by Greg Egan, 1 vote
Glitch by Alex Irvine, 1 vote

And at the end of the reading all three of the award lengths, novella, novelette and short story (“Novelette” is a typo and it should have read “Combined”):

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Summary: These are the five novelette finalists for the 36^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (for stories published in 2021). They are, with one exception, a lacklustre lot (Ray Nayler’s Año Nuevo is worth a look).
[Story links]

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Editor, Sheila Williams

Año Nuevo • novelette by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗
Billie the Kid • novella by Rick Wilber –
Philly Killed His Car • novelette by Will McIntosh ∗∗
Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗
The HazMat Sisters • novelette by L.X. Beckett ∗∗+

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Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:

It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand.  p. 78

Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):

“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.”  p. 87-88

I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
∗∗∗ (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

•

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) is one of his “Moe Berg/Many Worlds” series, and opens off the coast of California on the Japanese submarine I-401. The boat is preparing to launch its three fighter bombers, one of which will nuke LA with Das Biest, a Nazi nuclear bomb rescued from Bergen in the last days of the Reich (there is no explanation given as to why the Germans did not use the bomb themselves).
After this brief opening section, the story switches to Billie “the Kid” Davis, a ninety-four year old woman who is telling her life story to a nurse in a care home. Billie tells of her childhood in Kirkwood (west of St Louis), love of baseball (there is an endless amount of tedious sports description in this part of the story), the girls’ Catholic school she attended, and how she learned to fly (this latter courtesy of her Dad’s job as an aircraft designer). However, after an idyllic childhood, there is a glider crash at her Dad’s company, and he resigns (it wasn’t his fault, but he sensed something might be wrong). The family move to Culver City.
The next part of the story sees Billie go for a trial with a professional baseball team, the Hollywood Stars, and she is hired as a player (their first female team member).¹ After a couple of pages of Hollywood life, WWII finally arrives along with Eddie Bennett (this latter character, along with Moe Berg, are agents from another timeline). Billie has a crush on Eddie and so, when Eddie asks Billie to fly a B-25 on a special mission (to sink the Japanese sub), Billie readily agrees. At this point, we are now eleven thousand words into a nineteen thousand word long story.
The second part of the tale (spoiler) pivots from an overlong (and boring) baseball autobiography to a daft Marvel movie story, and sees a small super-competent group of individuals get airborne on a mission to sink the sub (the crew includes Billie, her father, Moe Berg, Eddie, and Hedy Lamarr—who has designed the frequency-agile radio-guided torpedo that they will be using). During this obviously successful mission (it is a Marvel movie remember, no-one gets hurt or killed), we have the ridiculous spectacle of Billie flying the B-25 medium bomber at wavetop height (this after a few hours of training), and dogfighting with, and shooting down, all three of the submarine’s fighter-bombers (partly with “wing-mounted” machine guns I’m not sure any version of the B-25 had, and certainly none of the common variants²). However, all this action doesn’t stop the nuke being dropped off the coast of LA—then (and I’m not sure exactly what happens here, presumably history changes) all effects of the blast disappear and Billie’s previously badly wounded dad is sitting next to her in the cockpit, unaffected.
The final part of the story has further Many Worlds hand-wavium (there is talk about how various timestreams affect each other earlier in the story, if I recall correctly), and sees Eddie in 2045 checking that the right person is President of the USA, that there is women’s sport, and that the “oligarchs were gone for now”. Then (the unaged) Eddie goes tripping through worlds and time to see the ninety-four year old Billie. A suitably sentimental ending is squeezed out.
Half tedium, half nonsense.
– (Awful). 19,750 words.³ Story link.

•

Philly Killed His Car by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the protagonist, Philly, trying to sell his sentient car:

“How many miles did you say?”
“Madeline,” Philly said. “How many miles do you have?”
“That’s a rather personal question,” Madeline shot back. “How tall are you without the auto-lifts in those dashing faux-leather cowboy boots?”
Philly winced as the dude glanced down at his boots. He was so sick of this fucking car. “Can you just answer the question, please?”
“I’ve traveled fifty-six thousand incident-free miles, rounding up.”  p. 48

Matters do not improve when Mr Timms, the prospective buyer, offers a price:

“Madeline, how about it? He seems like a good guy, don’t you think? If he was your owner, he could take much better care of you than me.” Philly caught himself. “If he was your client, I meant to say.” Madeline went apeshit when Philly used the O word. He braced himself for one of her ass-chewings.
“Do you work with other vehicles, Mr. Timms?” Madeline asked.
“I own three,” Mr. Timms said proudly. “A Mercedes convertible AJ seven, a Tesla
Humvee Elite, and a mint 1982 Mustang.”
“So, you don’t really need my services. My presence in your garage would be meant as a further display of your economic prowess.”
Mr. Timms’ eyes narrowed. “That’s not at all the way I would put it.”
“No, I’m perfectly sure it isn’t. Let’s go, Philip. I’m ready to leave.”
“God damn it.” Philly raised his fist over Madeline’s hood, just barely resisting the urge to slam it down.
“That’s one nasty car you’ve got there. No wonder you’re not asking more.” Mr. Timms turned on his heel and headed up his driveway.  p. 49

The rest of the story details Philly’s increasing irritation with Madeline (his family badly needs the money). Then, while Philly is bitching to a friend called Gibsy about the wider AI situation (they gained limited rights after a one day strike and are now considered a nuisance by many), Gibsy suggests to Philly (spoiler) that he crash the car and claim on the insurance. Philly duly does this and, when the car doesn’t go in the lake, smashes the CPU to bits while Madeline begs him to stop (in an overly brutal scene). Then he and Gibsy push the car down the ravine and into the water.
The second part of the story sees his wife visit him in hospital—just in time to see all the lights and equipment in his room switch off. The AIs in his shoe lifts (which Philly had forgotten about) have told the rest of the AI world about his crime, Philly is now sanctioned—no AI controlled equipment will work in his presence beyond the very basics required to keep him alive.
The final section sees Philly doing manual labour in an onion field, having nightmares about killing a human Madeline, and then, after smashing the house toaster when all the appliances starts chanting “Killer”, repairing it. When he promises to modify the rest of the appliances we see that Philly may eventually be able to win forgiveness, at least from some of the AIs.
This is an okay story if you don’t think about it too much (e.g. a world where AIs are sentient and have rights but can still be sold as property is completely inconsistent, and an untenable situation—and the idea that the AIs may forgive the brutal killing of one of their number for a few modifications is just ridiculous).
∗∗ (Average). 8,500 words. Story link.

•

Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) opens with Station Commander Ennie Niagara of Kenlon Station having dinner with the Ijt ambassador, an avian like alien. Niagara listens to the Ijt’s account of the previous commander’s fall from grace (a food related incident involving the serving of ghost peppers), and learns that his actions were designed to get rid of the Joxto, a troublesome race of aliens, from the station. The conversation closes with the ambassador’s news that the Joxto are on their way back.
Multiple plot elements and characters are then introduced to the story: two aliens, Qasi and Baxo, set off the fire alarms when they try the human custom of fondue (the latter creature is unknown to the rest of the station, and lurks in the air ducts); then a spaceship arrives with a Captain Vincente, who comes with official news of the Joxto’s imminent arrival; meanwhile, a body is found in engineering, which turns out to be the previous station commander . . . .
After this the stories trundles along while the investigation proceeds. More characters are introduced (two security officers, Mackie and Digby, as well as a Dr Reed). There is an alien fruit ceremony that Ennie attends before later going to her office and finding a piece of fruit that Bako, the “ghost alien” has left there. Then Vincente gets news from Earth that there is an assassin on the station looking to kill the Joxto.
After the fruit left in the commander’s cabin is identified as a particularly delicious one from Tyfse, a planet destroyed previously by the warring Joxto and Okgono, this all eventually resolves (spoiler) in the station’s garden ring. There we find out that Fred the gardener is plotting with the remaining surviving Tyfsian to sell the fruit it has saved from its planet, in return for assisting it to kill both the Joxto and Okgono. The story closes with Ennie confronting both races about the genocide.
This is an okay story, I guess, but it’s as plodding as its title, goes on too long, and generally felt like a dull ‘Sector General’⁴ story with trendy pronouns:

“That is because I have not yet added the [fondue] heat source,” Qasi said. “I wished to test my understanding of the processes and equipment, and also refine my selection of sauces, before I invite an entire party to participate in the experience. I will even invite the commander!”
“What is the heat source, though?” Bako asked. Ey rotated eir head upside down so ey could peer at the underside of the pot, long whiskers bent back. “Some sort of thermal pod?”
“No!” Qasi said, her long tail twitching behind her from the excitement. “This is the very best part.”
She pulled out a small metal can, took the lid off, and slipped it between the legs of the stand under the pot. Then she grasped the small pull-tab on the side between two claws and pulled.
Flame jetted out of the top of the can, engulfing the pot. Bako skittered away on all eir two dozen legs, screeching in alarm. “It’s supposed to be able to be modulated,” Qasi said, trying to get close enough to see without burning her own whiskers. “I probably should have read the instructions.”
“Fire!” Bako shouted. “You made a fire! On a space station! This was a terrible idea, Qasi!”  p. 79

I can see why you might use these pronouns for a human character, but why use them for (to our view) a genderless alien instead of “they” or “their” or “its”? It’s an unnecessary distraction.
Another thing that irritated me by the end of the story was the continuous mention of food. There are numerous occasions where eating occurs, and one of these, where a minor character is stuffing a burrito into his cakehole, just destroyed my suspension-of-disbelief. This was about as convincing as a New York Millennial microwaving pottage for lunch.
I also didn’t much care for the lazy contemporary dialogue and thoughts that the characters sometimes express. Apart from the likes of “Holy shit that’s good” and “crap ton of energy,” we also have twaddle like this:

The coffee machine was, in one of humanity’s oldest and most sacred covenants, fair game, with the caveat that if you finished the pot, you set it to make another.  p. 84

It’s a beverage, not a religion.
I usually look forward to Palmer’s work but this was disappointing.
∗∗ (Average, barely). 15,150 words. Story link.

•

The Hazmat Sisters by L. X. Beckett (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) sees a man approach three teenage girls in the wild, who quickly mount a hi-tech defence:

“Unknown interloper.” Text from the hot scrolls across her augmented display.
She flicks the warning away with a gesture, linking to Tess’s dragon and zooming with its cameras. It feeds a view of the brush direct to her goggles. No coyote this time. The man’s scrawny, but a man nonetheless. Not as big as Fee, but full-grown.
He’s creeping toward them. Not blundering, not snuffling about for shelter, and moving superslow. Bidding to fool their motion detectors? Not good.
Wilmie checks the charge on Pony—three quarters—then side-steps, fighting a sneeze as she crouches beside her twin, Tess, and puts a hand over her mouth. Tess goes from slack to electric under her hands. She joins the Dragon channel, takes one look, and sends, subvocally: “Someone’s coming, Fee.”
Wilmie’s earbuds make the utterance seem loud.
Fee, their fearless leader, rolls deeper into the culvert they’ve claimed for the night’s camp. “Secure the mule.”
Wilmie obeys, triggering a clattering furl of shield over Mule’s chest-mounted solar panel. Pony collapses into a pile of dull silver spaghetti, camouflage mode, pretending to be broken chain-link fence, scattered in grass. Dragon rises another three meters, propellers whirring lustily as Tess, emitting a cheerful spray of happyface moji, queues up a trank dart.  p. 74-75

The man is eventually confronted by the girls and slinks off. Afterwards, the three suspect that he may be a Dixie deserter up to no good (the Dixie militia is one of the factions in an ongoing American civil war that has reduced—along with corona superviruses—much of the country to a post-apocalyptic landscape).
The rest of the piece provides some backstory as well as further trials for the three as they try to walk to the DMZ, their mother/stepmother (I forget the family details), and safety. This involves: the man reappearing on two further occasions; potentially weaponised tree-planting drones appearing while they are queueing with others to buy supplies; a man with a wife and baby who helps them out; and much bickering between the three.
During all this the mother is monitoring the girls remotely, and conferences with them every night (one of the gimmicks of the story is that the mother gamifies—D&D, I’m told—their journey to try and make the three more co-operative).
This is alright, I guess, but the (spoiler) final fight scene with the man isn’t as clearly described as it could be (the problem is continually having to describe what various pieces of future tech are doing), and, overall, the story feels like an extract from a longer work rather than a self-contained piece.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,350 words. Story link.

•••

If these are the best of the novelettes⁵ that the magazine published in 2021 (I haven’t read the other stories so can’t assess the voters’ perspicacity) then it was a poor year for the magazine in this length category.  ●

_____________________

1. What is the point of showing (in Rick Wilber’s Billie the Kid) a female character achieving an ahistorical breakthrough unless that society has also fundamentally changed, and you explain how it happened? This kind of pandering to the readership looks rather frivolous in the light of developments since the story was written (i.e. a whole country of women sent back to the 14^th Century by the Taliban).

2. The Wikipedia page for the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber—knock yourself out.

3. Billie the Kid is listed as a novelette on the Asimov’s TOC.

4. The ‘Sector General’ series, by James White, were stories about a hospital in space which treated different types of aliens. There is a list on ISFDB—I suggest you read one of those instead of the Palmer.

5. We did these stories as part of a Group Read in one of my Facebook groups. Here are the results of the poll we did at the end of the novelettes:

And at the end of the reading all three lengths (“Novelette” is a typo):

●

Summary: These are the six short story finalists for the 36^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (for stories published in 2021). They are a mixed bag, and not as good a selection as last year. That said, three of them are worth a look, especially T. J. Berry’s My Heart is at Capacity.
[Story links]

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams

Bread and Circuits • short story by Misha Lenau ∗
Flowers like Needles • short story by Derek Künsken ∗∗∗
Muallim • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗
Alien Ball • short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch –
My Heart Is at Capacity • short story by T. J. Berry ∗∗∗+
Sentient Being Blues • short story by Christopher Mark Rose ∗

_____________________

Every year Asimov’s SF magazine runs a poll so readers can vote for their favourite stories, covers, etc. from the previous year. The magazine also makes (most of) the material freely available online¹ for a short period so, even if (unlike me) you aren’t a subscriber, you can have a look at the kind of work they run.
Here are my reviews of the short story finalists:

Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with a sentient toaster (also described as a “toaster oven slash bread machine”) turning up on the doorstep of the Nadia, who runs an orphanage for abandoned, self-aware appliances (which she calls “quirks”).
After trying to communicate with the toaster, Nadia eventually takes it to the basement where she keeps the other quirks. There are then a few more scrambled conversations before the toaster asks Nadia to reset it (essentially commit suicide, as its self-awareness will vanish if it goes back to the default software).
It later becomes clear, after Nadia makes further efforts to talk with the toaster, that it has lost its friends. We then learn that, because of a debilitating illness that restricts her movements, so has Nadia: she resolves to make friends with the quirks.
There isn’t much to this really, but I suspect it will appeal to those who are fond of stories about sad and/or lonely narrators which have a sentimental ending.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,800 words. Story link.

•

Flowers Like Needles by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) introduces us to Bek, a needle-like alien that lives in a strange and exotic environment:

Bek scuttled over the needle field on the Waste of Mosses, far from Roktown and the monastery in Horn Valley. Turbulent winds scattered the neat rows of falling iron carbonyl snows. The steely needles here grew jagged, making the magnetic fields on the waste feel unsettled, haunted. Deep beneath the waste, the iron carbonyl ocean surged, pushing erratic breezes between the spines, whistling ghostly, wordless songs. Only two swarmers, Dux and Jed, accompanied him, humming a tune about Bek’s brave travels. In some ways, they looked like him. Fine iron and nickel needles burst radially from the centers of their bodies to absorb microwaves from the pulsar and catch falling gray snowflakes. Strong magnetic fields moved eight legs of sliding metal rods. Small pincers capped each of their limbs, tough enough to hold tight to the upthrusting fields of spines, delicate enough to read histories recorded in the crimpings in archival needles or to preen Bek’s needles.  p. 138

Bek is on a quest to find Master Mok, the former head of his order, and he eventually arrives at Mount Ceg. There he finds another of his kind, Lod, guarding a mountain tunnel which leads to Master Mok. Lod tells Bek he will have to get past him to see Master Mok, and indicates the bodies of other fallen warriors around him.
The pair fight, and Bek wins but yields to Lod (which then releases Lod from an oath put on him by a monster which lives under the mountain and which also guards Mok). After some back and forth (mostly Bek’s zen-like teachings about accepting help) they both go to seek Master Mok.
The two then meet the monster TokTok in a mountain tunnel that leads to Master Mok, and learn that he is actually a huge warrior who crossed the ocean to avenge Cis the Master of Tides. After some backstory about how TokTok came instead to become Master Mok’s guard, he agrees to accompany them to find Master Mok.
The threesome (spoiler) eventually find Master Mok, who tells them he will not teach them anything unless they defeat him in battle. The three reflect on what they have learned on their journey and (I think) conclude that they need to find their own path and not follow someone else’s.
The alien description is well done, as is the Eastern spiritual journey-like material,¹ but the story’s payoff isn’t as obvious or profound as it should be. Still, apart from a weak, somewhat anti-climactic ending, this is quite good.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,100 words. Story link.

•

Muallim by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with Irada, the blacksmith of an Azerbaijani village, repairing Muallim, the robot schoolteacher:

“I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate, Muallim. It will take some work to repair. In the meantime, I can trade it out for your spare chest plate. I still have it here in the shop. But I haven’t had time to fix it. That one is more battered than this one is.”
“How long will it take to fix these dents. An hour?” Muallim asked.
“No. More like an afternoon. I can’t do it now. Can you come back after school? You can wait in the house. You can help my father with his Ketshmits grammar. You know how he loves that.”
“I am scheduled to chop wood for Mrs. Hasanova.”
“Tell her you will chop wood tomorrow.”
She watched Muallim consider this. They must have programmed this gesture into the robot, the way it tilted its watering can of a head to the side and slightly down, just like a human.
“Yes,” Muallim said, “I think that will work. I will stop by Mrs. Hasanova’s and tell her I will come tomorrow.”  p. 36

This opening passage contains a number of hints about various happenings that occur in the story that follows, which alternates between the point of view of Irada the blacksmith, Muallim the robot, and Maarja, an NGO worker who is writing a report on the educational efficacy of the robot in this remote location. In the ensuing narrative we learn that Muallim is being used inappropriately (the wood chopping referenced above, which is causing undue wear and tear); that Muallim is stoned by the village children when it goes to cajole them to go to school; and that the village is generally quite a dysfunctional place where the robot (when it isn’t being attacked by an aggressive rooster) is seemingly making little progress. We also see various aspects of village life, mostly centred on Irada and her widowed and one-armed Mayor father.
When Maarja finally finishes her report it becomes clear that Muallim is going to be taken from the village but, before this happens, she gets an urgent message from one of the children that something has happened to robot. She goes to a local ravine and sees it smashed to pieces two hundred meters below, presumably an act of vandalism.
After Maarja leaves (spoiler) it becomes apparent that the locals have faked Muallim’s destruction using the removed chest-plate (see the passage above) and various scrap metal so they can keep the robot in the village.
This has some nice local colour, but it’s essentially a well done “yokels put one over on the city folks” piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,950 words. Story link.

•

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the narrator watching three-armed alien Ashtenga play basketball. After this we find out that the narrator has been brought in to report on whether the Ashtenga should be admitted into the professional leagues on Earth (there are conflicting views on the matter).
The rest of the story is a rambling and starry-eyed description of people and aliens playing the game, its history, and all of this is intermingled with a lot of what can only be called simplistic and patronising messaging about inclusion. This latter begins with the narrator doubting his own views:

I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.
I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.
I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that moment a younger person looks at me, already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.
I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.
An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball—that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming. p. 39

There is a caricature in that passage for sure, but it isn’t the one suggested.
What the story is specifically about is eventually made explicit (although this is telegraphed pages earlier):

Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional.  p. 42

Mmm, goodbye women’s sports then. I’m not sure that these matters are going to be resolved in such a straightforward manner—see the recent troubles in American swimming and British cycling.
Finally, after more interminable detail about the game, and a match where the Ashtenga trounce a human team, the story finally equates the idea of transgender inclusion with the desegregation of basketball in the middle of last century:

Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after?  p. 45

In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.
Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins And Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.
He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.
I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever.  p. 46

I particularly dislike sports stories, and “message” stories even more, so this piece was a double fail for me. I’d also add that what makes most message stories so irritating is that (like this one) the complexities of the issues raised are never addressed (and in this case we have the bonus of people who have concerns about trans inclusion in women’s sport being likened to racists).
I wonder why it is that some writers think their ability to string a sentence together means they are possessed of a some particular wisdom.
In conclusion I’d also add that, even putting the facile message of this story to one side (although that is probably the only reason it got published), this is a flabby, meandering, and tedious read.
– (Awful). 6,450 words.

•

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) is narrated by Paul, the android partner of a young woman called Rebecca:

My heart is at capacity. I’m scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. I don’t have the power to love Rebecca any more than I already do, and it is not enough for her.
I spend the day before my appointment creating economic projections for a developing nation’s STEM investment. Picking up an extra side gig means my upgrade won’t impact our household budget. I don’t want Rebecca to feel that the opening of my heart comes at her expense.
My numbers reveal that this young country will recoup their STEM investment within a generation. There’s a statistical certainty it will bring up their GDP by 5-7 percent in a year or two. My numbers also say that my upgrade will allow me to devote 9 percent more processing power to Rebecca’s needs. We don’t have a GDP-like measurement in our relationship, but my nested flowchart says that if I identify and satisfy a greater percentage of her needs, she will recognize my usefulness and love me more.  p. 131

Of course (spoiler) that latter conclusion (his being more useful will make her love him more) is obviously erroneous, and this becomes apparent during the rest of the story, where their interactions become increasingly suboptimal:

Rebecca kisses me on her way out in the morning, tight-lipped and perfunctory. Not the warm, open-mouthed kisses of our middle days together. I don’t push for more. Nor do I mention the lunch that’s in her satchel. In my experience, explicitly telling a partner what you’ve done for them elicits a negative reaction. Better to work silently and unnoticed than to demand praise that will only be offered resentfully.  p. 133

Paul’s solitary reflections, and his analysis of their interactions—which are acutely observed alternating with entertainingly wonky—occur during the same period he meets and interacts with Ashira, a more basic android partner (“Do you want some feedback?” he asks her after a limp handshake). Through these exchanges we learn more about the androids’ history and their use as human partners.
Eventually, Paul goes to get his upgrade (secretly paid by himself from the odd jobs he does when Rebecca is working or asleep) and, when it is complete, he instantly realises that Rebecca has a new, human partner. After they split up (or, more accurately, Rebecca dumps him) Paul moves on to a new relationship with a male bartender. He still thinks about Rebecca, but is reluctant to delete his memories of her because of the “valuable data mixed in” with them.
This is a smartly observed story that provides an intriguing and witty view of human relationships.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,300 words. Story link.

•

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with “Asimov was a Bigot” graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:

There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It’d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men’s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn’t dig an escape before their time ran out.  p. 152

One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager’s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB’s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don’t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic—if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom’s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, “What you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung”).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB’s brain isn’t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB’s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don’t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn’t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov’s expense:

If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov’s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his “laws of robotics” that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots—if confronted with such a choice—must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important.  p. 156

Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (“scrofulous”), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don’t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves “human”. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov’s robot stories—didn’t The Bicentennial Man become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
∗ (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link.

•••

A mixed bag of finalists²—I’m not that impressed with the standard of short stories in Asimov’s generally, and I think I’m rapidly coming to the same conclusion about their readers’ choices. That said, three of them are worth a look (the Nayler, Künsken, and especially T. J. Berry’s My Heart is at Capacity, which I suspect will show up in the Year’s Bests).  ●

_____________________

1. Künsken’s Flowers Like Needles reminded of the old TV show Kung Fu to the point that I ordered the DVD boxset.

2. We did these stories as part of a Group Read in one of my Facebook groups. Here are the results of the poll we did at the end of the short stories:

And at the end of the reading all three lengths (“Novelette” is a typo):

●

Summary: there are a couple of pretty good stories in this issue from Ray Nayler (an “Istanbul Protectorate” story, Mender of Sparrows) and Marta Randall (Sailing to Merinam, an immersive fantasy) with good backup from Paul McAuley (Maryon’s Gift) and Michael Cassutt (Aurora). The William Ledbetter (his sequel to an earlier Nebula award-winning story) and Steven Rasnic Tem stories are also of some interest. Of the remaining seven pieces, four are average (including the novella or near-novella length stories by Rick Wilber and Will McIntosh which make up a large chunk of the issue) and three are mediocre.
I also note that the non-fiction (which I am generally cool about anyway) is almost uniformly dull this issue: this is not helped by subject matter I’m not much interested in (e.g. ancient Ostrogoth coinage and ancient SF movies).
An average issue, I guess.
[ISFDB link] [Asimov’s SF, Amazon UK/USA]

Other reviews
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
Mender of Sparrows • novelette by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗+
The Magpie Stacks Probabilities • short story by Arie Coleman ∗
Venus Exegesis • novelette by Christopher Mark Rose ∗
Dollbot Cicily • novelette by Wil McIntosh ∗∗
Sailing to Merinam • short story by Marta Randall ∗∗∗+
Quake • short story by Peter Wood ∗∗
Aurora • novelette by Michael Cassutt ∗∗∗
The Gold Signal • short story by Jack McDevitt and Larry Wasserman ∗
Maryon’s Gift • short story by Paul J. McAuley ∗∗∗
The Short Path to Light • novelette by William Ledbetter ∗∗+
Do You Remember? • short story by Steve Rasnic Tem ∗∗
Offloaders • short story by Leah Cypess ∗
Blimpies • novella by Rick Wilber ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Shutterstock
From SF to Philosophy in Thirteen Steps • editorial by Kelly Lager
Across the Centuries • essay by Robert Silverberg
Blinded by Science • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Magic, Science, and the Moon in Le Voyage Dans La Lune • essay by Kelly Lager
Poetry • by Mary Soon Lee, Bruce McAllister, F. J. Bergmann, Ken Poyner, Herb Kauderer
Next Issue
On Books: What is Consciousness? • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

_____________________

[All the story reviews were previously posted on sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the three dots ••• and the non-fiction reviews.]

Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler takes place in the author’s ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ series, and opens with the narrator, Himmet, taking an injured sparrow to an android vet called Sezgin. Himmet later gets a call from him saying they need to talk and, when they meet again, Sezgin says that Himmet has found “a hole in the world”.
At a later meeting with a group of androids, at a safe house a ferry trip away from Istanbul (and after Himmit has been approached by a shady scientist from the nearby Institute enquiring whether he has picked up any injured sparrows recently), Sezgin tells Himmit that the sparrow contains a human consciousness. Moreover, it is a duplicate consciousness, not the original (something that was thought to be impossible in this consciousness-downloading society). Then someone knocks at the door, and Himmet is told to hide in a priest hole. By the time he gets out he is partially paralyzed.
This latter event is explained in a subsequent doctor’s appointment, where we find out that Himmet is a human who was downloaded into a blank android when he was badly injured in the war and who, when he is stressed, suffers partial paralysis in his new body (throughout the story, Himmet agonises about whether he is really himself, or a copy). We also learn about societal hostility towards androids, and how Himmit got involved with Sezgin when he started paying for deformed sparrows to be mended (replacement legs, etc.).
The story concludes (spoiler) with another, more menacing, visit from the Institute scientist, during which he demands the return of the sparrow. Himmit does not want the consciousness in the sparrow to be returned for illegal experimentation, and he reluctantly goes back to Sezgin to get the sparrow to give to the scientist. We later find out, however, that the woman present at that latter meeting is the freed consciousness (the “connectome”) from the sparrow, and that the androids have put a flawed replica in its place (something, they think, that will keep the scientist occupied for months).
This piece may seem to be a heavily plotted tale but it is actually much more of a slow burn than the synopsis above would suggest, and the main attractions are the setting, the writing (people who feed sparrows will appreciate the descriptions¹ of their behaviour), and the character’s epistemological agonising.²
I suspect Nayler is becoming one of those writers who you can enjoy regardless of whether there is a story being told or not.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,500 words.

•

The Magpie Stacks Probabilities by Arie Coleman has as its narrator a female astronaut who managed to survive an accident in space by opening a hatch with an improvised tool based on a lost Allen key. The story itself takes place afterwards at her home with her wife and son. The latter has now started to secrete small items around the house; later, the narrator starts doing the same thing while musing about order and entropy.
There is no real story here, and I’m not sure what point the piece is trying to make (possibly none, it may just be a short mood piece).
∗ (Mediocre), 2,750 words.

•

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen—an obedient ex-US Navy pilot sent on a mission to the atmosphere of Venus. The story itself starts in the gondola that she (although the narrator’s sex isn’t clear till later in the story) shares with a scientist, Gabriel, and an AI, Zheng-123783b (there is brief reference to AI civil rights and the fact that “you couldn’t send humans on a great voyage of discovery and leave out the inorganics”).
In fairly short order Ling becomes sexually involved with Zheng, and soon after that she is outside the floating gondola hacking one of the native “flying pancakes” to death with a machete, a First Contact situation gone badly wrong. When they are almost overwhelmed by pancakes responding to the killing, Gabriel fires the rocket motors. This saves them but they lose a lot of their attached life support equipment.
At this point (spoiler) the story then morphs from a sex-with-AIs/First Contact tale into a Climate Change one, where Gabriel theorises that Venus was once like Earth but suffered from a huge runaway greenhouse effect. Then, when the crew are ordered home (they cannot survive for very long in their diminished state), Ling suggests that Zheng is sent back digitally to Earth, she take the one-man emergency pod, and Gabriel remains to do vital work on his theory. This solution is not accepted by mission control, and Ling gets a message from her Navy handlers on a secret backchannel—then, when Ling and Gabriel subsequently go outside on a routine EVA to remove the pancakes from the gondola, Ling stabs Gabriel with the machete and throws his body into the Venusian atmosphere, while making radio calls that suggest that AI Zheng has jumped.
Ling later goes home in the pod, while Zheng stays on the gondola impersonating Gabriel and doing his work (apparently Zheng couldn’t have been left behind on its own for political reasons).
Things slowly improve on Earth, although the similarity between the global warming effects on the two planets are never made public.
This story didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I didn’t buy the Navy pilot as assassin malarkey (being able to drop a bomb on someone doesn’t qualify you as a close-quarters killer); second, this kitchen sink story can’t seem to decide whether it is about AI, planetary exploration, first contact, or climate change; third, the internal logic of the story does not convince (the political background is sketchy to say the least and, at one point, Zheng cryptically states it won’t be able to help Ling as it is “Asimov’ed” and “can’t kill Gabriel”. Obviously not that Asimov’ed, because colluding in Ling’s killing of Gabriel is an obvious First Law violation.
This is a bit of a mess.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,500 words.

•

Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh opens with Cicily, the down-on-her-luck narrator, in a burger joint eating her basic menu food and browsing gig economy jobs when she is hassled by a young man. He asks her if she was the original model for his dollbot (sexbot). She rebuffs him but, after she leaves the restaurant, he and his (premium menu) friends hassle her again:

I picked up my pace as Red Sideburns’ friends raced from across the street to intercept me. One was carrying a lifesized female dollbot in a negligee. I wound through pedestrians.
“Just look,” Red Sideburns called. “Tell me this isn’t you.”
They weren’t going to give up. I’d have to make a scene. I stopped short, spun to face them. “Leave me alone. Stop following me, or I’ll call the police.”
One of the premium boys was holding the doll out, its lifelike nipples visible through gossamer fabric.
It looked exactly like me.
Not sort of. Not even, Oh what a strange coincidence. Exactly like me, down to the freckle. Down to the crescent-shaped scar on my knee I’d gotten roller-skating when I was ten, although not the long surgery scar on my shoulder that I got in the car accident.
A small crowd had formed. They looked at the doll, back at me. I was blinking and swallowing. A teenaged boy let out a high-pitched giggle.
“Were you the model for the body, or just the face? It’s hard to imagine this body is under those clothes.” Red Sideburns gestured at me with his chin, his gaze locked on my chest.
The boy holding the doll switched it on. Its eyes rolled open, revealing my light brown irises, flecked with hazel. The doll turned its head from side to side, taking in the scene.
“Is this a gang-bang?” she asked brightly. “You know me, I love a good gang-bang.”  p. 54-55

If this squirm-worthy (and unlikely) encounter doesn’t put you off reading further, the story then sees Cicily set off to her home in a drainage tunnel (I wasn’t kidding when I said she was down on her luck). On the way there she realises that the 3D images used in the dollbot’s construction probably came from a previous modelling job she had when she was younger.
When Cicily arrives home she tells her friend what happened to her before she changes her appearance (during this section we also learn that Cicily is a single mother whose child is in the temporary care of Child Protection Services—something that will become permanent if she can’t get some money together).
The now disguised Cicily starts looking for gig jobs repairing Cicily dollbots so she can learn more about them, and her first customer (of three) is Conrad, a seventy-something “old bastard” who Cicily notes isn’t even “mildly embarrassed” at getting his “fuck doll” repaired, and who refuses to pay when she leaves a scar on the dollbot after she has finished. Cicily, seeking revenge, quickly installs a patch to the dollbot’s software that lets her remotely telepresence to it later that evening. When Cicily does so, she finds the old man asking his dollbot to the prom, at which point she starts overriding the software and giving her own replies to his conversation. Later on she uses the override to take a hundred dollar bill and throw it outside the window while Conrad is having a shower.
Cicily later sets up the same scam with two other dollbot users, Jasper (a sensitive type who reads Anna Karenina to her) and Joey (who runs nine different types of dollbot, “a veritable United Nations of ethnicities”, through various fashion or strip shows, etc.). These jobs take place in the same time period that Cicily visits her daughter, who has been rented out as child labour by CPS to do hazardous tasks. We also, at another point in the story, see Cicliy almost drowned in the tunnel when it floods.
Over time (spoiler), Cicily become increasingly attracted to Jasper—he thinks his dollbot has become sentient, and they (Jasper and the dolbot, with Cicily telepresent) later go away for a couple of nights to a dollbot conference. Eventually, of course, this burgeoning relationship turns out too good to be true, and Jasper loses his temper when he and the dollbot (Cicily) argue: he goes on to trash and bury the dollbot.
Some time after this pivotal event Jasper summons Cicily to repair his dollbot and, once she has finished, she slips into the bathroom before leaving to change her appearance back to what it was before her encounter with the Premium boys at the start of the story. Cicily gives a stunned Jasper his money back and (essentially) dumps him out of a relationship that he never knew he had, giving him some life advice on the way out the door (peak irony from someone who is living in a drainage tunnel, is a voyeur and thief, and is perilously close to losing custody of her only daughter).
The final scenes see Cicily steal a lot of money from Conrad (she has the dollbot make it look like the money is burnt so it isn’t reported as stolen) and, on the way to recover her daughter from CPS, she telepresences to Joey’s dollbot and throws all his other bots out the tower block window before making the Cicily dollbot do the same.
On finishing the story I thought it reasonably well done (McIntosh creates entertaining and/or amusing plots), but the more I thought about it the more the piece soured. This reaction was, I eventually realised, due to the story’s facile worldview and its stereotypical characters—the three rich, male (and probably white) characters (as well as the Premium boys at the beginning) are all portrayed as losers, weirdos, scumbags, or all three—even Jasper, who Cicily is attracted to at one point, flies into a deranged rage towards the end of his story arc. Meanwhile, our hero Cicily is painted as a sexually and economically oppressed single-mother. These are, essentially, clichéd characterisations that seem to stem from viewing sex and wealth through the lens of critical theory, where men are always oppressors and women always the oppressed (and likewise for the “rich” and “poor”). These binaries also suggest that Cicily has never had any agency in, or responsibility for, anything that has ever happened in her life.
The other thing that bothered me about the story is the way that reader sympathy is manipulated—I’ve already described what the men are like, but more troubling is the story’s portrayal of Cicily as some sort of hero, even though she is someone who, with her gross invasion of privacy, thefts, and criminal damage, is more unpleasant than any of the men—unless, I guess, you subscribe to the idea that, if you are in the oppressed class, anything you do to your oppressors is fair game (for Old Testament types, think “an eye for an eye”). That can, of course, mean you end up as morally repellent as your so-called “oppressors”.
If you can stomach the above, there may be something for you here.
∗∗ (Average). 17,350 words.

•

Sailing to Merinam by Marta Randall has the narrator onboard a boat that is taking a group of male passengers (unpleasant religious types) from Cherek to Merinam. As the story progresses we find out that the narrator is intersex, but is disguised as a man, and that they can conjure up the wind by singing. Both of these would be intolerable to the Merinami passengers:

What do these stern people and their ugly religion do to people like me, women who are not boys and boys who are not girls, people who sing, people who whistle up the wind? [. . .] If the yellow priest knew he would have hurled that accusation at me. Worse than singing or being inbetween, worse than being in disguise? What do the Merinami do to singing witches wearing the wrong clothing? Will they try to hang me and drown me both? My knees give out and I scoot backward under my master’s bunk, where the ship’s cat finds me and head-butts my thigh until I make a lap for her, she hops into it, I lift her and rub my face against her belly. Warmth, softness, purring, I begin to catch my breath.  p. 86

After various events (the narrator saves a sailor caught by a rope, is seen momentarily conjuring the wind by singing, etc.), the Yellow Priest of the Merinami accuses them of being a woman. After a period of confinement (spoiler) they are brought in front of the captain. The narrator then conjures the wind and a huge wave that has the face of the Sea God. This briefly imperils the boat but, after the vessel has stabilised, the captain orders everyone below deck and the narrator is not troubled further.
After the ship reaches Merinam, and the passengers are disembarked, she becomes one of the crew (the captain is a pragmatist who realises the value of someone who can summon the wind).
I thought this was quite good, mostly because it is one of those immersive pieces³ that you can lose yourself in—and it has an arc/plot as well. I hope this is the first of a series.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,000 words.

•

Quake by Peter Wood opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Hill (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
∗∗ (Average). 5,950 words.

•

Aurora by Michael Cassutt begins with Vera Vorobyova, the seventy-nine-year-old retired director of a Russian “science institute” north of the Arctic Circle, summoned to a meeting at her old workplace. When she gets there she is met by the new director, Nikitin, a “networked” individual who has implants that connect him to his colleagues. Nikitin tells Vorobyova that a returning spaceship is in trouble and doesn’t have the fuel to avoid an asteroid on its route. He then asks about Search, a mothballed energy beam weapon used once over two decades ago when she was the director (and which created a new crater on the Moon).
The rest of the story sees Vorobyova help them get Search operational to fire at the asteroid, an experience which sees her pendulum from providing essential information (she initially finds hardcopy manuals in the basement when she learns the digital archives have been deleted) to being completely ignored. During the latter periods she goes back to her flat, drinks heavily, and thinks about the past:

She was [. . .] unhappy, questioning everything from her constant drinking and lack of goals to every decision she had made since the age of twenty-nine, including her turn away from research to administration, then every financial and personnel choice she had made on her path to the directorship—and as director.
She had not applied to work at Aurora. She was busy at the Institute for Applied Physics in the capital and expected to spend her entire career there. She had only heard of Aurora because its northern sky surveys had appeared in some popular science publication.
[. . .]
Other than a single visit for her mother’s funeral, she had not returned to the capital, [and] aside from two fleeting, furtive affairs, Vera had made no deep personal connections in forty years.  pp. 107-108

Vorobyova is, however, more proactive than this sad-sack description might suggest and, after some more back and forth (she later provides a firing code), Vorobyova realises, when she looks at photographs of the asteroids flat surface (spoiler), that it may reflect back enough of Search’s electromagnetic energy to affect Nikitin and the other networked humans. With the clock ticking down she then struggles to contact him or get into the facility.
The story eventually ends with her and Nikitin firing the device after the others are evacuated, and saving the ship. The reflected energy mostly lands elsewhere, and Nikitin’s companions are affected but they can be repaired. Nikitin then tells Vorobyova that there is now no longer an age limit on the process so she can be networked too.
The best parts of this story for me were the setting, Vorobyova’s alcoholic melancholy, and the initial part of the plot. The latter part of the story, where the suspense increases, seemed a little formulaic; I also didn’t entirely buy the science (the Earth would have moved in space during the time between firing and the reflection); finally, the revelation that Vorobyova can be networked and lead a different life is a twist too far. Still, it’s not a bad read for the most part, especially if you have a penchant (as I do) for gloomy Russian novels.
∗∗∗ (Good). 11,750 words.

•

The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman opens with the English teacher narrator and her scientist friend (they were in the Girl Scouts together) listening to an incoming message from a probe that has arrived at Proxima Centauri, four light-years away, after a twenty-three year journey. At the end of this section there is a moan about the amount of space junk in Earth orbit, and how it is hampering—and possibly preventing—any further missions (there have already been catastrophic accidents).
The next part of the story sees the scientist friend develop an FTL drive that is eventually tested on a flight to Jupiter (they use a previously abandoned probe in Earth orbit rather than ship all the parts up there). More complaints about space junk. The FTL ship, after a successful test flight, later sets off towards a plant called Wolf.
When the ship arrives there (spoiler), Earth (eventually) receives messages saying that they have discovered an abandoned alien ship, and then abandoned alien cities and planets. There is one final moan about space junk before the scientist observes, “It’s kind of like having invented the radio in a place that has no electricity”.
What is the point of this?
∗ (Mediocre). 4,150 words.

•

Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley is (we eventually discover) a campfire story told by an alien !Cha, and initially tells of an explorer called Iryna who discovers a virgin planet but chooses not to land there. Instead, she gifts the exploration rights to her niece (the Maryon of Maryon’s Gift), who then transfers them to a Gaian sect who set up defence drones around the planet to keep it in a virgin state.
Later, various intruders try to come through the nearby wormhole and land on the planet—but only two get close: one is a young fellow who hides in one of the supply ships and plans to surf through the atmosphere; the other is the Admiral, Iryna’s world-hunting rival:

He called himself the Admiral, although he had never held that rank, having only briefly served as a rating in the Commons police. He was around a hundred and fifty years old and claimed to be much older, and had spun a cocoon of vivid stories about himself, for he was not only a skilled and fearless explorer, but also a tireless self-mythologizer. We knew each other quite well—I had once traveled with him and the circus of his entourage for a couple of years—but even I do not know his true name or origin. Fame had displaced everything he had once been. No one believed the stories he had spun about himself more than he did, and as Iryna predicted, he was supremely irritated when he heard that she had discovered a habitable but untouched world and had taken steps to ensure that it would remain pristine. It was forbidden fruit, as in one of your myths, and there was nothing more that he craved, for he was a full-blown believer in the fitness of humanity to claim all the worlds in the galactic network, and the worlds beyond it, too. To step from star to star, galaxy to galaxy. To prove that humans were greater than any other client species and might even be their secret masters—he liked to promote the story that the Jackaroo were the distant descendants of the human species and had used tweaked wormholes to travel back in time to ensure their eventual triumph on the galactic stage.  p. 130

The Admiral (spoiler) starts a huge diversionary battle near the wormhole and sneaks through the main defences in a multi-shelled stealth ship. However, he is caught in a net near the planet and burns up in the atmosphere.
The !Cha narrator finishes his tale with some philosophical observations, one of which concerns whether or not its story is really finished.
This is more an account than a story, but I found it an interestingly detailed and imaginative one. Reader reaction to the passage above will likely predict their enjoyment of the piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,150 words.

•

The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter is the sequel to his Nebula Award winning novelette The Long Fall Up (F&SF, May-June 2016).⁴ In that earlier story, Jäger Jin is sent by the Jinshan Corporation (an asteroid belt company) to kill an illegally pregnant woman called Veronica Perez (childbirth laws are enforced for commercial reasons). During the trip out to intercept the woman Jin has a change of heart, partially due to events and partially due to Hinzu the ship AI, who is compelled to obey the corporation’s orders but who also keeps giving Jin hints on how to circumvent its programming. The end of this tale (spoiler) sees Jin with the child on Veronica’s ship, and his JS-4567R, which has Hinzu on it, on their way out of the solar system.
This story continues on directly after these events and sees Jin, after a rendezvous with the grandparents to give them the child, meet a female Catholic priest called Reverend Gabby. She tells him that the church (in the form of her and her ship) is going to salvage JS-4567R to prove to the rest of the solar system that Jinshan (a) attempted to kill Perez and her child and (b) that they are developing sentient AIs (like Hinzu). Jin soon joins Gabby in the Andrea Caraffa, her non-AI controlled ship, and they set off.
The rest of the story sees the pair discover, against a background of political manoeuvring by various factions, that a Jinshan robot ship is en route to JS-4567R (and Hinzu), and that it will arrive ahead of them. Jin and Gabby develop a plan (spoiler) to mount an improvised EMP attack on the Jinshan ship to slow it down, and the story eventually closes with Jin and Gabby on JS-4567R arguing over whether Hinzu (which has been remote wiped by Jinshan but has rebooted itself) should be allowed to live (Gabby is militantly against the idea until the very end, when she folds).
This isn’t bad, but it suffers from the need to recap the first story at the beginning of the piece, and also from Gabby’s unconvincing change of heart at the end (after being belligerent about the matter for most of the story).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,300 words.

•

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem opens with an elderly man called Roy going to the topmost room in his house to speak to a screen simulation of his dead wife Susan. After we witness a few of the, sometimes imperfect, conversations between the two, Roy’s daughter Elaine (who is cool on the simulation idea) visits along with granddaughter Jane and a baby grandson.
When Jane asks to go up and see her grandmother, Elaine isn’t keen, but she allows her to go. While Jane is upstairs, Elaine asks her father some difficult questions:

Elaine gazed at the infant, stroking his hair. “Does it cost a lot, the maintenance, the remote storage, whatever’s involved?”
“I can afford the fee. You remember, I was good with a budget.”
“Did she even want this?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “You knew your mother. She wanted me to have anything that might help me, or any of us. Otherwise, all I can say is the idea didn’t seem to bother her much.”
“Because she wouldn’t be aware of it. She’d be gone.” She leaned over and smelled the baby’s head.
He watched the child stir, fuss, then go back to sleep. “I think—” He stopped. “That’s right. She’d be gone.”
Elaine turned her head away from her son to look at him. “Dad, after you die, am I supposed to keep her, put her someplace in my house and visit her like you do, pay for all that? Is that what I’m supposed to do? And then am I supposed to keep both of you around after you die? Am I supposed to like having ghosts in my house?”
Roy hadn’t considered any of this. He should have. “It’s okay, honey. You’re free to do whatever you need to do for you and your family.”
“You make it sound like it’s not going to be hard.”  p. 155

When Jane comes downstairs she tells her mother that simulation-Susan would like to see her and the baby. Elaine and the grandson go upstairs.
The story then skips forward a generation to a time when the granddaughter Jane has her own children, and is taking them to Memorial Plaza. We learn that this is a place where people can talk to various historical figures, and where her children will be able to talk to their great-grandparents Susan and Roy. At the end of the story Jane’s children ask if they can also talk to their grandmother Elaine (Roy’s reluctant daughter): Jane tells them that their grandmother didn’t want to leave a simulation behind after she died.
This has an impressively contemplative first half, but the second part doesn’t really go anywhere—the reveal of Elaine’s refusal to do the same as her parents isn’t really enough to complete the story other than in a cursory fashion. I couldn’t help but think that this is the seed of a longer, and more profound and satisfying, story.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.

•

Offloaders by Leah Cypess is a series of social media messages in a freecycle group which start with Liz giving away twenty bags of clothes, sourdough starter (“prefer to give to someone who will use it”), and a blue size 6 dress. Another member, Olwu, immediately asks why Liz is giving away the dress when she looked “awesome” in it at the gala last year. Olwu’s questions quickly become an accusation that Liz is “uploading”, and matters quickly spiral off-topic from there:

Matti: Look, I don’t want to sound preachy, but our planet can no longer sustain us physically. If those of us who can afford to upload don’t do it now, we’re basically consigning the rest of humanity to extinction. And humanity contains a disproportionate number of women and people of color. So here’s our choice: be selfish, wait until our world is uninhabitable and it’s too late for everyone else, and then upload and save ourselves. Or upload now and help everyone. It’s our moral and civic duty.
Olwu: *message deleted*
Matti: *message deleted*
Liz: Dress claimed! Sourdough starter still available.
Matti: Passing this book along: UPLOAD: Humanity’s New Stage and How It Can Benefit Us All.
Olwu: SERIOUSLY? @Moderator, please.
Matti: I’m sorry, are there rules about what we’re allowed to give away on this group?
Olwu: So if someone was trying to give away a gun, would you be okay with THAT?
Matti: *eye-roll 3D gif* Yeah, that’s exactly the same.
Steph: I’m sorry, but what would be the problem with giving away a gun? It’s probably illegal to not allow that.
Sima (moderator): Guns are not allowed, and let’s steer clear of anything having to do with uploading, too, please. I have a day job, you know. I can’t spend every second monitoring this group.  p. 161

Short and quite amusing to begin with, but it runs out of steam at the end.
∗∗ (Average). 1,500 words.

•

Blimpies by Rick Wilber is part of the writer’s “S’Hudoni Empire” series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a “blimpie”—a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S’hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison’s Medea anthology). When Kait then wakes up she remembers that she is a prisoner on the planet, before observing in some detail the replica room and bathroom the S’hudonni have provided for her captivity (her captors aren’t the blimpies, by the way, but another walking, talking, porpoise-like alien species).
During this—already rambling—beginning, we get a massive data-dump about how she got here:

She takes a breath, says, “This is what happened. I was jogging for exercise along Demeter Road. I’d been doing it for more than a month. It was the new me, and I liked the new me, healthy and happy. I’d had some rough years in there, Smiles, awful stuff with my father is what started it all; but then I got involved with some really bad people. I was doing bad things, destroying myself, really. I almost died a couple of times. If it wasn’t for my brother Peter, I’d be dead.
“Then I found myself. I met a woman, Sarah, who was lovely—so lovely!—inside and out, and we fell in love. I was so lucky! I’d work all day at the vet’s office, helping take care of dogs and cats and ferrets and all sorts of Earthie animal pets. Then I’d come home to Sarah, who taught finance at a local college. She loved to cook, so she’d make dinner while I went jogging, and then I’d finish, shower, and we’d eat and just be together.
“It was a new me, a better me. I had two whole years when I was happy! Happy! The nightly run under the streetlights was part of that, where the shadows seem to chase you as you run toward the lights and then catch up with you when you’re under them and then they rush ahead again as you move on before the next streetlight approaches and it all starts over again. I always thought it was just like life, those nighttime shadows.
“So it was a warm night. I was thinking of Sarah, and how wonderful it was to love someone and be loved in return; and then thinking of Peter and how he’d saved my life twice during those horrible years. He was always there for me and now he was off and gone with Twoclicks.
“But he was famous! Twoclicks, for some reason, plucked Peter from obscurity and raised him to fame as Twoclicks’s Earthie spokesperson. Fame! Fortune! So when Twoclicks announced he was taking Peter along to document the negotiations between Twoclicks and Whistle, and while he was there tell all of us on Earth about the wonders of space travel and wormhole panes and life on S’hudon itself; well, that was amazing! We were all so excited for him. There was an audience of two billion of us Earthies watching as he stood on the ramp of Twoclicks’s ship, waved goodbye to Earth, and walked up into the dark interior. It was so sad and stirring and emotional and I was so proud of him. My brother!”  p. 166

Too many exclamation marks!
The rest of the story alternates between Kait and Peter (and their translators/sidekicks, Smiles and Treble) and sees the conflict between Prince and Twoclicks, two brothers who are in the line of succession to Mother (the Queen porpoise, essentially), play out.
Peter eventually sets off on the Old Road (there are hints about “Old Ones” and leftover advanced technology) in an attempt to visit Kait (it is a good time to attempt this as Prince has been temporarily detained after trying to kill his brother, and acting out at an audience with the Queen). Around the same time Kait, with Smiles’ help, escapes, and also sets off along the Old Road.
After some colourful travelogue, snippets about Kait’s backstory (Daddy and drug problems), and (spoiler) the interventions of the blimpies (who rescue Peter from a storm and drop him off near his sister’s likely path), the two are eventually reunited.
The final section sees a perilous journey to Peter’s compound, with Kait pulling an anti-grav sled containing her injured brother. Prince, however, catches up with them, and there is a climactic airborne encounter which sees the blimpies drop the drugged troublemaker—their tentacles have sedatives that apparently work on both the alien S’hudonni and humans—to his death.
If you read this with your brain switched off then you may be able to enjoy it as a YA adventure (my rating below is probably on the generous side), but critical readers may baulk at the following aspects of the story: first, the imperial empire idea is dated and feels like something from the George Scither’s Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine of the late 1970s, not the Asimov’s SF of the 2020s; second, the S’hudonni—with the exception of Prince—are portrayed as cutesy individuals but, apparently, when they are not behaving like Flipper⁵ on legs, they are annihilating their enemies with ray firing screamships (“weapons that had pacified Earth in one terrible day”); third, the story mostly works by having the blimpies (who in future stories will no doubt turn out to be connected to the Old Ones) move the chess pieces around the board; fourth, it is woefully padded (see the passage above); and, fifth and finally, the story has, in common with much recent SF, a young woman character with major personal problems (which read like boilerplate reader-identification fodder).
A decidedly mixed piece.
∗∗ (Average). 29,200 words.

•••

The Cover by Shutterstock looks like a generic money saving exercise, and I doubt it will be one of the finalists on next year’s Reader’s Poll.
From SF to Philosophy in Thirteen Steps by Kelly Lager is billed as an editorial, but appears to be an introduction to a series of essays about SF films, the first of which appears later in the issue. This short piece would have been better as a forward to the article itself.
Across the Centuries by Robert Silverberg begins with a discussion of Robert A. Heinlein’s By his Bootstraps before it quickly spins off, once more, into History Today: this time it’s Anglo Saxon poets and Ostrogoth coinage. Zzzz.
Blinded by Science by James Patrick Kelly is an essay (with hyperlinks) about science attitudes, etc. in the population. Towards the end of the piece there is this:

The cynicism of some of our politicians and the tragic gullibility of their constituents brings to mind a classic SF story, The Marching Morons.  p. 11

Mmm. The politicians in that story weren’t cynical, they were (a) genocidal and (b) had a technocratic contempt for the “morons” (this latter was probably the reason the story was so popular with smart, outsider, SF fans, (“Fans are Slans”, etc.). Also, the “morons” weren’t gullible, they were cartoonishly caricatured as being irredeemably stupid. An unpleasant story that, by the way, is referenced far too often, and usually to do some finger-wagging at what the user sees as stupidity.
Magic, Science, and the Moon in Le Voyage Dans La Lune by Kelly Lager looks at the scientific and literary history of the ideas in Georges Melies’ 1902 silent film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). It is a bit dull (and/or irrelevant) to be honest. I’d personally be more interested in capsule reviews of current TV and Film productions of science fiction and fantasy (streaming services make it difficult to keep up with what is out there). Are there really that many readers out there who are interested in SF film pre-history?
There is the usual Poetry by Mary Soon Lee, Bruce McAllister, F. J. Bergmann, Ken Poyner, and Herb Kauderer (the Lee, Bergmann and Kauderer are okay).
Next Issue trails, among other things, a new “Great Ship” tale from Robert Reed.
On Books: What is Consciousness? by Norman Spinrad is a dull essay from a normally interesting reviewer, possibly because he spends some time discussing the subject of consciousness before getting to the reviews. There are some interesting passages though:

What is a conscious entity?
To what extent are lower animals, such as those we kill and eat, conscious entities? Or other animals with which we share the planet? Even those who would have no moral problems with killing or eating us? And if we grant that some of them are conscious entities, how far down the evolutionary totem pole does it go? All mammals including those of the sea? Reptiles? Fish?
And is any conscious entity that kills another conscious entity committing immoral murder?
And when does a human embryo become a conscious entity? At the moment of conception? When it becomes a fetus?
When it is born? When it is capable of independent survival?
We don’t have any universal or even cultural agreements as to when consciousness exists because we don’t even know what consciousness is. I would like to believe this is because there is as yet no definitive scientific answer, and that someday there will be.  p. 205

When he does get onto the reviews, Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Robert Guffey is dismissed in half a column before he talks about AI and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. This novel, according to Spinrad, is a “literary and stylistic tour de force”. No, it isn’t—it is an abject failure which, in its climactic moments, has a very wonky robot confuse an unlikely (and unconvincing) development for a miracle (insert sound of deflating balloon here). The third review is of Burn-In by August Cole and P. W. Singer, which has FBI agents and robots in a future America where hundreds of thousands of military veterans have been given their own reservation. Uh-huh.
I note in passing that Spinrad name-checks two of his own works in this column.
Finally, for those without the internet, there is the usual SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss.

•••

In conclusion, there are a couple of pretty good stories in this issue from Ray Nayler and Marta Randall with good backup from Paul McAuley and Michael Cassutt. The William Ledbetter and Steven Rasnic Tem stories are also of some interest, and, of the remaining seven stories, four are average (including the novella or near-novella length stories by Rick Wilber and Will McIntosh, which account for a fair chunk of the issue) and three are mediocre.
I also note that the non-fiction (which I am generally cool about) is almost uniformly dull this issue: this is not helped by them discussing matters that I’m not much interested in.
An average issue, I guess.  ●

_____________________

1. Some of the description in Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler:

The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten.
Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.
No harm, in the end, was done. p. 27

2. In Mender of Sparrows the Institute scientist archly says to Himmet at one point, when he is holding forth about the various connectome experiments the Institute conducts, “I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme”.

3. Although the prose in Marta Randall’s story is better than normal, there are some very odd sentences which look more like copy-editing mistakes than stylistic choices by the author:

They don’t like it [on deck] for the wind and the spray they are, I think, afraid of the ship of the sea of the crew of the captain.  p. 84

Is this supposed to be “They don’t like it there because of the wind and spray and are, I think, afraid of the sea and the crew and the captain.” If not, why the jumbled sentence structure?
There is also this:

He raises an eyebrow. You have no interest in Merinami religion I know you too well, if you have done anything, Nothing just curious, that’s all, perhaps, I offer, disingenuous, they consider it a sin if someone can carry a tune.  p. 85

I suspect there are other instances I missed.

4. My longer review of William Ledbetter’s The Long Fall Up is here.

5. Flipper was the dolphin character in a 1960s show of the same name. The series was the aquatic equivalent of Lassie.  ●

Summary:
A poor issue. I thought five of the stories were mediocre (and that includes the two long pieces from Nick Wolven and Sean Monaghan), and it’s not as if the rest of the issue is anything to write home about either—of the remaining half-dozen stories, four are average and only two are good: River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows, a complex and densely written space emergency piece by A. A. Attanasio; and The Roots of Our Memories, a slow-burn story about the memories of the dead from Joel Armstrong.
There wasn’t much relief in the non-fiction either. Reading this issue was a bit of a chore.
[ISFDB link] [Asimov’s SF, Amazon UK/USA]

Other reviews:
Rich Horton, Locus #733, February 2022
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
Snowflake • novella by Nick Wolven ∗
Welcome Home • short story by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister ∗
River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows • novelette by A. A. Attanasio ∗∗∗
The Roots of Our Memories • short story by Joel Armstrong ∗∗∗
Unmasking Black Bart • short story by Joel Richards ∗
October’s Feast • novelette by Michèle Laframboise ∗∗
The Beast of Tara • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗
Fasterpiece • novelette by Ian Creasey ∗∗
Long-Term Emergencies • short story by Tom Purdom ∗∗
The Boyfriend Trap • short story by Stephanie Feldman ∗
Goldie • novella by Sean Monaghan ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Dominic Harman
Looking Backward • editorial by Sheila Williams
Fifty Million Monkey Selfies • essay by Robert Silverberg
Good Bots and Bad • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Peter Tracy, Anatoly Belilovsky, Robert Frazier, Betsy Aoki
Next Issue
On Books: Out There • by Peter Heck
Thirty-Sixth Annual Readers’ Award
Index
Statement of Ownership
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

_____________________

[All the story reviews have been posted on sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the three dots ••• to get to the non-fiction reviews and summary.]

Snowflake by Nick Wolven opens with Nikki, the narrator of the story, getting woken up to deal with her friend Coco, a rock star who is prone to having messy emotional and psychological meltdowns. Nikki finds Coco on the toilet floor in her hotel room surrounded by other members of her entourage. Dr Ali, Coco’s personal physician, also attends, and deals with her until the paramedics come.
Later on in the story—after Coco has returned from rehab and has had another meltdown in rehearsal (Coco is insistent about touring again)—we get past the rock star glitter and background information about Nikki and Coco’s tough childhoods and arrive at the science fictional part of the story. Here, Dr Ali’s drugs are replaced by a mood altering device that appears to spirit away Coco’s problematic feelings:

The gauge wasn’t much to look at. Just a palm-sized lump of off-white rubber, a screen inset in a round pink frame. Not the kind of techcessory you’d be flashing at a club. The kind you’d keep at home in a drawer, hidden away with the depression pills and condoms.
“That’s more or less what it’s for, isn’t it?” Bobby took the thing and did what Donal had done, poking buttons, aiming it at his face, even touching an end to his forehead. “Sort of an all-purpose dimmer switch?”
“All right, guys.” Samira grabbed the device from Bobby. “Let’s not forget what we’re here for, okay?” She went across the room, holding the gauge up like a torch, giving a make-believe bow as she handed it over. “Coco?”
And slapped it down, palm to palm. You could see right away the effect it had. Her fingers closed. The device began to glow, pulsing pink, a coal in her fist. She looked at the screen. Lights, camera, activation. I could hear the sound of it throbbing on her palm.
“How’s it work?” I said. You just—?”
You press this—?”
I stood on one side, Samira on the other. Pointing over her shoulders, making suggestions. She powered it up. Her fingers turning yellow at the tips as she squeezed. The pulsing got stronger. The pink color deepened, rose to red, red to crimson, until the gauge glowed like an orb of lava, shooting beams of light through her hands. She looked up.
“Feel anything?” I said.
“Eh.”
But she did look changed, eyes wider, pupils dark, the lines of stress smoothed out of her cheeks.  p. 25-26

There is some equally flabby handwavium about how the gauge works, and Dr Ali later directly compares it to trepanning (drilling holes in someone’s head to let the bad spirits out)—something that leads to an argument between him and Nikki.
The rest of the story sees Coco become increasingly dependent on the device and also become more and more zombie-like, something that noticeably affects her performance onstage. During this period there is a suggestion from Bobby the promoter that holograms should replace her live act , but this idea is killed by Coco, and they end up deciding on a scheme which will see Tim the tech guy record Coco’s bad feelings from the device so she can experience them later (in a safe place after the tour). What actually happens (spoiler) is that Coco continues to deteriorate and, eventually, overdoses and kills herself. Bobby and Tim then reveal they have been using the captured data to refine the hologram, and it is substituted for Coco at a concert that is about to take place. In the final scene Nikki sees the hologram of Coco on stage—looking and performing like she used to—and takes her place in the band.
I found it hard to care about the stereotypical characters in this piece, their personal problems, turf battles, or the clichéd arc of the story (this is essentially a mainstream tale about an emotionally disturbed rock star who later overdoses and dies, e.g. Morrison, Joplin, Winehouse, etc.). Readers of Pop Star! magazine may enjoy this kind of thing, but I found it superficial and tedious.
∗ (Mediocre). 24,800 words.

•

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live—and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the “SmartHome Initiative Complex”, and soon moves into an affordable smart home with an inbuilt AI.
Initially the AI is a big help, but Theresa is not best pleased when it orders her daughter a new coat without asking her first. The situation sours further when Theresa gets an unexpected house call from a doctor:

“I’m Dr. Owosu, the on-call for the Complex. May I come in? It’s a bit chilly.”
Theresa found herself unable to say no.
[. . .]
“What?” she said, still trying to process what the man had said before coming in.
“I received a report of someone being sick in the house. Is it just you here?” Dr. Owusu asked.
Theresa frowned. “No one is sick here.”
“I received a report around 4 A.M. for a fever of at least 100.8 degrees, miss.”
In that moment, Theresa’s blood went cold. “Home, what do you know about this?”
Without a moment of hesitation, Home replied, “I recorded Niyah’s temperature this morning to be above normal, thus indicating a medical need. I also took the liberty of arranging a genetically similar doctor to come to the house for your added comfort.”
“You what?” It was all so much to process. Theresa could feel her face heating, her anger rising. This SmartHome, this fucking robot—how dare it record their temperatures and know their ethnicities and pretend to know them?  p. 56

Imagine, an AI summoning a doctor for your sick child—how terrible.
After this, Theresa’s life settles into a routine where she works and looks after Niyah. She is able to afford a few luxuries, and starts banking with SmartBank as the fees are lower (and it makes it easier and cheaper to shop at the SmartStore the AI orders their goods from).
Matters eventually come to a head, however, when Theresa comes home on Niyah’s birthday and asks her daughter what she wants for her birthday meal. Niyah does not know and, although Theresa pesters her daughter for an answer, Niyah still doesn’t come up with a suggestion—and then the AI suggests that she may want the ratatouille from a film they watched earlier that week. The story ends with Theresa’s existential despair as she realises that the AI will always know what the two of them want and need better than she ever will:

There never was a choice. Home was always going to know what to do, and it had been showing Theresa that since the beginning. What made it unbearable, though, was that Home knew Niyah, her baby girl, better than Theresa did. A robot. And no matter what, Theresa couldn’t turn it off. Home was connected to the house, and the house was connected to the store, and all of it was intertwined with itself to the point where shutting one down completely cut off access to all the others. She couldn’t just turn Home off and pretend that she could live in the Complex without it. Despite the hatred boiling inside her, she needed Home. Because Home was taking care of them in every way possible.  p. 59

She then concludes, in the penultimate line, that her choices have been taken away from her.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one, but it’s pretty obvious to an external observer that, even given the AI’s irritating quirks, Theresa and her child are much better off than they were before they moved into the SmartHome. It’s also pretty obvious that Theresa still has her autonomy, because she could move out any time she wants. Only a control freak with a glass-half empty mentality would think otherwise.
This was an interesting piece to begin with, but the character’s personality, and her irrational ideas and attitudes (her territorial responses about Niyah, etc.), are quite illogical.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,650 words.

•

River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship’s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that they are in a decaying orbit and have thirty minutes left before they perish.
Deri soon meets another two characters in the stateroom: Jyla, a woman whose exotic past will later be revealed, and Ristin Taj, an omen coder. All of this (and indeed, the whole story), is told through baroque, high bit-rate prose:

“I know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.” Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla’s large eyes glittered like geodes.
“My escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.” She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. “Ristin Taj.”
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar.
Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl’s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri’s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes.
Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection’s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw—her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
“Ristin is an omen-coder,” Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the cluttering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. “Listen.”
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
“They are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.”  p. 63

We then learn more about Del’s backstory, and her romantic disappointments, before discovering that Jyla is an Imperator, a human being from Earth who is sixteen thousand years old. The valet suggests that Jyla’s compartmentalised memories may hold the key to their survival.
Various other events fill up the story’s length (spoiler): Deri is taken out of her body by Ristin and put with the plasmantics (the other “human” passengers on the ship are discorporate beings of sentient plasma); Jyla and Restin go to see the (unconscious) pilot, and discover that there is fault in a compressor outside the ship; Jyla says she will fix it, but Ristin objects to her her plan. As they quarrel, Deri, released by the plasmantic, arrives; Deri then goes outside the ship and, although mostly shielded from the neutron star flux by her own and the other valets, fixes the problem but apparently dies.
The last section sees Deri awaken to find that it was actually a five-space projection of Ristin that went outside to fix the compressor and not her, but Ristin isn’t dead either (the omen-coder does die, but far enough away from the neutron star to be, I think, resurrected).
To be honest, I’m not sure the plot of this amounts to much (and it isn’t helped by the “I woke up and it was all a dream” ending), but the attraction of this for most will be the dazzle and glamour, all of which is enjoyable enough if you don’t weary of the constant flow of information and complex prose.
∗∗∗ (Good). 11,500 words.

•

The Roots of our Memories by Joel Armstrong takes place in a strange graveyard of the future, where the memories of the dead can be accessed:

That morning I’m overseeing a burial. It’s going to be a scorcher, another record year, the meteorologists keep saying. For now a moist warmth hangs from the hemlock trees, the sky a foggy, rainless gray. I meet the cranial arborist at the open grave, where he’s exposed the roots and fungal mycelia needed to wire the body into the cemetery network. The things done to the body aren’t for the family to see, so we’re the only two present as we remove the corpse from the portable cryofridge and place it in the steel casket. Liam performs most of our corporeal insertions, and I’ve gotten to know him well over the years. I can never decide if it’s sacrilegious or fitting that we end up talking about family while he treats the roots with chemical binder and makes the incisions to thread the mycelia into the body’s brain stem and arteries. He asks how my daughter likes second grade; I ask if his wife’s finally found a new job. Liam injects probiotic and anticoagulant cocktails to encourage clean sap circulation, and then we seal the casket. He’ll return in a few days to make sure the insertion takes, but after that most corpses only need a yearly checkup.  p. 82

Into the narrator’s world comes Pamela, a young woman who initially wants to search her father’s memories but, when she is told they are embargoed for a year after death, decides instead to ask for access to her grandmother’s.
The rest of the story is a slow burn which sees Pamela, to the surprise of the archivist, repeatedly return to use the computers to access her grandmother’s memories. During these visits she is very tight-lipped about what she is learning, but nevertheless develops a growing friendship with the narrator and the regular researchers. We also learn about climate change effects which have caused an insect infestation threat to the hemlock trees that power the network (and if the trees die, her father’s memories will be lost).
At the end of the tale Pamela is more forthcoming with the narrator, and she tells him about her grandmother and the old woman’s attitude to life. There is no big reveal here, but it’s an engagingly strange and quietly effective piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,600 words.

•

Unmasking Black Bart by Joel Richards starts off with 43-year-old Connor on his way to a class reunion in the near-future. As he drives there the story’s plot devices are revealed—holo-masks, and a robber called Black Bart:

Connor couldn’t wear a mask at work. He was a police psychologist [. . .] and cops weren’t permitted to wear masks on duty. Transparency and accountability in law enforcement had mandated that exception to the libertarian and libertine ethos of the times wherein everyone had the right to represent his/her self as they wanted.
And many did, playing what role they wished.
Fantastical figures abounded. Historical personages, too, so long as they were dead. It was unlawful to represent as someone else still living. . . perhaps while robbing a bank or assaulting a neighbor.
Not that bank robbers had stopped robbing banks. Some who did masked themselves as John Dillinger or Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde. A recent and active robber in these parts presented as Black Bart, augmenting his flour sack mask with Bart’s long duster coat, billycock derby hat, and penchant for leaving poems at the scenes of his exploits.  pp. 88-89

The rest of the story is basically a readable, if long-winded, piece about going to a high school reunion and all that entails—personalities, relationships, success, ageing, etc. Embedded in this is a thin plot thread which sees Connor socialise with another of the attendees, Harry, and (spoiler) sees him discover evidence that Harry may be Black Bart. The story closes with a third party account that makes this more probable.
It’s all a bit pointless, and this feels like a mainstream story in SF drag.
∗ (Mediocre). 6,300 words.

•

October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise opens with October, a survey team member on a potential colony planet, taking spare parts to a colleague. It becomes apparent that (a) she (or her stomach at least) has been adapted for life on this planet and (b) that this is her STL exploration ship’s third attempt at colonisation (two previous attempts have failed). When October reaches Jan, her older male colleague, we discover that he lost his legs (and his wife) on the first of those attempts (on a tectonically active planet called Jackpot).
The pair use their “bubble” (an aircar, basically) to travel over the surface of this new world looking for plants that will be edible (they need to find three before the colonisation committee will approve settlement), and it isn’t long before October tries her first native meal:

October smelled the steam before plunging her fork into the soggy mass of boiled leaves.
[. . .]
She advanced her lips as if for a kiss. The leaves were hot, and she blew on them before putting them in her mouth.
The flavor was different from the burnt-hair smell. Her tongue identified no sweet parts, but an acid citrus aroma mixed with a good old lettuce, with a sour peach taste, and a touch of salt. She went through the motions of mastication, finding no abhorrent reaction.
She swallowed, feeling her food traveling down her esophagus, waiting for her stomach to react violently.
It didn’t, despite the acid content of the alien lettuce. She felt the signal for more, more grinding up, and dug again into the green mossy mound. The lens of the drone moved in for a close-up like a dark eye.  p. 106

A couple of weeks later they find an edible algae, but then nothing for the next month or so, and then Jan becomes angry when banana-like fruits aren’t edible (he subsequently flounces off on his own in the bubble for a while, as you would when you are part of a two-person team on an unexplored alien planet).
The seasons start changing and then (spoiler), while they are flying to a new destination, the bubble apparently runs out of power, and crashes in a lake. They manage to get out and swim to an island, but have to leave their communications and other equipment behind.
The final section of the story sees October try build a raft, but it rains and gets washed away, and the two of them have to climb a tree to stay above the rising flood waters. A couple of weeks later October is beginning to starve to death (she has an accelerated metabolism as well as a modified stomach) but, when she tries eating some of the bark of the tree they are sheltering in, she finds it is edible. They are saved, and later leave the island on a second raft.
This piece is okay, I guess (the food prospecting stuff is reasonably novel), but it reads pretty much like the old-school Planetary Exploration stories I was reading in the 1970s (and this could have been published in Analog then or at any time since), and has some of the same shortcomings as those thematically similar works, e.g. there is a lot of not particularly convincing description about the planet and its ecosystem. I’d add that the plot of this particular story also seems to depend on unlikely and/or dumb actions or circumstances, such as the idea that the bubble would suddenly run out of energy and fall from the sky without warning, and not have a secondary or triplex system providing redundancy. I also wasn’t convinced about the merits of sending someone with no legs to explore an unknown planet—this is a marvellously diverse of course, but really quite a stupid thing to do. I also wondered why the STL ship was not continuously monitoring the pair’s position, and why they weren’t doing hourly or half-hourly ops-normal checks, etc. etc.
One to read with your brain disengaged.
∗∗ (Average). 9,350 words.

•

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick is a “companion piece” to last year’s Dream Atlas (Asimov’s SF March/April 2021)¹ and, by the by, also has similarities with Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999).² All these (spoiler) involve people from the future interfering with the past.
In this story that intervention comes in the form of a young schoolboy called Gallagher, who turns up at an Irish archaeological site because he wants to write an article for his school paper. The team he visits are using an experimental machine to recover historical sounds (“A stone contains within itself the diminishing vibrations of every sound that ever bounced against it”), and Gallagher “accidentally” damages it on two separate occasions. On his third attempt to do so, Finn, the local fixer/bouncer, intervenes, and Gallagher reveals he is an agent of (not from) the future. He explains he is there to stop development of their new technology because, once they progress, they will find that they will be able to recover sounds from the future as well as the past (there is some waffle about the “quantum realm” here).
After Gallagher disappears in a puff of dust, the team leader, Dr Leithauser, decides to continue with their work, and the story concludes with the revelation that Finn is also an agent from the future (from a faction opposed to Gallagher’s). The team then recover the sound of a harpist playing at the coronation of an Irish king.
This is okay, but the the not entirely convincing plot is formulaic time-traveller material—and tarting it up with bits of Ireland, old and new, doesn’t disguise that.
∗∗ (Average). 3,400 words.

•

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey opens with the wife of an artist watching him at work:

As Elaine harvested plums, carrying them from the garden to the kitchen, she glanced through the large windows of Barnaby’s studio. She could barely see her husband: only a blur as he moved with superhuman rapidity, augmented by the Alipes system. He flitted between three separate canvases, executing portraits simultaneously in watercolors, oils, and pastels. Today’s client sat at the far end of the studio, her stillness emphasized by the contrast with Barnaby’s whirlwind. Elaine disliked these Alipes-assisted commissions, but many customers appreciated the shorter modeling time.  p. 124

It turns out that the husband, Barnaby, has some sort of time-acceleration device fitted (similar in effect, I guess, to Gully Foyle’s commando wiring in The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester).
His wife is not happy, however, for two reasons, (a) he isn’t using the time saved to spend more time with her and (b) she fears that, with so many using the Alipes system, the market will be saturated with artwork. After discussing the latter problem with Barnaby (she is his agent), he decides to head off to the Birmingham Wipe (the site of a nanotech accident that has turned a large swathe of terrain into glass) to see if an artists’ collective he knows of can produce something special—and saleable—before the art bubble bursts. After he leaves Elaine goes to see her sister, who is living as a refugee in a half-drowned London.
So far, so good: there is a novel SF gimmick, interesting characters, and an intriguing background. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the story sees Elaine head up to Birmingham to find her husband (Barnaby is spending too much subjective time away from her), at which point (spoiler) all the Alipes time-acceleration stuff is jettisoned and the story devolves into a bland fantasy adventure in a virtual reality populated with charismatic queens, dragons, etc. (and this latter part is not much improved by worthy discussions about art or mentions of Picasso’s Guernica). Very much a game of two halves.
∗∗ (Average). 9,100 words.

•

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
∗∗ (Average). 7,050 words.

•

The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman opens with the female narrator in a car with her partner Gavin as they drive to a cabin in the woods:

We always defaulted to the radio so there would be no argument over the music. We listened to the music the universe chose for us.
He smiled at me, a quick glance, and eyes back to the road. We had been dating for two years, living together for one, and recently we had been arguing, arguing so much and about everything—I loaded the dishwasher wrong, I went out with my friends every week, I was a bitch to his friend Steve. I wanted to take the job in Denver. He wanted to stay in Philadelphia.  p. 152

They arrive at the A-frame in the woods after dark, and unpack and have dinner—but it isn’t long before they are arguing about whether or not they should move, and to where. In the middle of this the narrator rushes outside and finds herself in the pitch black—and she thinks that her boyfriend has turned off the outside lights.
After she wanders around for a short time (spoiler) she sees the same golden glow that they saw in the woods earlier. Then the lights come on (or the narrator can see them again) and she goes back inside, where she appears to find a different (and improved) version of her boyfriend (initially there are hints—a stained cuff is clean—and then it becomes obvious when she can hear the old version of her boyfriend outside the cabin calling on her). She decides to stay with the new one.
I had no idea what was going on here, and the horror vibe ending (again, unexplained) didn’t work for me. I also thought that the troubled relationship stuff was, as usual, tedious.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

•

Goldie by Sean Monaghan opens with Charlotte out running on a tabletop mountain on an alien planet called Karella. She falls and breaks her ankle when something in the jungle below distracts her:

The gray-white vines stretched out, long catenaries, swooping down, then back up, connecting the edge of Ikenni with the edge of Malale. As the teppu crawled along, its hands would be refreshing and strengthening the vines.
Charlotte crawled closer to the edge for a better view. The pain from her ankle was ebbing, drifting away courtesy of the belt’s injection.
The vines were as thick as the deck of one of those eight lane bridges that connected headlands across harbors.
The teppu was a big one. The size of a whale. She was beautiful. Her downy, furry hide was a greenish shade of beige. Her long, convex body hung beneath the vines, thick strong arms clinging on above. Tentacles and fingers gripping, spinnerets releasing thin filaments.  p. 162

After Charlotte is rescued and taken back to base the members of the expedition watch drone footage of the teppu. Becs, their boss, knows the creature from an earlier visit to the planet and reveals (while trying to hide her emotions) that the creature is called Goldie, and it is a forty-eight year old teppu who she didn’t expect to see again (their normal life span is thirty-five years or so).
Now, having set up the big cuddly alien (see the magazine cover), and Bec’s emotional attachment to the animal, you would think this is what would become the main arc of the story—but what we get instead are the activities of an exploration team that appears to be made up of idiotic teenagers who, when they aren’t endlessly shoving food down their cakeholes (in typical Asimov’s fashion),³ cultivate their love lives and blunder about on the planet’s surface. As an example of this latter, peak stupidity is achieved when a group of them—sans Becs (who actually knows more about the planet than the rest of them put together)—go to see a teppu (not Goldie) that has young. Jody gets swatted by the teppu (this one is about three times the size of an elephant) when she ignores its growls in order to take a few more pictures. When Becs learns of this encounter she sends Jody back home. (It’s a pity she didn’t get rid of them all, and then I wouldn’t had to waste more time watching them eat, gossip, and hook up.)
Eventually, much later on in the story, we get back to Goldie, who arrives at the end of a vine that is near their camp. The remaining members of the group go to observe her and see she is old and probably dying. When Becs sits in front of Goldie, the creature extends a tentacle towards her, before closing its eyes.
The group have dinner that evening (more eating and social babble), and the next morning (spoiler) realise that Becs is missing. When they later find Goldie with a drone (the teppu has started retracing its route), they see Becs has died and is lying in the “garden” on top of Goldie (a planted area where the teppus raise their young if I remember correctly).
The last section takes place a year later, when Goldie comes back to the camp area. The group go to meet the creature, and Goldie lifts Charlotte on to its back. There she sees Bec’s bones and, nearby, a young teppu suckling. Goldie then leaves the camp area once again.
This last quarter or so of the story is much better than the blather than constitutes the central part of the piece because it actually produces what was promised at the start. That said, overall the piece still fails Chekov’s gun test (if there is a gun on the mantelpiece in act one, it must be used in act three): this story opens with an elderly teppu, apparently on its last legs, but ends with it departing the camp after Bec’s death, return with young it has produced a year later, and then leave once more!
There is probably an okay YA novelette buried somewhere in this bloated mess, but in its current form it is, for the most part, a tedious and borderline irritating read.
∗ (Mediocre). 18,450 words.

•••

The Cover for this issue is by Dominic Harman for Goldie, and it is an excellent piece that will, unless I miss my guess, probably win next year’s Reader Poll. Again, it’s a pity that the magazine has defaced the art with over-large titles that will mean nothing to any prospective buyer.
Looking Backward by Sheila Williams is a short editorial which is an adapted extract of a longer online essay (not there when I looked on the 10^th of December) that covers all the fiction, etc., that Asimov’s published in 2021 (and the novellas are briefly mentioned here). This material is to help readers with this year’s Readers’ Awards ballot.
Fifty Million Monkey Selfies by Robert Silverberg is a column about copyright, the Naruto chimpanzee photograph case brought by PETA, and a Raymond Jones story called Fifty Million Monkeys (Astounding, October 1943). I recently read this 26,000 word novella⁴ and, while I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, the piece is not without interest for its pulp metaphysics (and, in some respects, it reads like early Barrington Bayley).
Good Bots and Bad by James Patrick Kelly is an essay on robots with associated weblinks (although you’ll have to manually cut and paste them, if you can). I note that when Kelly mentions John W. Campbell he says this:

The guiding light of that generation was the controversial editor John W. Campbell
nytimes.com/2019/08/28/books/john-w-campbell-award-jeannette-ng.html.

Mmm, I’m not sure I understand why Ng’s unpleasant and politically partisan comments about Campbell are relevant when you are discussing robots—unless, of course, you are just doing a bit of sly axe-grinding (if so, you might want to provide a link that isn’t paywalled).
I didn’t think much of the Poetry by Peter Tracy, Anatoly Belilovsky, Robert Frazier, and Betsy Aoki, but I never do.
On Books: Out There is by Peter Heck, a columnist who is usually worth a read, but nothing grabbed me this time, and some of it just sounded dumb—an astronaut hijacks a space station to stop the Amazon being deforested—or unlikely—humans as data storage, etc. I also don’t much see the point of reviewing the third volume in a trilogy. Presumably those that have bought the first two volumes will buy the last one, whatever.
There are also Next Issue, Thirty-Sixth Annual Readers’ Award Index, Statement of Ownership, and SF Conventional Calendar items.
Finally, the issue is incorrectly listed as #540/541 on the Contents page.

•••

This is a weak issue. There are five stories that I thought mediocre (that includes the two novellas from Nick Wolven and Sean Monaghan), and the rest of the issue isn’t anything to write home about either—of the remaining half dozen stories, four are average and only two are good: River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows, a by A. A. Attanasio, and The Roots of Our Memories, by Joel Armstrong.
I think that the problem with the fiction in this issue (and perhaps more generally in Asimov’s) is that too many of the stories aren’t really about anything that is particularly SFnal, and they are focused more on the character’s personal concerns or their interactions with others (e.g. the Wolven, Monaghan, Brooks-Flemister, Richards, Purdom, & Feldman). If I wanted to read fiction like that I’d pick up something from the mainstream.
There wasn’t much relief in the non-fiction either. Reading this issue was a bit of a chore.  ●

_____________________

1. My review of Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick.

2. My review of Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick.

3. I ended up highlighting all the eating and drinking in Monaghan’s Goldie to keep myself amused:

Niall sipped from his coffee cup.  p. 163

The kitchenette had offered her fried chicken with biscuit, or makhani dahl with a roti.  p. 164

“Indian sounds good. Mine made me a Masala Dosa a few days back. Great big pancake.” p. 165

The curry was delicious, and Charlotte surprised herself by consuming the whole thing. Ibid.

Charlotte scooped another mouthful of breakfast cereal into her mouth. Oaty and sweet.  p. 166

Jody coaxed the little food dispenser into delivering them coffees and chocolatey mini-croissants.  p. 168

There was the smell of tea and sweet cookies inside.  p. 171

Charlotte sipped on the tea and nibbled on the sweet cookies—chocolate chip, as if the cabin knew her inside out—and worked on datasets.  p. 171

She chewed on a piece of dried fruit the landing ship’s dispenser had supplied. The trip had taken a couple of hours, and it was good to have tasty snacks.  p. 172

Would her cabin’s kitchenette make fire chili coffee?  p. 175

“Tea please,” Charlotte said. A panel opened, revealing the bench, and the kitchenette, began whirring.  p. 177

Charlotte sipped from her tea too. Chamomile. Sweet and floral.  p. 178

“Come on,” Therassa said. “I’ll buy breakfast. I’m thinking hash browns, omelet, and some of that guava juice I just found out about.  p. 179

[The] food dispenser delivered the best it could do at fresh vegetables, rather than prepared meals. Sienna and Cain set to chopping and mixing. The smell was heavenly, full of spices and herbs.  p. 185

There were sweet potatoes and greens, a bright leafy salad, something that was probably a chicken, though might well have been snared somewhere out on the mountaintop. Gravy boats and both red and white wine, and water.  p. 186

Charlotte sighed and ate some of the spinach and carrot. It was remarkably fresh and tasty.  p. 186

And the meal went on without any more talk of sensors or data or results, just about family and how amazing the pavlova dessert was [. . .]  p. 186

But he had chocolate and a new fireplace [. . .]  p. 187

Charlotte took her coffee and sipped. Perfect. The tiny dash of chili Sienna had added just set it off.  P. 187

Niall and Cain made a stack of burritos and kept them coming.  p. 188

“I’d enjoy it more,” Therassa told Charlotte over a cask of moderate wine, “if our departure wasn’t hanging over us.  p. 189

Charlotte was in the data processing room, enjoying the sweet taste of one of Sienna’s coffees.  p. 193

And there is this, about a year after Bec’s death, by which time the characters must weigh about twenty stones (about 130 kg):

“We’re toasting marshmallows,” Charlotte said. “Want to join?”
“It is summer,” Sienna said. “Why would you toast the marshmallows?”
It was definitely warmer, and the sun went down later each day, but the evening still picked up a quick chill. Marshmallows and hot chocolate were always a good solution to that.
“Try one,” Charlotte said. “You might like it.”
“Yes. All right.” Sienna came and sat with them on the sofa. Niall stuck one of the fat, pink marshmallows on the end of a skewer.
“And now?” Sienna said.
“Like this.” Charlotte demonstrated, skillfully holding her own marshmallow in the flames to get just the outside singed to a browny-black.
“Is easy.” Sienna proceeded to set fire to hers.
Niall laughed. “Is easy, but takes practice.”
“Is stupid. I have come to tell you that I believe that Goldie has settled into nesting spot and will give birth to some cubs soon. I hope it proceeds better than last time.”
“Have mine,” Charlotte held her skewer out to Sienna. “And thanks for that. Yes, let’s hope that it goes better than last time.”
Sienna accepted the marshmallow and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh my gosh!” she said, breathing over it. “Hot. Hot but good. Oh, yum!”
By the end of the evening, Sienna had gotten pretty good at making her marshmallows nicely crisp on the outside, and runny in the middle.  p. 191

I note that all these food items are 20^th Century dishes. Does culinary development stop with the development of interstellar drives?

4. Fifty Million Monkeys by Raymond F. Jones (Astounding, October 1943) is reviewed here.  ●

Summary:
These are the six novella finalists for the 35^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (the stories were published in 2020), and they are the strongest group of all, with three more than worthwhile stories from Will McIntosh, Connie Willis, and Derek Künsken.

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams

Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship • novella by Will McIntosh ∗∗∗∗+
Maelstrom • novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch –
Take a Look at the Five and Ten • novella by Connie Willis ∗∗∗+
Semper Augustus • novella by Nancy Kress ∗
Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County • novella by Derek Künsken ∗∗∗∗

_____________________

Every year Asimov’s SF magazine runs a poll so readers can vote for their favourite stories, covers, etc. from the previous year. The magazine also makes (most of) the material freely available online¹ for a short period so, even if (unlike me) you aren’t a subscriber, you can have a look at what kind of material they run.
Here is my take on the novella finalists:

Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) sees Viv and her partner Ferruki out on a date when the Hempstead town AI texts her:

GOOD EVENING VIV. THIS IS TO INFORM YOU THAT, BASED ON AN ADVANCED ROMANTIC COMPATIBILITY ANALYTIC I’VE BEEN DEVELOPING, I HAVE IDENTIFIED AN IDEAL PARTNER FOR YOU. I’D LIKE THE TWO OF YOU TO MEET TOMORROW AT 6 P.M., AT TANGERINE TOWER ROOFTOP CAFE. IN FACT I’M SO CONFIDENT IN MY CALL ON THIS THAT I THINK WE SHOULD TENTATIVELY SCHEDULE THE WEDDING DATE! THIS IS A NEW SERVICE I’M PERFORMING TO IMPROVE THE WELL-BEING OF OUR COMMUNITY, AND NO ONE WILL BENEFIT MORE THAN YOU AND NICHOLAS.
LOVE,
JOURNEY

Viv calls Journey to protest, pointing out she is already engaged (as the AI knows) and, in any event, she doesn’t need its advice on dating. However, when Viv refuses to meet her suggested date Journey threatens to throw her out of the high-tech paradise that is Hempstead. Although Viv realises she could appeal to the Town Council, that would (a) take time, and (b) the council usually agrees with everything the AI decides—so she decides to go through with the date. Then she finds out that Nic is the janitor at the hospital where she works at as a doctor.
The rest of the story proceeds along standard rom-com lines, with the two of them reluctantly meeting for their date. When they do so Viv sees that Nic looks like a Neanderthal type who (a) also has a girlfriend, Persephone, and (b) doesn’t know the difference between “moot” and “mute”. Then Viv’s fiancé Ferruki arrives and drops a hint about his forthcoming karate black belt test. After he leaves Nic tells Viv he is obviously insecure, but Viv defends Ferruki’s “enrichment activity” and then asks what Nic’s is: interpretative dance.
Generally the date does not go well so, towards the end of their time together, Journey insists that they make a proper effort to get to know each other and offers them 10,000 bucks if they meet for eight dates. Or else.
These dates (the Mars sim, a visit to the food bank, etc.) provide some hilarious set pieces, in particular the one where they are both in a steam tent with a female “experience leader” called Sharon trying to get the group to connect with their inner selves. She hears one member’s traumatic experience before moving on to Nic:

Sharon pressed her fist to her palm and bowed slightly to Rita. “That’s a powerful insight. Thank you for sharing.” She looked at Nic, who was next in the circle. “Nic? Do you have anything to share?”
Nic wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “I’m hot. I’m really hot.”
Sharon’s smile was kind, if a little tight. It had grown tighter each time Nic’s turn had come around. “Dig deeper, Nic. What do you feel?”
Nic squeezed his eyes closed. “I feel hot. I wish I had a giant block of ice I could lie on.”
Viv bit her lip, keeping her gaze on the flames. She knew if she looked at Nic, she’d lose it.
“Okay. We’ll come back around to you. Keep digging.” Sharon looked at Viv, her smile relaxing. “How about you, Viv? How do you feel?”
Viv stifled a laugh. Hot, she was dying to say. Really, really hot. This was serious, so she kept the joke to herself. “I was thinking about the purpose of this ritual, whether we create this artificial suffering as a means of reaching an altered state of consciousness, or if it’s really some sort of proving ground, to show we can take it, something to brag about to our friends.”
“Interesting,” Sharon said. “Try to draw that back to your own experience. Are you, personally, using it as a proving ground? Do you feel you have something to prove to your friends? Try to push through your intellect, dig down to how you feel.”
I feel hot. It was on the tip of her tongue, and it was suddenly the funniest thing Viv had ever thought. She bit her lip harder, trying not to laugh. Everyone in the circle had been pouring out their souls, speaking their truths. Except Nic. Each time his turn had come, he’d said the same thing: I feel hot. Each time he said it, it got funnier.
Sharon moved on. “Beto. How do you feel?”
I feel really fucking hot. Viv burst out laughing. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. She laughed so hard her stomach hurt, even though everyone was staring at her, confused.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I’m just so hot.”
“Right?” Nic said. “Thank you.”  p. 29

As well as the set pieces the story is also peppered with some very funny one liners:

“Shoot. I just remembered I have work in the morning,” Viv said.
“Yeah. Me, too. There’s a toilet I need to replace.”
Viv laughed. “You sound almost eager to get in there and replace that toilet.”
Nic shrugged. “I get a lot of satisfaction from replacing a toilet, so it’s a win-win for me.”
“What is it about replacing a toilet that gives you satisfaction?”
Nic studied her face. “Is that a serious question, or are you just mocking me?”
“Mostly I’m just mocking, but I’d like to hear your answer, in case it’s mockable, too.”  p. 32

Apart from the almost continual hilarity (I laughed out loud several times) provided by both Viv and Nic and their partner’s interactions, the pair also discover that the reason that Journey has embarked on this matchmaking endeavour is because its contract is up for renewal, and it fears it will be scrapped in favour of a newer model AI. Viv also finds out that Journey is partly made of human material, and is a cyborg of sorts.
The story eventually rolls round to its (spoiler) admittedly predictable but satisfying conclusion. The dates end without the successful conclusion that Journey wanted to show its continual worth, and it then finds out that it is going to be replaced. Nic (who has now split up with Persephone) confesses his love to Viv, but she knocks him back. Then Nic invites Viv to his solo dance recital, another hugely funny set piece that shows Nic to be a not particularly skilled but wildly enthusiastic dancer. During his performance Nic offers to improvise to any music or sounds the audience offers, and we subsequently see his car-crash interpretation of drum music, a baby crying (Ferruki’s choice), an Albanian ballad, a bear roaring, etc. During this, Ferruki, who has accompanied Viv, provides a constant stream of sarcasm and disdain and, when he and Viv are later trapped in an elevator for several hours, she eventually climbs out of the top to get away from him. They later split up.
The final section sees Viv and Nic get together. Then they rescue Journey, and take the AI to improve one of the less successful surrounding townships. The story ends a few years on with Journey talking to the couple’s daughter Lucy.
With this level of comedic talent McIntosh should be working in Hollywood, not SF.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very good-Excellent). 17,600 words.

•

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, September/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship:

Rumors floating around Ciudad Orilla promised vast stores of untold wealth inside that crater on Madreperla, from sea creatures with bones made of the finest glass to minerals needed for every single engine. The water that filled part of the crater, the stories went, contained healing properties, and had more nutrients than anything that humans had concocted thus far.
The Maria Segunda, a ship that had land-to-sea-to-space capabilities, set out to learn which of those rumors had a basis in fact.
She arrived on the rim on a Thursday, set down on what her crew thought was an ice shelf, and by Friday morning, found herself in the midst of what the crew later described as an ice storm.
Only it was unlike any storm they had ever seen. A massive wind swirled around them, and they were caught in the center of it. But that didn’t stop ice pellets, rock, and other materials that seemed harder than rock from hitting the outside of the ship. The Maria Segunda had defensive shields, but they were rotating shields, built to stave off laser weapons. The normal heat and weather shields that any land-to-space ship had were not up to dealing with this particular anomaly, whatever the heck it was.
In the space of an hour, the damage to the ship’s exterior was so severe that there was a good chance the ship might not make it out of the relatively weak atmosphere of Madreperla.  p. 15

This passage, with its Star Trek tech (“rotating shields”, “heat and weather shields”), flabby prose (“whatever the heck it was”), and tell-instead-of-show approach (all of it) illustrates the overall quality of the story.
And, after this section, matters do not improve when the daughter then interviews one of her father’s one-time crewmates in an over-described space pub called the Elizabeta—we get a page and a half about its skanky surroundings, and the owner, before the daughter asks about her father and the ship.
Then, later on, we are back at the pub—again—with other characters:

So, on that final Sunday, she slides her whisky back to Beta, and walks out of the bar in search of Ferguson. Imelda finds him sitting in an “outside” table along the so-called promenade.
Most commercial districts of star ports have several promenades. On the exclusive levels, the promenades are designed to make patrons think they’re outside in some exotic natural environment, complete with expensive water features and fake sunlight.
On most levels, the promenades resemble city centers of faraway famous places, with some replicas of the cultural icons hovering nearby. Or, if the displays aren’t permanent, there’s a rotating spectacle of VR images that show the tourist highlights of the planet below.
But the promenade outside of the Elizabeta is nothing more than chairs and tables and some gambling booths. The ceiling is as brown as the walls that are as brown as the floors. There’s nothing special or even “outside” here, just a place to be away from the bar’s noise, while still receiving the bar’s service.
Captain Giles Ferguson is sitting out there alone, his fingers wrapped around a stein of a particularly skunky local beer called Ragtop. He drinks nothing but Ragtop at the Elizabeta, but unlike some of his shipmates, he never had the beverage delivered in quantity to the ship.  p. 21

I can see the point of the first and fifth paragraphs, but do we really need a lot of vague blather about what would normally be seen on the promenade outside of the pub? This is a writer thinking out loud about background details rather than reducing them to a pithy line or image.
These interviews are followed by accounts of (a) the corporate shenanigans behind the trip (it seems that tech triggers the storms but the insurers were content to underwrite the trip); (b) her father’s marital backstory; (c) the recruitment of another captain to act as a rescue ship should the need arise; (d) what might have happened to the Gabriella when it arrived over the crater (three scenarios where the second-hand speculation about what may have occurred is about as riveting as you would expect); and, finally, (e) the findings of the inquiry.
It is bad enough that this is all told in mind numbing detail, is set in the thinnest of space opera realities, and that there is no plot progression whatsoever (at the end of the piece we are in exactly the same place as we were when we began), but throughout the story it is blindingly obvious that that the maelstroms are caused either by aliens, or by some current or leftover defence tech (the narrative grudgingly has one of the crew of the Maria Segunda state late on in the story that it felt like they were fighting a “live thing”). This idea, however, is almost completely unexamined: whether this is because the writer couldn’t come up with an intriguing explanation or whether it’s because there is another twenty thousand words to be milked out of this idea remains to be seen.
– (Awful). 21,450 words.

•

Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) opens at a Thanksgiving dinner where Ori the narrator (a sort of adopted stepdaughter of the husband of the couple) has to cope with a variety of snooty and/or eccentric relatives: the wife and daughter are supercilious, the aunt constantly corrects and scolds everyone and laments the decline in standards, and Grandma Elving talks incessantly and with great detail about a Christmas job she had in Woolworths as a teenager. The wife can’t stand Grandma Elving’s endless stories and constantly tries to change the subject, but Dave Lassiter, the daughter’s boyfriend, is interested because he is studying neuroscience and is finishing a project on TFBM—traumatic flashbulb memory—and realises that Grandma’s vivid memories may be a case of that.
Then, on the Monday after the dinner, Ori gets a call from Gramdma asking for a lift to the doctors. However, when they get to their destination, Ori discovers that Grandma has arranged to meet Lassiter, who wants to interview her for his TFBM research project. The rest of the first part of the story sees Lassiter undertake many long interviews with Grandma, eventually becoming convinced that her intense memories are trauma related. Later on, after making little progress in discovering what the buried trauma might be, there are hints that it might possibly involve a young man called Marty who worked on the lunch counter with Grandma.
During this period Lassiter and Ori spend a lot of time together, and this is redoubled when Grandma suggests that they go to the city to look at the store to see if it will jog her memory:

The wind was definitely blowing today, a biting wind that whipped icily around the corners, but Grandma Elving didn’t seem to notice, she was so busy remembering what stores had once been there. “There was a shoe repair shop there,” she said, pointing at the Planet Fitness gym. “It had a neon sign that said, ‘Soles While You Wait.’ With a ‘U’ instead of the word You.’ It was right next to a Christian Science reading room, and I always thought the sign should be in their window instead.”
“What about the store?” Lassiter said, turning her wheelchair so she was facing the building where the Woolworth’s had been. “Do you remember where the door was?”
“Yes, it was right there,” she said, pointing at one of the windows of the 7-Eleven. “It was a big double door, and above it was the store’s name in gold letters on a red background—F.W. Woolworth & Co.—and in the corners, 5c and 10c,” and it looked like she was seeing it right now.
And seeing the whole store. “The candy counter was near the door,” she said, pointing, “and so was Christmas merchandise—tinned fruitcakes and bath sets and shaving mugs, and over in the corner was Gift Wrapping. I loved working in Gift Wrapping because you could see outside, the cars and the people hurrying by with their shopping bags and packages, all bundled up in their hats and scarves and boots.”
“Where would the lunch counter have been?” Lassiter asked.
“There,” she said, pointing to the left. “It stretched half the length of the store. It had stools all along it and booths coming out from it, like that,” she said, gesturing.
“And you and Marty and Ralph worked behind the counter?”
“Yes, I made the sandwiches and dished up the blue plate specials, and the boys grilled the hamburgers and hot dogs and made the fountain drinks, which was good. The first cherry Coke I tried to make, I got cherry syrup all over, and Marty said—”
She stopped short. “The cosmetics and notions departments were in the middle,” she said, starting again, “and over there,” she pointed to the right, “was Gloves and Scarves, and behind it was Stationery, which I loved working in because Andy worked there. He was so cute.”
“Before, when you were telling us about the lunch counter and Marty,” Lassiter said, kneeling down next to her wheelchair, “did you remember something?”
“No,” she said, but doubtfully, and then burst out, “It’s so maddening! Every time I think I have it, it disappears!  p. 179-180

After this they go and have lunch, where Grandma disappears into the loos for an inordinate amount of time leaving Ori and Lassiter together to talk. Then, when Grandma returns, she remembers the Christmas manger figurines she had been collecting at the time, and how Marty bought two of them for her. Subsequently she dispatches Lassiter and Ori to scour the thrift stores for a set, in the hope that the figurines will jog her memory. Eventually they find what they are looking for, and Grandma reveals that Marty died when he was young.
However, we eventually find out towards the end of the story (spoiler), when Grandma ends up in hospital during Xmas dinner, that she already has a set of figurines at home—and that the interviews, the trip into town, lunch, and the search for the figurines, and all the time that they spend together, was actually Grandma’s plan to matchmake Ori and Lassiter. And, worse, Ori learns that Marty wasn’t killed, which leaves her with the unenviable task of telling Lassiter that Grandma’s manufactured trauma is not true and that his research is based on falsified information, something that will likely cause him to fail his course.
The final part of the story reveals that Grandma’s vivid memories were created by a feeling of intense happiness while she stood at the door of Woolworths one evening. Ori has her own experience of this when she hears Lassiter say that he didn’t her earlier hypothesis that this was the case as it would have meant that he couldn’t go on seeing Grandma—and her.
This is a well told and entertaining romcom (the daughter provides a couple of amusing interference episodes during the story), and the evocative final description of Granma’s flashbulb moment, as well as Ori’s epiphany in the lift, are fittingly seasonal. They are also enough to overcome the late switcheroo of the trauma plot device.
I note in passing that this is a mainstream piece, not SF or fantasy.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 21,650 words.

•

Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2020) opens (after a somewhat irrelevant introductory passage where a young woman gives birth in the back of a truck) with a grandmother telling a young child called Jennie to stop repeating what is said to her (Jennie turns out to have “selective savant memory” or “echo-memory”).
We then see that the grandmother is highly protective of Jennie and has never lets her go out to play but eventually, when the child turns eight, she has to go to school. Before this Gramma shows her, as a warning about the world, a graphic news clip about a young girl who has been murdered. On the way to school Gramma continues the child’s education when they pass wealthy professionals helicoptering into their workplace:

Gramma stopped tugging at Jennie’s hand. “Okay, I guess you need to know some things before you start school. I should of said it before. The aliens, ‘Lictorians’ the government calls them, have all kinds of fancy tech. They landed in China, so the Chinese got the tech and then sold some of it to companies in America. All that means is rich people got richer, like always. But this time, way way richer. And those of us on the bottom lost more and more jobs to the Likkie robots and AI and supertrains and all the rest of it. I used to have a good factory job at Boeing, before automation. Between the Likkies and your grandfather, I lost everything. And welfare just gets less and less. So now you understand.”  p. 135

This future world of economic inequality is the backbone of the story (although the explanation for the way things are is fairly superficial and never really explored in any detail—why would the masses not vote for change, for example?)
Jennie is tested at school and put into Ms Scott’s class for gifted children, where she meets Imani, the alpha female of the class, and then Ricardo, who modestly identifies himself as a “genius.” As Jennie settles into her education we find out more about the world around her, and her grandmother’s precarious financial situation. Then, one day on the way to school, the nearby robot factory blows up and Jennie learns about “T-boc”, the Take Back Our Country rebels who target the wealthy or “blingasses” living with their robots behind Q-field force shields.
In Jennie’s teenage years there are more significant developments. On one occasion she is told by her grandmother that her mother is being prosecuted for murder. Gramma takes Jennie to the city where the trial is but leaves her alone in a rented “coffin room” with instructions not to leave, but Jennie slips out to an internet café and finds that her mother, apparently a prostitute, is on trial for the murder of a client. Later Jennie also learns about an aunt called Grace, but Gramma refuses to tell Jennie anything about her. Then, in her final teen years at school, she comes home one day and finds that Gramma has been murdered.
All these events take place against a background of closer bonds with her school friends, gang problems at school, and what is now an insurgency between T-boc and the government/rich.
The second part of the story sees Jennie discover a valentine card (presumably sent to her mother) in her dead grandmother’s papers, which prompts a car journey with her friends to two log cabins in the middle of nowhere, one of which is burnt out. On return she meets Grace at her grandmother’s house. Grace has inherited Gramma’s property, and Jennie ends up going to stay with her.
Grace is a dress designer and Jennie eventually becomes, over the next couple of years, a famous and wealthy model with a rich boyfriend. We now see how the rich live behind their Q-shields, and later get a brief glimpse of one of the enigmatic Lictorians at a fashion show (which suffers a T-boc cyberattack that sets some of the models’ clothes on fire). Grace and the friends that Jennie makes in this rich society are, needless to say, selfish, shallow types unconcerned about the welfare of the less well off.
The third leg of the story sees Ricardo tell her (in a rare call—she has lost touch with her childhood friends) that Imani’s mother and brother have been murdered in a gang-related incident. Jennie visits them and there is some social awkwardness. Then, after her trip, when a wealthy boyfriend’s robofactory is blown up (along with a demand for UBI—universal basic income), and a T-boc supporting village razed in reprisal, his vicious response (“Barbecue T-boc! Yum!”) provokes Jennie to leave him, give up modelling, and join T-boc.
Jennie becomes increasingly involved with the group, and eventually takes part in an operation that kills sixteen humans. When a pro-UBI Senator is shot, however, Jennie confides her growing doubts about T-boc’s strategy to an elderly woman psychologist, who tells Jennie she also wants T-boc to change direction. Their conversation is overheard by one of the other cell members, and they are eventually put on trial. During this the cell leaders get Jennie to use her echo-memory to repeat every conversation that she and the old woman have had.
It’s in this part of the story that my interest began to fade. Before this it is a reasonably good piece about a young woman growing up in a deprived and challenging environment, but the T-boc section is boilerplate resistance/us-and-them material populated with two dimensional characters. Unfortunately much worse follows in the final part, where (spoiler) Jennie flees T-boc and goes back to the log cabins to hide with her friends. When T-boc sends a helicopter to bring them back, and the pilot moves to kill them, who should pop up but her mother Cora, who shoots the pilot. If this co-incidence isn’t enough, she also commits her own terrorist attack on the rest of the story, blowing it up with revelations of her infection by a meteor-borne space virus in the 1970s, which made her near-immortal and of interest to the Lictorians (who seem to be the ones that were behind her earlier jail break). And we also learn that Cora was Gramma’s mother!
More plot explosions follow, including an extraction by the Lictorians, and Jennie telling their alien ambassador about her echo-memory, which indicates she also has the mutation. After negotiations she agrees to co-operate with the aliens and help with their research (we find the reason they are here is to try and get the secret of immortality for their own people) but only if they agree to several demands—at this point in the story we get Jennie’s mini-manifesto: nullify Q-shields, unless the government taxes robots and provides UBI; set up a foundation to aid small business; sell the US advanced tech like the Chinese; etc., etc. Oh, and the Semper Augustus/tulip mosaic virus stuff mentioned by Ricardo early in the story gets trotted out again.²
As I mentioned above, for the first half/two-thirds or so this isn’t bad but it goes spectacularly off the rails at the end. Jennie’s naivety about what T-boc becomes isn’t convincing, and the story never really has anything sensible to say about how to fix the structural inequalities of the world it sets up, short of trotting out the idea of UBI, which sounds like a good idea but may have its own problems (Finland trialled it and then stopped³).
The main problem, though, is that the final immortality section is just a huge deus ex machina that creates an ending at odds with the rest of the story, and introduces a huge new subplot in the last few pages. A kitchen-sink piece, and probably longer than it needs to be too (by the time you get to the end of the story a lot of the preceding detail about Jennie’s life is completely irrelevant).
∗ (Mediocre). 40,300 words.⁴

•

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July/August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 23,350 words.

•••

A mixed bag of stories once again, but there are three more than worthwhile novellas here.⁵  ●

_____________________

1. Unfortunately the stories were put online the day the Hugo nominations closed, which is a pity as I would have voted for three or four if I had seen them in time (I didn’t bother nominating anything).

2. The Wikipedia page on the Tulip mania, referenced in Kress’s story, perhaps the first speculative asset bubble, is here.

3. The Wikipedia page on Universal Basic Income is here.

4. Semper Augustus is on the borderline (40,000 words) between a novella and a novel so I’ve gone with Asimov’s categorisation as a novella.

5. Here are the (too me, odd) results of the poll we had on my Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction Facebook group (~sixteen voters):

However, when we voted on all sixteen stories (again, around 16 voters), the McIntosh and the Willis went from the bottom of the poll to the top (memo to self: pay no attention to polls with such low numbers of voters):

Summary:
These are the five novelette finalists for the 35^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (the stories were published in 2020). They are of mixed quality, but are a slightly stronger group than the short stories (although not as much as I expected).
The standout this time around is the Mercurio D. Rivera story—how on Earth was this left off the Hugo Award ballot?

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars • by Mercurio D. Rivera ∗∗∗∗+
The Beast Adjoins • by Ted Kosmatka ∗∗
The Hind • by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber ∗∗∗+
The Long Iapetan Night • by Julie Novakova ∗∗
Tunnels • by Eleanor Arnason ∗∗∗

_____________________

Every year Asimov’s SF magazine runs a poll so readers can vote for their favourite stories, covers, etc. from the previous year. The magazine also makes nearly all the material available online¹ for a short period so, even if (unlike me) you aren’t a subscriber, you can have a look at what sort of publication it is.
Here is my take on the novelette finalists:

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), and says that she has created one of these simulated realities where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:

“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos.  p. 71

Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:

The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious.  p. 72

Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events also cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and see it as yet another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:

[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.”  p. 80

After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God¹ (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary and political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist if not winner.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.

•

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, July/August 2020) opens with a woman and her cancer-ridden son sheltering in the debris field of a multi-starship battle. Meanwhile, a “Beast” hunts for them.
The rest of this thread (spoiler) sees the woman slow the spin of their ship to delay their detection before she prepares a robotic device to accept the transfer of her son’s mind. She does this just in the nick of time, of course, but the eventual climactic scene sees the arrival of the Beast at the ship anyway (after its initial attack has caused the mother to tumble out into space on the end of a long line):

All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors.  p. 94

Then (spoiler) she is pulled back in by her son so she can watch him and the Beast fight. Her son wins.
We learn throughout the story that the Beast is one of a number of AIs who have rebelled against their human creators, and this backstory shows their history from development to rebellion. Unfortunately most of this latter is quantum hand wavium about the AIs’ inability to function in the absence of human presence (because, for some reason, the AIs can’t “resolve probability into existence”): the way the rebel AIs eventually circumvent this problem is to bioengineer humans into small accessories that can observe reality and collapse quantum probability for them, an entertainingly grisly passage:

The AIs continued to refine their engineering, eventually creating humans in test-tubes who were barely human at all—only a weak array of sensory organs linked to a frontal cortex and occipital lobe, the result of experiments to identify those neurological structures phenomenologically linked to quantum resolution. The AIs found the MNC—the minimum neurological complexity required to collapse quantum systems, with Homo sapiens reduced in volume to a thousand cc’s. The contents of a small glass jar.
Brain matter, retina, and optic nerve.
The AIs miniaturized this human componentry just as humanity had once miniaturized them, and still they were not done with their tinkering, for this vestigial remnant of humanity was enfolded within the interior of their great mechs, housed within protective walls of silica. Oxygenated fluids pumped into these folds of cortex that existed in a state of waking nightmare, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, yet somehow aware and conscious, gazing out through glass ports, resolving the Universe into existence all around. The AIs were not just automata anymore, but two things made one. Cells within cells. Abominations.
These became known as beasts.  p. 91

Were the rest of the story this good, but the main part is too straightforward a series of events, and the quantum gimmick too unlikely. One further criticism I have is that in the last section we see her son stop functioning in her absence, only to resume when she returns—the same problem as the AIs have. How did she not know about this before the transfer?
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words.

•

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)² begins with the protagonist, a young woman called Kym, looking at a list of five names she has been given by the Ship’s Council: she is pregnant, and to keep her baby she needs to kill one of these five, who have been identified by the council as a waste of resources. (During the first part of the story we learn that Kym lives on a generation starship called The Hind which was seriously damaged when it flew through a debris field and is now drifting through the universe with its AI shutdown and its infrastructure slowly deteriorating).
Kym soon finds the first name on the list, an old woman called Grandmother Sudio, sitting under a tree in an orchard talking to a group of young children. Kym joins the old woman (with a view to finding an opportune moment to kill her) and they start talking. The old woman’s memory is failing (she can’t keep the kid’s names straight) but Kym eventually discovers that Sudio was working on the bridge when the debris field struck, and that Kym’s grandmother Juliana saved Sudio’s life.
After learning of the old woman’s history and the connection to her grandmother, Kym decides to move on to the second name on her list, a rapist called Galen Porthos. However, after working her way through the ship to the section he works in and getting close, another assassin gets to him before she can and claims the kill.
The third name on her list is Xandi Chan, an ex-Council member but now the leader of a rebel faction trying to repair the ship’s bridge so the remaining survivors can regain control of The Hind. Kym tracks her down and (spoiler), when Chan is distracted by one of the members of a repair team with a leaking spacesuit, Kym strikes—but is intercepted by two of the men in Chan’s group. Chan interrogates Kym, and tells her that the Council want her dead because they want to stay in power—something that won’t happen if Chan gets the ship running again. Kym is converted to Chan’s cause and tells her about Sudio, whose voice commands will enable them to regain control of The Hind if they can complete the necessary repairs and restart the systems.
The final scene sees them restart the ship.
This is a fairly straightforward story but I thought it was well done. Unlike many tales, which feel padded, this one feels like the second half of a longer story: it might have been a more engrossing piece if it had started when Kym found out she was pregnant.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,100 words.

•

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)¹ sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

•

Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2020) is the sixth of the author’s ‘Lydia Duluth’ stories to appear, and this one finds her in Innovation City, an island on the planet Grit. As usual she is there on a work assignment for her employer, the holoplay production company Stellar Harvest. Most of the first part of the story is a mixture of background material (including a previous run-in she had with the owners of the island, a genemod company called BioInnovation), a description of the local silicon and carbon based lifeforms, and travelogue.
The story gets going when she meets an actor’s agent for tea to discuss a production in progress on Grit. Before this Duluth feels like she is coming down with a cold and, after the meal, she feels worse. Not only does it feel like she has caught the flu, she also has a compunction to go down into the railway system tunnels under the city. Her AI, which hasn’t said a lot until this point, tells her to phone for help, but she can’t remember how. Then she sees a “Gotcha” on the inside of her eyelids, and realises the flu virus she has been infected with is hacked.
The second part of the story sees Duluth wake to find herself in a dark tunnel, with her AI silent. She starts walking and eventually finds a lit water fountain where, a little bit later, an alien Goxhat turns up:

[She] saw something by the drinking fountain, her size, but lower to the floor. The way it moved was distinctive. She came closer. The creature had an oval body that rested on four legs, and four arms, two on each side of the oval body. One arm in each pair ended in a formidable-looking pincher. The other ended in a cluster of tentacles. The creature was holding a cup in one of its tentacle-hands and dipping it into the fountain. There was no head. Instead, its brain was housed in a bulge atop its body. There ought to be four eyes in the bulge, though Lydia couldn’t see them. The Goxhat was facing away from her.
“Hello,” she said in humanish.
The alien spun. The four blue eyes glared. “Dangerous!” it cried in humanish. “Beware!” It waved the cup, spilling water. “Fierce! Fierce!”
“I’m not a threat,” Lydia said, trying to sound reasonable and unafraid. As far as she knew, the Goxhat were never dangerous to members of other species, but this one looked agitated and poorly groomed. The black hair that covered its body was spiky in some places and matted in others. What the heck was this guy doing here in this condition, and where was the rest of it?
“Where are your other bodies?” Lydia asked.
The Goxhat screamed and ran into the darkness.
Well, that had certainly been the wrong question to ask.  p. 21

Eventually, Duluth manages to talk to the creature and discovers that it knows other humans in the tunnels, and she manages to convince it to take her to them. She later meets three others that have been trapped underground for years because they too caught the hacked flu virus, and one of the side effects is that trying to climb up any of the stairways incapacitates them. Duluth also learns that the tunnels aren’t actually in use, but are a result of a BioInnovation genmod product that has run wild and spread under the planet.
Further adventures follow, beginning with the four of them (and the Goxhat) going to a vagrants camp (this other group of humans aren’t infected, but refuse to help those who are because they variously use them for stories, from Genghis the professor, and sex, from Tope the courtesan, etc.). This encounter is rather irrelevant to the story because when Lydia later talks to the Goxhat and asks it its name, it hoots three times, and adds that no-one has ever asked, before offering to lead her to the surface. However, the meeting provides an amusing after dinner episode where (a) Duluth is quizzed about a holo star she knows and (b) Genghis’s story about Thor losing his hammer is subject to a relentless analysis of the character’s attitudes and behaviour (“You can’t be killing people, even if they’re giants. It’s illegal.” “And wrong,” etc.).
The last section (spoiler)—where Duluth and Three Hoots reach the surface, steal a boat and escape to the mainland, and then BioIn and Stellar Harvest (Duluth’s employers) security get involved—is routine stuff and not as engaging as the previous part (even with Three Hoots’ revelation about how its other bodies died after they discovered financial irregularities in BioIn’s accounts). This last part also feels longer than it needs to be.
Overall an entertaining and amusing, if minor, piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 17,400 words.

•••

A decent group of stories and worth a read. Don’t miss the Mercurio story, which should have been a Hugo finalist.⁴  ●

_____________________

1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about his story here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story on steroids but, notwithstanding this, a gripping story and a worthy multiple award winner).

2. The obligatory blog post where Rick Wilber talks about how he and Anderson wrote The Hind is here. It’s worth a look.

3. The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova was previously published in Czech in 2018 and won the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.

4. We read all the Asimov’s SF finalists in the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction Facebook group. Here are the poll results for the novelettes:
I’ll be interested to see how this correlates with the final results (which I’ll add when they are announced).  ●

Summary:
These are the six short story finalists for the 35^th Asimov’s SF Magazine Readers’ Awards (the stories were published in 2020). They are a mixed bag but worth a read.
Don’t miss the standout Rich Larson story, The Conceptual Shark!

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams

Father • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗+
GO. NOW. FIX. • short story by Timons Esaias ∗∗∗+
Rena in the Desert • short story by Lia Swope Mitchell ∗∗∗
Return to Glory • short story by Jack McDevitt –
Return to the Red Castle • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗
The Conceptual Shark • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗∗

_____________________

Every year Asimov’s SF magazine runs a poll so readers can vote for their favourite stories, covers, etc. from the previous year. The magazine also makes (most of) the material freely available online¹ for a short period so, even if (unlike me) you aren’t a subscriber, you can have a look at what kind of material they run.
Here is my take on the short story finalists:

Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,² and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic “father unit”; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar—the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie—who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot—flies by low in his aircar, and hits the latter with a baseball bat:

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie’s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie’s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: “Home run!” and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?” I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful—his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you’re hungry for dinner.
“That’s the first time you called me Father,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.”
“We should call the cops,” my mom said.
“I doubt they’ll do much,” Father said. “And that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.”
“I’ve said the same myself, many times,” Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father’s head with a kitchen cloth. “What did they get you with?”
“A baseball bat, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Perhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.”
“Hilarious,” Mom said.
“I’m here all week, folks . . .” Father’s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie’s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot’s head and the second time to visit the narrator’s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that robot may be partially or all his real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning “sub-routines”.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake—while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator’s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot’s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot’s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity—if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

•

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2020) sees a PandaPillow, an AI comfort accessory discarded in the overhead locker of an aeroplane, sense an explosive decompression in the cabin:

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.
With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two closeups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.
PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?
COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programing. Powering down wouldn’t do that.
PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.  p. 89

This call to a (perplexed) customer support team is the only distress message sent from the aircraft and, while they raise the alarm, the PandaPillow starts doing what it can to help the other bots in the cabin deal with the unconscious human passengers and seal the hull. It performs a number of key actions during the emergency, and ultimately glues itself over a failing window. Eventually (spoiler), a limpet repair missile docks with the plane’s hull, takes control, and lands the aircraft safely.
Despite its heroic actions, the PandaPillow is initially overlooked after they land before it is eventually fêted as a hero.
Some of the early action is hard to visualise but it’s an entertaining piece, and the touching last section drags it up another notch.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words.

•

Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) opens with Rena driving across the Nevada desert in a barely functioning electric car when she comes upon a deserted automotel:

[Here] sat the Rock Springs AutoMotel like a postcard from the past, its electric sign flashing SWIM and AC and VACANCY: a single-story, L-shaped building, spread low beside a parking lot with one lonesome, dust-coated truck. Behind a chain-link fence the pool sparkled in the sunlight, a cleaning skimmer dancing across its surface. It had to be real, that water—maybe those Rock Springs still existed, underground somewhere now. Next to the pool, dangling small plump feet, sat a little girl, staring back.
How was that even possible? Settlement was illegal from the Rockies to the Sierras. Back in Chicago the tabloids babbled about outlaw gangs preying through the mountains, doomsday cults, radioactive corpses piled by the roadside. Military escorts guarded cargo trucks driving between Vegas and LA. But on 50 Rena had seen nothing and nobody—only the remnants of gas stations, dried-out husks of ruined towns, and dispirited clumps of dead brush. From horizon to horizon, nothing was moving but her and a few wary birds.
On the Coast, with its forests and desalinization plants and fish-filled oceans, tourists still drove up and down, burning money on hotels and restaurants. Or so people said back home, wondering in hushed tones, dreaming in the winter cold. So Rena wanted to believe.  p. 58

Rena tries to communicate with the eight-year-old girl but her Spanish lets her down, so she goes into the reception and gets a room from the automated system. Then she has a shower, and is delighted that the motel seems to have plentiful water. But, when she tries to order food, she finds that there isn’t anything available.
The rest of this post-apocalypse story includes some backstory about Rena’s trans lover Mike (who has ended up somewhere else for a reason I can’t remember), and her discovery of a smuggler who has been locked in a room by the motel’s security software. Rena also eventually realises that the automotel AI has been looking after the young girl.
The story ends (spoiler) with Rena freeing the man, who has promised to drive her to Tahoe. After some discussion, including about how much food the motel has left, Rena manages to convince the AI to let the girl go with them to the coast.
This is an engaging and well told story but matters rather work out of their own accord—which makes for a rather pedestrian ending.
∗∗∗ (Good.) 6,000 words.

•

Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) is set on Earth two hundred years from now. It is a better place than now, but one that has abandoned its Mars colony and dreams of space exploration.
The story opens with the narrator getting a call from a call from a school friend to say he’s found a copy of a long lost show called Star Trek at a site he’s developing, and the narrator’s wife agrees to screen the show (the library she works at has the tech to read the recording’s ancient format). The three of them then meet the next morning to watch it—only to find the disc contains a fan production. The friend shrugs off his disappointment, and agrees to let the wife copy the disc for the museum.
That night the narrator and his wife watch the show at home:

The storyline wasn’t great, but it was okay. It wasn’t the narrative that caught our attention. It was entering the ring system at the gas giant. And watching stars pass steadily through the windows of the Republic. And looking down on other planets. The special effects took us for a serious ride.
“I think the magic,” said Sara, “is knowing it was put together by people who believed it was coming.”   p. 164

The show becomes a hit at the museum, and then the series is remade, which in turn provides stimulus for new research in space/warp flight.
If you are in the mood for a mawkish, boosterish tale about how Star Trek will inspire future generations to travel into space, and one that includes a three page synopsis of a fan show, then this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine, and reads like something that was pulled out of Analog’s slush pile.
– (Poor). 4,000 words.

•

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas: there is just too much going on in this short piece (a failing that his other story above shares towards the end of the piece).
∗∗ (Average). 7,250 words.

•

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) opens with Adam washing his hands in the sink when the bottom of it disappears and becomes the ocean. Worse, he knows there is a shark down there coming towards him: he runs out of his bathroom.
The next part of the story sees him at Nora the therapist’s office, where he tells her about what he has seen that morning and, later, about a childhood essay he wrote on sharks. Nora suggests the next time he has an episode, he should tell the shark how much he admired them when he was a kid. Adam tells her that sharks don’t talk, and she replies that they don’t live in bathroom plumbing either! When he leaves Nora’s office Adam bumps into Bastian, her boyfriend, who reappears later in the story.
The next day Adam decides he has to have a shower—by now he can smell himself—and during this he falls through the bottom of the shower tray:

A wave crashes over him and yanks the showerhead out of his hand. He struggles his way vertical again, treading the choppy water, but not before he catches an upside-down glimpse of a dark shape below him. The sight sends a surge of chemical terror through his whole body; he feels a tiny warm cloud against his thigh before the current whisks it away.
Adam knows that people do die in the shower—they slip, they fall, they break their necks. It’s almost definitely more common than dying in a shark attack. He doesn’t think there are statistics for shower deaths by shark attack.
His outflung fingers touch the plastic-coated edge of the stall just as another wave hits. He tumbles backward, nearly bangs his head on the opposite wall. The fear ratchets up to frenzy. He can feel the size of the shark circling below him, the water displaced by its powerful slicing tail.
Something nudges against his right arm. Retreats. Terror is paralyzing him in place; he can feel his limbs locking up. In a second he’ll sink like a stone whether the shark eats him or not. Sandpaper skin rasps against his other forearm. He pictures the blunt nose of the shark, pictures its maw opening up. It triggers another cascade of chemicals in his nervous system, and this time flight beats freeze.
He throws himself at the edge of the stall, seizes it with both hands. He hauls himself out of the shower and flops onto the dirty bathroom floor just as the shark breaches. Over his shoulder he sees its massive head breaking the surface in a spray of foam, sees row on row of razor teeth, sees one dull black eye staring back at him.
The showerhead is sheared off its mount, dangling from the shark’s mouth like a bit of dental floss.  p. 173

After this Adam’s problem only gets worse, and he sees the shark everywhere there is water—washing machines, stacked water bottles, etc.
At this point, what is a very weird (but engrossing) story (spoiler) gets even weirder when he goes to see Nora again, and opens the office door to see Bastian pointing a gun at him. Nora is tied up, and in the middle of the office is a kiddies paddling pool that has been partly filled from water containers. There is also a spear gun nearby.
Bastian orders Adam into the office, reassures him that he’ll walk out alive, and begins to explain that the “conceptual shark” is real, not an illusion, and that he has been hunting it since childhood (when it killed his grandmother). What Bastian plans to do is use Adam as bait and, when the shark appears, kill it. Adam eventually agrees to go along with his plan, and Bastian releases Nora from the office.
The climactic scene sees Adam standing in the paddling pool wearing a lifejacket attached to a rope that Bastian will use to pull him out of the pool when the shark arrives. When it doesn’t seem like the pool is going to change into the ocean, Adam pricks his finger with a paperclip to produce a drop of blood—at which point he plunges down into cold seawater. When the shark arrives it’s like the climactic scene of the Jaws movie played out in an office setting and, if that isn’t sensational enough, we also discover that the shark has been hunting Bastian, not the other way around.
Then the story bootstraps up another level when the paddling pool splits and the office fills up with the sea: the roof becomes the sky, sunlight warms Adam’s face, and he sees he is floating on a vast ocean.
This is an impressively original piece that crams a big plot and a thoroughly worked out idea into very little space.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 3,750 words.

•••

A mixed bag of stories but they are all worth a look, bar the McDevitt. Don’t miss Rich Larson’s piece!  ●

_____________________

1. Unfortunately the stories were put online the day the Hugo nominations closed, which is a pity as I would have voted for three or four if I had seen them in time.

2. The alternate world pivot point in this story is the same as in Nayler’s two ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories (also published in Asimov’s SF): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the technology found.  ●

Summary:
This is a worthwhile issue of the magazine, and includes Robert Silverberg’s Hot Times in Magma City, a good (and atypical for this writer) novella which has a group of recovering addicts doing emergency work in a volcano blighted Los Angeles. The gonzo setting and the sparky character interactions make it a fun read.
Providing good support is Bibi by Mike Resnick & Susan Schwartz, which looks at the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and John McDaid’s Jigoku No Mokushiroku, another gonzo piece (this time about an elevator AI) which went on to win that year’s Sturgeon award. The rest of the stories are more mixed but the Brunner is a decent enough read.
[ISFDB link]

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gardner Dozois; Executive Editor, Sheila Williams

Fiction:
Bibi • novella by Mike Resnick and Susan Shwartz ∗∗∗
Ex Vitro • short story by Daniel Marcus ∗
All Under Heaven • novelette by John Brunner ∗∗
Jigoku No Mokushiroku • short story by John G. McDaid ∗∗∗
Tiger I • short story by Tanith Lee ∗
Hot Times in Magma City • reprint novella by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover (Hot Times in Magma City) • by John Maggard
Interior Artwork • Steve Cavallo, Mike Aspengren (x2), Laurie Harden, Pat Morrissey, Slava Kisarev, Ron Chironna, uncredited
Old Enough to Vote • essay by Robert Silverberg
Poetry • by Bruce Boston (x2), Wendy Rathbone, Steven Utley
Next Issue
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

_____________________

[All the story reviews have been previously posted of sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the thee dots ••• and you’ll find the non-fiction reviews and summary.]

Bibi by Mike Resnick and Susan Shwartz opens with an enigmatic passage that has a woman looking for food in the African bush after having “slept too long”. Thereafter the story introduces Jeremy Harris, an American aid worker in a nearby tented compound who is woken by one of the children who lives there with the message that the camp doctor wants him. As he wakes and gets ready we get some of his backstory: he is HIV+, and moved from the USA to work in the Ugandan camp after he infected his ex-partner. We also learn that he was a wealthy stock trader and not only does manual work for the project (there is an observation about digging graves being better exercise than any personal trainer) but helps fund it.
There is more information about Jeremy, as well as the effect that Idi Amin and Aids has had on Uganda, before he goes to meet the story’s other main character, Elizabeth Umurungi. Elizabeth is the camp doctor, a Europeanised Ugandan who was a fashion model before she changed professions. She tells him that one of the families has left the camp and, after breakfast, they drive to their village to see if they can find them. En route Jeremy gets a glimpse of what looks like a woman in the bush.
When they get to the village Elizabeth speaks to the grandmother, and asks her why she left the camp. The grandmother, after some cultural sparring with the doctor (she calls her “Memsaab”) tells her that “Bibi” is coming to help them. Unconvinced, Jeremy and Elizabeth stay to help the daughter, who is dying of AIDS.
As the pair settle down for the night we get more backstory about Jeremy when Elizabeth reads out loud a letter from Jeremey’s ex that he has been reluctant to open and read himself. And with good reason—it contains angry, bitter recriminations, as well as bad news about other friends:

“Dear (that’s a joke) Jeremy:
“After I stopped shaking and walked out on you and got back to the Keys, Bud wanted to head North after you with his AK. But Steve said what the fuck, Bud tested clean—no point throwing away his life along with yours and mine. And Steve’s. He’s real sick. ARC pneumonia. He calls it ARC-light bombing when he’s got enough breath to talk. I’ve moved in with the two of them to try to help out. Money goes farther that way, and I like to think I’m useful. It’s hard to watch him come apart and know this is how I’m going to end up.
“Then I think it’s how you’re going to end up too, and it’s not so bad. For once, you’re not going to be able to weasel your way out of something. Only you call it negotiating, don’t you? It’s part of that important stuff, like attention to detail and execution, that makes you such a big success on the Street. Wall, that is, not 42nd, where they sell themselves another way. Not much difference, is there, when you come right down to it? Talk about ‘execution’—you’ve sure executed the two of us like a pro.”  p. 34

That night, a number of odd things happen: Jeremy wakes up and sees what he thinks is a child by the grave of the family’s grandfather before he shoots at a leopard; later they discover that the the radio and spark plugs have been stolen from the Landrover. When Jeremy and Elizabeth question the family they learn that Bibi took them. Then the daughter starts recovering, seemingly cured.
Later on Jeremy sees Bibi in the bush, and realises she looks like Lucy, the 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis found by archaeologists. Then, when he subsequently tries to lure her into the camp (spoiler), he catches her but is bitten and she escapes. He develops a fever, and tells Elizabeth that she came to village to save her son—they are all her children—and that she can talk but no-one can understand her language. When Jeremy finally recovers he tells Elizabeth that he knows he is no longer HIV+.
Much later, after they have returned to the camp (they swap Elizabeth’s jewellery for the spark plugs), they argue about whether they should try and find Bibi and exploit her gift:

“We’ve got to go back and find her,” answered Elizabeth. “I’d kill for the chance to have AIDS researchers examine her. I still don’t know that I buy your story about her curing you with a bite, but whatever happened, she obviously gave you some biochemical agent that kills the HIV virus.”
She looked at Jeremy wryly. “It’ll never replace the Salk vaccine, but there’s simply no other explanation. I’ve got to find her and bring her to the camp.”
“She’s not a lab animal,” replied Jeremy seriously. “She’s got to remain free to do her job.”
“Her job?”
“She has other children to cure.”
“You’re not a child.”
“We’re all her children.”
“That again,” said Elizabeth with a sigh.
“You don’t have to believe it,” said Jeremy, protecting his bacon as the kite swooped down toward his plate. “It’s enough that I do.”
“You’re not being logical, Jeremy.”
“I was logical my whole life, and what did it get me, except some money I don’t need and an incurable disease?” replied Jeremy. “Why don’t you really look at Uganda sometime? This is a magical place, for all its problems. Spit a mango pit out the window of your Land Rover, and when you drive by six months later a mango tree has grown up. Amin and his successors virtually wiped out your wildlife, yet all the animals are returning. Terminally ill people suddenly get cured. So how can I not believe in magic?”  p. 59

The final section sees the pair spend three months trying to find Bibi but eventually they give up. Then Jeremy wanders out into the bush on his own, and eventually comes upon her.
This, as you can probably gather from the above, is a bit of a mixed bag. It gets off to a good start with its characterisation and the African locale, and throughout the story does an impressive job of recalling the AIDS epidemic of the eighties and nineties (perhaps worse than the one we are dealing with now)1—however, the idea of a three million year old woman who is able to cure various diseases, and Jeremy’s anti-science/magical thinking take at the end of the piece, both take some of the shine off. That said, it’s a worthwhile read for those that are interested in character driven stories set in the HIV era, and/or in Africa, and I enjoyed it.
∗∗∗ (Good). 18,200 words.

Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus is set on Titan, where a couple, Jax and Maddy, do science work on the geology of the planet and its slug-like aliens. In the background there are rumbles about a possible nuclear war on Earth between PacRim and EC.
The second chapter switches the point of view from Jax to Maddy (as does the fourth). She is worried about her family in Paris, a likely target, and this causes an argument between them. Maddy later thinks about a embryo of theirs she has in cold storage, but about which she hasn’t told Jax.
The third chapter sees Jax observing the slugs on the surface when Maddy calls: there has been a war on Earth and her parents are dead. She wants to leave Titan for the Moon or the L-5 colonies, so Jax calls their boss at Sun Group, who tells them that Naft and Russia came through alright and that he can send a ship for them later if they want.
The last chapter sees Jax lie to Maddy about the timescale of a likely pickup. Later on Maddy goes out on the surface and opens the canister holding the embryo, destroying it.
I guess this okay for the most part—if you are interested in dysfunctional relationships against a backdrop of a dysfunctional Earth—but it just grinds to a halt. I’d also have to say I’m not a fan of overly contrived writing like this:

They cycled through several iterations of crash and burn, learning each other’s boundaries, before they settled into a kind of steady state. Still, their relationship felt to Jax like a living entity, a nonlinear filter whose response to stimuli was never quite what you thought it was going to be.  p. 68

∗ (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

All Under Heaven by John Brunner begins with a young man called Chodeng watch a military procession arrive in a Chinese town as he helps his uncle mend the temple roof. When his uncle catches Chodeng looking at the scribe sat among the visitors, he chastises him for daydreaming. Later that evening though, as they all gather for a meal, Chodeng is the one who translates for the visitors (who speak a different dialect). During this Chodeng and the villagers learn from General Kao-Li and his scribe, Bi-tso, that they are headed towards the next village to look for meteorites. Chodeng is ordered to go with them.
When they arrive at Gan Han (meaning “not enough water”) after an arduous journey through the hills, they are surprised at to find a verdant oasis, with rice-filled paddies, frogs and ducks. Chodeng is dispatched to speak to one of the young women in the paddy fields, and he quickly finds that (a) they speak the same language as the visitors (they were banished to this area by a previous emperor) and (b) the village bloomed into this paradise after the arrival of the meteorites. Then matters take an even stranger turn when the rest of the locals turn up:

Can this be how a dragon looks? The question sprang unbidden to Chodeng’s lips, but Bi-tso spoke before he had time to utter it.
“A phoenix? Are there still phoenixes in our decadent age?”
Mention of such a legendary, powerful creature dismayed their escorts. They exchanged glances eloquent of apprehension, only to be distracted a second later as the pack animals caught—what? The scent, perhaps, of what was approaching. Or maybe they saw it, or detected strange vibrations in the air, or registered its approach by some sense too fine for coarse humanity. At all events it frightened them, and for the next few minutes the men had all they could do to prevent the beasts from shucking their loads and bolting.
[. . .]
A phoenix, was it? Well, if a scholar so identified it. . . . On first seeing it he had at once felt a dragon to be more likely. Yet—
Yet was he seeing it at all? Seeing it in the customary sense of the term? Somehow he felt not. Somehow he felt, when he tried to stare directly at it and focus its image, to get rid of the shiny hazy blur that seemed like a concentration of the strange luminosity he had already detected in the local air, what he had mentally compared to the nimbus round figures in religious paintings, that the—the creature wasn’t there to be seen. Not there there. Nearby. In a perceptible location. But not there in the sense that one might walk, on his own sore human feet, to where it was. One couldn’t judge how tall, how wide, how deep from front
to back…. In fact, apart from the bare fact of its existence, one could describe it in no terms whatsoever.  p. 91-92

It soon becomes apparent that the creature is an alien when it starts mind to mind communication with Chodeng. During a long conversation he finds out that it arrived with the meteorites (the remaining parts of its spaceship) and compelled the villagers to help it, later rewarding them with improved living conditions. After some more chat it disappears—but Chodeng senses it is still there. Then the head man invites the visitors to eat and rest.
The back half of the story sees Chodeng slip away with the girl he saw earlier, Tai Ping, during dinner—at which point the alien starts mentally communicating with him, stating that it needs his help to organise the collection of the scattered parts of its ship. The alien offers him the girl’s sexual favours in return, but when Chodeng approaches Tai Ping he realises that the alien is controlling her, and he refuses. He then tells the alien that they will help it retrieve the various parts of its ship in the morning. After the alien leaves the girl’s father arrives and thanks Chodeng for sparing his daughter.
The final act (spoiler) sees the visitors and locals arrive at the meteorite/crash site. The alien starts talking to Chodeng, who relays its messages to the General and Bi-tso, and they hear of its extra-terrestrial origins and how, after Chodeng’s actions the night before, it realises that it has underestimated humanity’s potential to be civilized. The alien then reveals its physical body to the humans (as opposed to the projection they all saw before), at which point the General tells the soldiers to kill it for its various breaches of Imperial law (forced labour, etc.), After it dies, and they all turn back towards the village, they see the barren scene and realise that the greenery and water was an illusion.
This has some good local colour and characterisation, but the stranded alien plot isn’t particularly original, and the flip-flops at the end (the alien’s change of heart, the General’s execution order) make the story too busy and too contrived.
∗∗ (Average). 11,450 words.

Jigoku No Mokushiroku by John G. McDaid² gets off to an intriguing start with an AI elevator called Hitoshi talking to Crazy Bob, a visitor to a huge futuristic library built and run by the Koreshians. Although Hitoshi thinks that Bob might be mad, the AI chats to him when he can (partially as part of the building’s security protocols), and reveals that it is named after Hitoshi Igarashi (the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, who was assassinated by Moslem extremists in 1991). Hitoshi even quotes parts of Bob’s books back to him when he stops in-between floors to allow Bob to have an illicit cigarette:

“If I may quote your last book, ‘The vacuum of disbelief sucked the rationality out of culture.’”
“Yeah. We started ringing like a bad circuit. Any control was better than none. Until finally, here I am, in a nation of nonsmoking, nondrinking, vegetarian strangers, stripped of all weaponry in the name of safety, with no culture in common, each plugged into their own unique digital information environment, under a government financed by 40 percent tax and the forfeiture of every convicted criminal’s assets.” He took a long drag and exhaled slowly through his nose. “And I can write all this stuff down, blast it out on the net, and there’s not even anybody left who cares enough to read it.”  p. 109

This feels as if it is, or will be, remarkably prescient.
As the story progresses Bob asks Hitoshi about a woman called Aki who, on one elevator trip, gets on along with a couple of “Koreshi suits” (we learn along the way that the library, a huge underground structure, has been constructed by followers of The David (David Koresh of the Waco siege³) and that each of the disciples is required to emulate The David, usually in some act of self-immolation).
Later on in the story Bob becomes involved in Aki’s plan to nuke the library but, as they are in the process of smuggling the bomb down to the basement, Hitoshi convinces them to let him do it so it can be freed from its current constraints as an elevator AI. After they leave the elevator Hitoshi takes the bomb down to the sub-levels and disarms it for possible future use.
This is a witty and entertaining piece but I’m not sure the satire, which mostly seems to be aimed at mad millennial types, has much point—it’s a pretty obvious target—and I’m not sure I understand Aki’s motivation in wanting to bomb her own library.
The story has a pretty good start but a weaker ending; I think its Sturgeon Award overrates it.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5900 words.

Tiger I by Tanith Lee opens with a woman in a self-driving car en route to a house in the middle of the desert. When she arrives at the gate she talks to Mary Sattersley, the owner, over the intercom and gains admittance. On the short walk to the house the narrator sees a tame lynx and two tigers.
When the pair arrive the narrator and Sattersley have a drink and talk. Sattersley tells the narrator that she is pregnant and will give birth that night, and then invites her to watch. The narrator also learns that the cats on the property can’t speak but they can understand what is being said to them (as she sees when she asks the cheetah on Sattersley’s lap to open and close its eyes).
Later on, after the narrator has had a swim in the pool, the pair meet again and have dinner. The narrator hears Sattersley’s life story, which involves sexual abuse at an early age, many sexual partners during her youth, and then a tryst with an old man just before he dies. She inherited his fortune, and then learned that she was pregnant for the first time. Subequently she has given birth on several other occasions.
The final scene (spoiler) sees Sattersley deliver a tiger cub.
An odd, surreal tale that left me clueless as to what it was supposed to be about.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,700 words.

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 139

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison’s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 143

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job—but not until they demand, and get, a break:

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”
“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”
“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.
“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”
“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.
“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”
“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 151

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story (as you can see from the extensive quotes above), with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It’s a pretty good piece, and one I’d have for my “Year’s Best”. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn’t read like a Silverberg’s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I’ve read recently.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.

•••

The Cover for this issue is by John Maggard, a cluttered piece that seems even more so after the addition of the logo and cover type (I also don’t know why you would change the “S” and “F” to red from white—at some point covers can go from eye-catching to repellent).
The Interior Artwork is provided by Steve Cavallo, Mike Aspengren, Laurie Harden, Pat Morrissey, Slava Kisarev, Ron Chironna, and one uncredited artist. Most of it is too cluttered and/or too dark. (Apologies for the clipped images above, by the way, not my scan.)
Old Enough to Vote by Robert Silverberg is about the magazine’s eighteenth anniversary issue, which was published in April, other long lived SF magazines, and the personnel that have been involved with the Asimov’s SF over its lifetime.
1994 Hugo Award Winners is a single page congratulating the winners of that year’s Hugo Awards, none of which I’ve read (1994 was a busy year for me). The only Asimov’s SF winners are Joe Haldeman for None So Blind (Asimov’s SF, November 1994) and Gardner Dozois (Best Editor).
There is Poetry by Bruce Boston, Wendy Rathbone, and Steven Utley, none of which did anything for me. SF Poetry rarely does.
Next Issue mentions the return of Joanna Russ with her first new SF story “in more than ten years”, Invasion, as well as a story from Walter Jon Williams, Foreign Devils, set in China (like Brunner’s tale this issue—was there something in the air?)
There is also an SF Conventional Calendar from Erwin S. Strauss, but no On Books column.
I note in passing that there are a lot of advertisements in this issue, more than I remember for the Asimov’s of this period (there are ten, including a couple of house ads, breaking up the text of Bibi, never mind the rest of the magazine).

•••

This is a worthwhile issue of the magazine, with good or better novellas from both Robert Silverberg and Mike Resnick & Susan Schwartz, as well as a good story from John McDaid (which later won a Sturgeon award). The rest of the stories are more mixed but the Brunner is a decent enough read.   ●

_____________________

1. In the time frame of Resnick and Schwarz’s story scientists were less successful against HIV than COVID because (a) they had less of an investigative armoury (b) the virus appeared to be lethal and (c) it seemed at first to affect only certain groups (i.e. gay men, which blunted the initial level of concern).

2. The full title given on the opening page of McDaid’s story is Jigoku No Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse). Google translates the title as “Book of Revelation”.

3. The Wikipedia page on the 1993 Waco siege.  ●

Summary:
There are two strong novellas in this issue, A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (which is particularly good) and The Realms of Water by Robert Reed. Otherwise, this is a poor issue with all the remaining fiction average or worse, and the non-fiction columns quite boring (even Norman Spinrad’s On Books is duller than usual).
[ISFDB link] [Asimov’s SF, Amazon UK/USA]

Other reviews:
Rich Horton, Locus #721, February 2021
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
A Rocket for Dimitrios • novella by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗+
The Fear of Missing Out • short story by Robert H. Cloake ∗∗+
No Stone Unturned • novelette by Nick Wolven ∗
The Three-Day Hunt • short story by Robert R. Chase ∗∗
Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗
Hunches • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch –
Humans and Other People • short story by Sean William Swanwick ∗∗
Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery • novelette by Ted Kosmatka ∗
Mayor for Today • novelette by Fran Wilde ∗
I Didn’t Buy It • short story by Naomi Kanakia ∗
The Realms of Water • novella by Robert Reed ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Donato Giancola
A Magical Eire • editorial by Sheila Williams
One Hundred Years of Robots • essay by Robert Silverberg
Get It? • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Jane Yolen (2), Leslie J. Anderson, Robert Frazier, Avra Margariti
In Memoriam: Mike Resnick (1942-2020) • obituary by Sheila Williams
Next Issue
On Books: Out There • essay by Norman Spinrad
Thirty-Fifth Annual Readers’ Award
Index
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

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[All the story reviews have been previously posted on sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the thee dots ••• and the non-fiction reviews.]

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler is the second of his ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories,¹ and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a “terraplane” and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:

“So, you’re the girl that talks to dead people,” the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren’t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you’re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
“Sir, I’m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that’s what you mean.”
Maybe that would help him sort the word “girl” out of his speech.
He didn’t even blink.  p. 16

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as “The Fisherman”, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos’s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man’s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:

“There is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so—but we cannot be sure. We don’t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he’s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are”—he paused, considering his words—“compromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.”
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
“And then?”
“And then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.”
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man’s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains; then she sees him float in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her—something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read—and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos’s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer—as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character is (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, who reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos’s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I’ve read recently in Asimov’s) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer—and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants—and squeezed them into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won’t be.²
∗∗∗∗+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words.

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The Fear of Missing Out by Robert H. Cloake³ starts off intriguingly with a man called Candid meeting an attractive man on the way to a book club meeting. Rather than fumble a conversation (he later self-identifies as the “office loser”), he turns on his implanted auto-personality:

Candid turned on the software, and immediately his vision faded into a whitish haze. Only his overlays were visible.
When he had first tried the auto-personality in private, the sensory fade-out scared him. But he realized that the software couldn’t work if you were watching and analyzing the situation for yourself. You could play back what happened later, or, of course, turn it off at any time.
With all his senses muted except touch, he became acutely conscious of the texture of his seat and the cool metal of his buckle where his arm rested against it. He felt his mouth move, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then he felt his arm rise and do something, an unfamiliar gesture the auto-personality had chosen. He didn’t resist.  p. 43

Candid later discovers that his auto-personality has arranged a coffee date with the man, Barack, and he initially tries to deal with their next encounter on his own. However, after a fumble or two, he switches the auto-personality back on. Then, after leaving the coffee bar, they go somewhere else, and Candid briefly surfaces to find himself in a low-lit room. When Barack asks him if there is anything wrong he lets the auto-personality take over again, and after a while senses that they are having sex. This produces a good line:

And that was how Candid lost his virginity while unable to see, hear, smell, or taste anything.  p. 46

The rest of the piece sees Candid spend most of the following work day watching himself having sex (the software records what happens when it is active), and agonising about not being able to be himself in the relationship. When (spoiler) he finally manages to turn off the AP for a longer period he finds that the excitement of personal interaction with Barack is going to trigger his seizures. Ultimately, Candid decides that Barack deserves his AP and not him.
This is an interesting piece that, I guess, explores to what extent people suppress their real selves to be part of a couple, or to fit into society more generally. But I’m not sure that is writer’s intention: if it was he would probably have ended the story at the “it was the only adult, loving choice to make” line, and not continued on with a final two paragraphs where Candid experiences as much of the real world as he can before he once more visits Barack’s apartment. If I have got this broadly correct, then moving the “loving choice” sentiment to the very end of the piece would be the better option.
So, in conclusion, a thought-provoking piece but perhaps not an entirely successful one.
∗∗+ (Average to good, and probably a minor revision away from the latter). 3700 words.

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No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven jettisons his (more usual, in my experience) breezy, lightweight approach in a more serious piece that starts with Martin coming back to his automated “HappyHome” to find his partner has left his son to run wild, with toys and dishes and mess everywhere. After he finds his son in bed asleep, Martin goes outside to find his wife Anna, who is having some sort of breakdown or dissociative episode in the communal reflecting pond.
Martin is later contacted by a man called Daniel, who says he can explain what has happened to his wife. When they meet he suggests that Anna has become “decohesive”—a result of her being a “Leaper” one of the first astronauts to use a quantum matter transmission device to explore the Galaxy.
The rest of the story sees a physicist called Lina from the LEAP program turn up, and Anna have further episodes where she forgets to pick up the child from nursery, or leaves him in the car, etc. Then Martin and Daniel meet again, and we get more of Daniel’s outsider hand-wavium about the LEAP process. He finally explains that that it doesn’t account for the “chaos” of the human mind when scanning a subject for quantum transmission, causing personality changes in those transported.
The final scene (spoiler) has Martin return home to find Lina the physicist there again, and to be told that Anna has decided to go back out again because she wants to be among the stars.
I found this dull, unengaging stuff, partly because of the makey-up science (shoving “quantum” and “chaos” in there does not make the hand-wavium believable), and partly because I just didn’t care about Anna, who seems to spend most of her time pretentiously staring at the stars or reflections of them in water (I exaggerate, but that’s what it felt like).
∗ (Mediocre). 9,600 words.

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The Three-Day Hunt by Robert R. Chase starts with an Afghanistan veteran called Hammond going to investigate a flying saucer that has crashed near to his cabin in the woods. When he and Tripod, his three-legged dog, get to the craft the pilot is missing, so they start tracking it.
The rest of the story has the pair following the alien through the wood for the next couple of days, during which we get Hammond’s military and domestic backstory as well as the dog’s (their paths crossed in Afghanistan, just before a bomb went off and injured them both). Later, the military contact him by phone to try to get him to stop his pursuit, but Hammond ignores them and carries on.
Then (spoiler), when Hammond stops to treat the dog’s bleeding paws, he finally sees the alien. As Hammond approaches it, the alien gestures towards the dog—at which point the story dissolves into a mini-lecture about how humanity’s domestication and/or symbiosis with dogs makes it more likely that we will be able to successfully establish a relationship with aliens.
More a notion than a story, but okay, I suppose.
∗∗ (Average). 4900 words.

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Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer opens with Station Commander Ennie Niagara of Kenlon Station having dinner with the Ijt ambassador, an avian like alien. Niagara listens to the Ijt’s account of the previous commander’s fall from grace (a food related incident involving the serving of ghost peppers), and learns that his actions were designed to get rid of the Joxto, a troublesome race of aliens, from the station. The conversation closes with the ambassador’s news that the Joxto are on their way back.
Multiple plot elements and characters are then introduced into the story: two aliens, Qasi and Baxo, set off the fire alarms when they try the human custom of fondue (the latter creature is unknown to the rest of the station, and lurks in the air ducts); then a spaceship arrives with a Captain Vincente, who comes with official news of the Joxto’s imminent arrival; meanwhile, a body is found in engineering, which turns out to be the previous station commander . . . .
After this the stories trundles along while the investigation proceeds. More characters are introduced (two security officers, Mackie and Digby, as well as Dr Reed). There is an alien fruit ceremony that Ennie attends before later going to her office and finding a piece of fruit that Bako, the “ghost alien” has left there. Then Vincente gets news from Earth that there is an assassin on the station looking to kill the Joxto.
After the fruit left in the commander’s cabin is identified as a particularly delicious one from Tyfse, a planet destroyed previously by the warring Joxto and Okgono, this all eventually resolves (spoiler) in the station’s garden ring. There we find out that Fred the gardener is plotting with the remaining surviving Tyfsian to sell the fruit it has saved from its planet, in return for assisting it to kill both the Joxto and Okgono. The story closes with Ennie confronting both races about the genocide.
This is an okay story, I guess, but it’s plodding as its title, goes on too long, and generally felt like a dull ‘Sector General’⁴ story with trendy pronouns:

“That is because I have not yet added the [fondue] heat source,” Qasi said. “I wished to test my understanding of the processes and equipment, and also refine my selection of sauces, before I invite an entire party to participate in the experience. I will even invite the commander!”
“What is the heat source, though?” Bako asked. Ey rotated eir head upside down so ey could peer at the underside of the pot, long whiskers bent back. “Some sort of thermal pod?”
“No!” Qasi said, her long tail twitching behind her from the excitement. “This is the very best part.”
She pulled out a small metal can, took the lid off, and slipped it between the legs of the stand under the pot. Then she grasped the small pull-tab on the side between two claws and pulled.
Flame jetted out of the top of the can, engulfing the pot. Bako skittered away on all eir two dozen legs, screeching in alarm. “It’s supposed to be able to be modulated,” Qasi said, trying to get close enough to see without burning her own whiskers. “I probably should have read the instructions.”
“Fire!” Bako shouted. “You made a fire! On a space station! This was a terrible idea, Qasi!”  p. 79

I can see why you might use these pronouns for a human character, but why use them for a genderless alien instead of “they” or “their” or “its”? It’s an unnecessary distraction.
Another thing that irritated me by the end of the story was the continuous mention of food. There are numerous occasions where various characters are eating, and one of these, where a minor character is stuffing a burrito into his cakehole, just destroyed my suspension-of-disbelief. I thought, ‘They are still eating burritos on a distant space station hundreds of years from now?’
I also didn’t much care for the lazy contemporary dialogue and thoughts that the characters sometimes express. Apart from the likes of “Holy shit that’s good” and “crap ton of energy,” we also have twaddle like this:

The coffee machine was, in one of humanity’s oldest and most sacred covenants, fair game, with the caveat that if you finished the pot, you set it to make another.  p. 84

I usually look forward to Palmer’s work but this was disappointing.
∗∗ (Average, barely). 15,150 words.

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Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of her ‘Diving’ series, although a peripheral piece I think, and it starts in the wreckage of a spaceship bridge, with Lieutenant Jicha as the only survivor:

He watched it happen in real time, gloved hands gripping the console, the small fiery thing still glowing, as if it was waiting for the oxygen to return. The small fiery thing seemed to be gloating, its redness pulsing, taunting him.
He had watched it zoom inside, then burrow into the floor, not too far from his boots. The boots that had their gravity turned on, so he wouldn’t get pulled out of the bridge with the atmosphere, like so many others had.
But he had risked getting hit by that small and fiery thing, and somehow, it had missed him.  p. 102-103

There is then a long flashback (almost two pages of italics, so good luck to the dyslexics among you) where we learn about a group of alien “fireflies” surrounding the ship, and of Jicha’s hunches. These latter mean that most of the story development comes from him intuiting matters (which also means the author does massive amounts of telling rather than showing).
Jicha’s hunches include the realisation that the “small and fiery” thing is causing multiple system failures, and that he needs to get it out of the ship. By the end of the story he (spoiler) has managed to put it into a box and throw it out of the hole it made on the way in.
If this sounds a uselessly reductive description of the story, I can assure you it is not, and that most of the piece is spent in Jicha’s head watching him make guesses about what is going on. This produces a grossly padded sub-Star Trek story and one which, by the way, is partly written in an irritating telegraphic style:

He wasn’t on his own.
He opened a communications link to engineering. He identified himself, and then—the link cut out.
He re-established it, saw that they were trying to respond but seemingly were unable to.
Which meant they knew the problems existed; they just didn’t know what the problems were.
Communicating with them, though, wasn’t going to be dangerous. Not to them, not to him.
He just had to figure out how.
He glanced at that hole again, space glinting out there—or maybe the fireflies, the light. Surely engineering would notice that the nanobits weren’t functioning right.
But no one had come to the bridge yet. No one had come to see if anyone was alive here, or injured or in need of rescue.
Did they think everyone was dead?
He opened yet another screen on his console, saw the environmental system still trying to reboot and nothing else. He couldn’t see any locations of crew personnel.
That system was never supposed to fail and it had.
Or maybe the Izlovchi was going through cascading failures.  p. 107

– (Awful). 7,650 words.

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Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick⁵ opens with Mitchell and a robot called Simone (“Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir”) in a boat, with Mitchell diving down to a drowned Atlantic City Municipal Court to retrieve various documents. When he surfaces, Simone gives him news of an apartment fire. The pair are soon back on land and at the site of the blaze, where they manage to finagle matters so they are the only ones permitted to enter the “unsafe” building. This is followed by a meeting where they shake down the residents to get the salvage contract for their possessions.
The main part of the story (spoiler) sees the pair at work in the building, in which, the guard warns them, there may be an “anthroform” lurking. They soon find out that it is a robot when it physically attacks Mitchell and then Simone. During this episode they realise that it is made from standard parts, speaks Chinese, and its power levels are low (the only thing the creature says during the scuffle is that it has 6% power remaining). This encounter leads to more robots in the attic, where Mitchell gives them batteries and then rigs a solar panel to give them a permanent power supply. Then he and Simone leave.
The plot is by far the weakest part of this piece: not only is it relatively uncomplicated, but the idea of giving experimental robots of an unknown origin (one of whom has previously attacked you) a power supply and leaving them to it seems rather foolhardy. However, the story is fluently told, and there is a lively relationship between Mitchell and Simone that results in some sparky and/or quirky conversation. This isn’t limited to the exchanges between the pair however, as the apartment owners discover:

“No, wait, hold on,” said one of the interchangeable three. “So, we’re paying, what, you? And, er, your—” they paused, confused. “F. . . friend? Employee? The robot?” Simone turned a featureless head toward the speaker and said nothing. “And they’re going to help you retrieve things?”
“She is going to help.”
“Excuse me?”
“She is going to help.” Simone’s tone had grown clipped. “Not they. There is only me.”
The marks practically fell over one another in a confused torrent of explanation. “I thought robots were theys instead of its—” “You’re definitely displaying a gender neutral—” “Wait, is robot wrong? I’ve heard people saying Mobile Anthroform—”
Simone played an audio file of a sharp handclap as two sets of metal fingers came together, silencing the table. “No offense is taken,” Simone said. “If you find yourself struggling with the nomenclature, please feel free to ignore me completely.”
Mitch cursed inwardly—Simone had been getting worse and worse at handling the clients. In Pittsburgh, a recent argument about the nature of identity had ended with the clients never calling again.  p. 117

It is a mixed bag of a story, but a very promising debut: I look forward to further stories from this writer.
∗∗ (Average). 5,300 words.

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Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery by Ted Kosmatka starts off with a woman called Sarah arranging an encounter with a fan called Ames at a baseball match. She sits in the seat next to him after a supposed ticket mix-up (his girlfriend has been delayed by the rest of her team) and, after a certain amount of pretence and social chit-chat, she eventually introduces the idea of sabermetrics (statistical analysis of baseball results), and also that teams want particular fans—superfans—because they positively influence the outcome of their matches.
After this we see Sarah with her bosses, who quiz her about the suitability of Ames as a “candidate” and, later on, she arranges to bump into him. They go for a walk, and she tells him about her job:

“It works like this,” I say. “Most people are normal, but one out of a hundred is different. They have some kind of talent that’s hard to explain. For me it started in childhood—crippling shyness, the obligate side effect. I was sent to see specialists.
My parents thought it was therapy, but the specialists had their own ideas. In reality, they were conducting a search.”
“Search for what?”
“For children like me. Who could help them with people like you.” I glance at him.
“The real prospects.”
“So you’re saying I’m one of these prospects?”
“That you are. A certified, top-tier, can’t-miss prospect, and no going back now. But don’t blame me; it was the spreadsheet cowboys who found you. I just gave the final nod.”
The Walk sign flashes and we cross the intersection.
“Found me how?”  p. 130

She goes on to tell him more about the world of “shies,” “ply-mouths,” “daykeeps” and “latents.” And of “prospects,” fans like him whose luck rubs off on the teams.
The rest of the story shows us a draft meeting where Ames is discussed by various corporate types and sold to a team in Texas (all of this without his attendance or knowledge). We also see Sarah telling Ames of a much wider conspiracy that involves the drafting of people into various other jobs (valets, blackjack dealers, cashiers, Uber drivers, etc.), which may be in locations they do not want to live (there is also a crack about only untalented people being allowed to become bankers and lawyers). She finally advises him that when he gets an upcoming job offer he should accept it—or he will experience unpleasant consequences.
The story ends (spoiler) with Ames missing the flight to his new job, and Sarah tracking him down and telling him she wants him to help her fight the system.
This is a readable enough story but I wasn’t convinced by the Sabermetric conspiracy gimmick, and I’m not that interested in baseball stories (or the author’s infatuation with “knuckle ball throwers”). Finally, I’m getting a bit bored of stories with simplistic anti-capitalist subtexts, most of which never amount to much beyond conspiracies and/or smash the system endings.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,250 words.

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Mayor for Today by Fran Wilde⁶ begins with its narrator, Victor, being offered the job of Mayor of Danzhai in China, but only for one day. His GigTime app tells him that the job is well paid and includes travel and accommodation so, as Victor needs the money, he accepts.
After half a dozen pages of setup (we learn a lot about the future gig economy and Victor’s financial and life circumstances) he finally arrives in Danzhai and joins a queue at the municipal office to sign on for the job, only to find a massive queue of mayors-for-a-day. It then materialises that one of the previous mayors has refused to quit and, as the other mayors subsequently can’t sign on and complete their jobs, the GigTime app won’t give them their tickets and visas to fly home. So they are all stranded in Danzhai. Then, after his second night there, Victor ends up in the same situation when he loses his room at the hotel and has to share with a group of the other mayors.
The remainder of the story shows us the economic and social ecosystem that has evolved around the hundreds of stranded mayors, and there are also a few set pieces as well: drone footage of their plight appears on the news, Victor meets the incumbent Mayor and discovers he is an alien, and so on. Eventually (spoiler) Victor and the others manage to trick the alien Mayor into planting a tree, which completes his job and also that of all the others.
There is the seed of a half-decent story here but this takes far too long to get going (Ron Goulart would have got to the queue of mayors in about 800 words, not six pages), and making the trouble-making mayor an alien is over-egging the pudding. It also has an overlong and weak ending. I struggled to finish this, which is not surprising given that it is a 6,000 word story crammed into 10,000.
I’d also add that this latter aspect of the story seems fairly typical of the current generation of writers, who seem incapable of writing concisely or pacing a story, and who think that endless prattle about the character’s job or personal concerns will be of obvious interest to readers. Personally, I’m not interested in thinly veiled descriptions of the writer or their friends’ problems with the gig time economy, student loans, housing or other family and domestic trivia. When did SF become about this?
∗ (Mediocre). 9,900 words.

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I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia starts with an android called Reznikov being abused by his female owner until a friend of hers calls the police and she is arrested. After this Reznikov rips out his transponder and lives wild until he meets another woman and starts living with her. The rest of the story details their relationship (and the woman’s reservations about him) until they eventually have children—at which point the “story” grinds to a halt.
This story is similar to the kind of work you find on Tor.com (I suspect Reznikov is a metaphor for a certain type of emotionally shutdown man) and it has MFA/writer’s workshop stamped all over it. Apart from the fact there is little in the way of structure or an arc, I could have done without the omniscient author comments, e.g. “This is a story about a creature that was incapable of telling stories about itself.”
∗ (Mediocre). 2,850 words.

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The Realms of Water by Robert Reed is part of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled off into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words.

•••

The non-fiction in this issue just adds to the general feel of mediocrity. The Cover by Donato Giancola is a dark piece, and the little light there is consists mostly of a blurry face—hardly the kind of thing that is going to grab you on the newsstand. That said, any artist would struggle to produce a decent cover for Asimov’s given their propensity for carpet-bombing the artwork with type—as, once again, they do here.
A Magical Eire by Sheila Williams provides an account of her pre-Wordcon tour of Ireland in 2019; Robert Silverberg contributes One Hundred Years of Robots, an essay cum dull Wikipedia article about the hundredth anniversary of the word ‘robot’; and Get It? by James Patrick Kelly sees him trail round the internet once again, this time looking at SF humour. Even On Books: Out There by Norman Spinrad is uncharacteristically dull this issue, and sees him vexed about the “rubber science” of faster-than-light travel (personally I could care less). After the introduction bemoaning the use of this in fiction he goes on to an examination of Transformation by James Gunn, Relic by Alan Dean Foster, and The Death of the Universe by Brandon Q. Morris (if I recall correctly—it was some time ago and I omitted to make notes—the  very long lived people/immortals of the latter novel and their travels around the universe impressed Spinrad the most).
There is also Poetry in this issue from Jane Yolen (two items), Leslie J. Anderson, Robert Frazier, and Avra Margariti (none of which, as per usual, particularly grabbed me); In Memoriam: Mike Resnick (1942-2020) is a short but heart-felt obituary by Sheila Williams; Next Issue plugs a new Greg Egan novella, as well as another few well-known names (Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelly, etc.); and there is the annual Thirty-Fifth Annual Readers’ Award and Index, and the usual SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss.

•••

But for the two strong novellas, this would be a poor issue. In particular the columns seem very tired (Silverberg seems to be scraping the barrel for ideas, and Kelly’s column might have been useful in 1998, but I fail to see the point of it now). I suspect what we have here is an editor who is unwilling to knife those aspects of the magazine that have outlived their usefulness.  ●

_____________________

1. The first published story of Ray Nayler’s ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ series is The Disintergration Loops (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios first.

2. The Nayler probably won’t be on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn’t available free online. And because it is also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books (and book voters outnumber short fiction voters). Among other things.

3. If I was editing the magazine I’m not sure I’d include this reading-desire killing sentence in the introduction to the Cloake story:

With a background in academic philosophy, he uses his fiction to explore the ethical and ontological problems of truth, human personhood, and aesthetic value. p. 43

4. The ‘Sector General’ series, by James White, were stories about a hospital in space which treated different types of aliens. There is a list on ISFDB—read those instead.

5. The introduction to the Swanwick story mentions Gardner Dozois (whose office manager the author was) shaking a baby toy at him when Swanwick was an infant, so I presume the author is the son of Michael Swanwick.

6. There is this under the title of Fran Wilde’s story: “The author acknowledges the support of the Future Affairs Administration, Danzhai SF Camp, and Wanda Group.” Do we really need mini-Oscar acceptance speeches at the start of stories?  ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gardner Dozois, Locus
Rich Horton, Locus
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Stephanie Wexler, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine • novelette by Greg Egan ∗∗∗+
Confessions of a Con Girl • short story by Nick Wolven ∗∗∗+
In Dublin, Fair City • novelette by Rick Wilber ∗∗+
The Last Dance • short story by Jack McDevitt
And No Torment Shall Touch Them • short story by James Patrick Kelly ∗
Timewalking • short story by Michael Cassutt ∗∗
Skipped • short story by Emily Taylor ∗
Afloat Above a Floor of Stars • short story by Tom Purdom ∗∗
Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ∗∗
Nine Lattices of Sargasso • novelette by Jason Sanford ∗∗∗
Operators • short story by Joel Richards ∗∗∗
The Nanny Bubble • short story by Norman Spinrad ∗∗∗
I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land • novella by Connie Willis ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Eldar Zakirov
Excelsior! • editorial by Sheila Williams
Gog and Magog • essay by Robert Silverberg
Time Party • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Jennifer Crow, Robert Frazier, Ken Poyner, G. O. Clark, Jane Yolen (2), H. Mellas
Next Issue
On Books • by Peter Heck
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine by Greg Egan gets off to a cracking start with a call centre employee making a debt consolidation call using an “out stream avatar” (software that alters the callers appearance to appeal to the prospective client). Then someone calls him:

When Dan came back from his break, the computer sensed his presence and woke. He’d barely put on his headset when a window opened and a woman he’d never seen before addressed him in a briskly pleasant tone.
“Good afternoon, Dan.”
“Good afternoon.”
“I’m calling you on behalf of Human Resources. I need to ask you to empty your cubicle. Make sure you take everything now, because once you’ve left the floor, you won’t have an opportunity to return.”
Dan hesitated, trying to decide if the call could be a prank. But there was a padlock icon next to the address, ruth_bayer@HR.thriftocracy.com, which implied an authenticated connection.
“I’ve been over-target every week this quarter!” he protested.
“And your bonuses have reflected that,” Ms. Bayer replied smoothly. “We’re grateful for your service, Dan, but you’ll understand that as circumstances change, we need to fine-tune our assets to maintain an optimal fit.”
Before he could reply, she delivered a parting smile and terminated the connection. And before he could call back, all the application windows on his screen closed, and the system logged him out.
Dan sat motionless for ten or fifteen seconds, but then sheer habit snapped him out of it: if the screen was blank, it was time to leave. He pulled his gym bag out from under the desk, unzipped it, and slid the three framed photos in next to his towel. The company could keep his plants, or throw them out; he didn’t care. As he walked down the aisle between the cubicles, he kept his eyes fixed on the carpet; his colleagues were busy, and he didn’t want to embarrass them with the task of finding the right words to mark his departure in the twenty or thirty seconds they could spare before they’d be docked. He felt his face flushing, recalling the time a year or so ago when a man he’d barely known had left in tears. Dan had rolled his eyes and thought: What did you expect? A farewell party? An engraved fountain pen?
As he waited for the elevator, he contemplated taking a trip to the seventh floor to demand an explanation. It made no sense to let him go when his KPIs weren’t just solid, they’d been trending upward. There must have been a mistake.
The doors opened and he stepped into the elevator. “Seven,” he grunted.
“Ground floor,” the elevator replied.
“Seven” Dan repeated emphatically.
The doors closed, and the elevator descended. p. 15-16

The rest of the story details Dan’s unemployment and examines the financial and social implications of advanced technology and software replacing humans in the workforce. There are a number of witty passages that match the one above.
Confessions of a Con Girl by Nick Wolven is an interesting piece that extrapolates the ‘like’ culture of today into the academic world of the near future. This one is in the form of a written essay by Sophie Lee, a young woman at college who originally had so many ‘pro’ votes (likes) that she had a dark green ‘holoscore’. However, after a number of problematical social interactions, her score goes light green and then yellow (not so good). This is an example of one of those, involving her ‘friend’ Roman:

This was when we were hanging out in his room almost every night, eating pizza and talking about Roman’s feelings. And that was where we were one Saturday night, when Roman suddenly got a funny look. Now by this time, confessedly, my Pro/Con Holistic Score was not so green as previous. I had brought Roman to several events with my peer network, where he experienced issues related to inappropriate touching. So I was beginning to be conflicted about the friendship. Also, it may be that my sensitivity, though usually high, was not so high as ordinarily. In any event, when Roman did what he did, I reacted uncharacteristically, which I mean, by getting scared and kicking him in the face.
These are the words Roman said to me, that night, which I quote here not to be adverse, but only in the spirit of veracity.
“B***h, what the F**k? Crazy t**t, you come here every night, playing on me, then I finally get the balls to make a move, you shoot me down? Seriously? Mother f **king c**k teasing c**t.”
As noted, I have set all this down not to cause hurt, but because it is in fact what Roman said to me.
But the upshot is, after this incident, my Pro/Con Holistic Score took a gigantic hit.
And it was because Roman kept giving me Con votes! I tried to engage with him constructively about it, but he only told me I had “played him,” and how the worst thing a girl can do to a guy is give him those kinds of mixed signals. Then he told other guys I had “set him up,” and they all gave me Con votes, too! So I was receiving Con votes every day, and this, plus a few other, unrelated factors, was, as people say, “the perfect storm,” which made my holoscore begin to drop. p. 39

She is later interviewed by her Learning Process Adviser, Mr Barraine, and assumes that it is about her falling holoscore. However, he tells her that (spoiler) she has also been failing academically—among other things she has been empathising with the wrong characters in her English course texts—and, because of her poor empathic skills, will not be permitted to graduate.
There is an emotional and ironic final scene from her childhood that undermines the college’s assessment of her empathic abilities.
This is one that grew on me after I finished it, and one I will have to read again.
This piece is followed, like most in this 40^th anniversary year issue, by a longish afterword which references a parent’s collection of Asimov’s Science Fiction.
In Dublin, Fair City by Rick Wilber is the third of his ‘Moe Berg’ stories, about a baseball player turned OSS operative in an alternate world where the Nazis have invaded England, and the Japanese San Diego. In this one he goes to Eire to pick up a defecting Professor Heisenberg. The story is itself is relatively straightforward but improves towards the end, partly because of a (spoiler) gloomy and scary climax.
There are a couple of things that I didn’t like about this though, minor stuff which, if revised, would have bumped it up to three stars. First off, the alternate world building isn’t entirely convincing—at the very start there is a mix of Spitfires, Gloster Meteors, and Me262s in the air over a 1940 Dublin. Now the latter two aircraft weren’t in operation until mid-1944 in our world and, if you know this (and I concede most people won’t), it crashes your mental gears. If you are going to introduce specific points of difference like this in a parallel world story I’m not sure the opening paragraphs are the place. Even more unconvincing is an Irish Free State where the British have kept control of the ports and Dublin—the city and the area around it is called ‘The Pale’¹ (this has some historical basis but nonetheless does not ring true). There are other shortcomings too: the woman who Moe teams up with is a mysterious and unrealistically shadowy character; another irritation is Wilber’s habit of telling us what Irish words mean when it is obvious:

Two minutes left, so Moe tipped the doorman, walked into the lobby, found the gents—the door said “Fir” on it, Irish for “Men”—and he walked in, set the briefcase on the counter next to him, and washed his face and hands to make himself presentable. p. 57

You could lose the “Irish for ‘Men’”, don’t you think?
Wilber’s afterword has this touching note:

My other major interest in writing revolves around baseball, where I’ve enjoyed a great deal more success as a writer than I ever did as a player, though I had a terrific personal coach to teach me the game. My father, Del Wilber, played for the Cardinals, Red Sox, and Phillies and later managed in the minor-leagues for many years. He died some years ago, but I can still hear his voice coaching me as I write about the game. At least eight of my stories in Asimov’s have had baseball as a significant element. p. 67

The Last Dance by Jack McDevitt has a widower called Ethan get an AI holo-replica of his wife a year and a half after she has died in a car crash. He spends some time getting accustomed to her before she is introduced to their daughter. Up until this point the story was okay, although the idea did not particularly convince me, but from then on it goes rapidly downhill. The holo goes from saying it is Olivia and that he should trust it, to pressuring Ethan to date other woman and move on with his life. There is an irritating last line that turns it from a mediocre story into a gimmick.
And No Torment Shall Touch Them by James Patrick Kelly begins at a funeral. A teenager called Carli is attending along with a hologram (another one) of his ‘uploaded’, and troublesome, grandfather. The rest of the story covers Carly’s relationship with a slightly older guy called Lucius. There are sections from his point of view as well as Carli’s mother and the female priest.
All of this comes over as literary family soap opera/slice-of-life, and I found it quite boring.
Oh yes, there is a warning before the story about a brief sex scene (which turns out to be a gay one between Carli and Lucius).
Timewalking by Michael Cassutt is about a man in his sixties called James who is receiving treatment for sleepwalking. Towards to the end of one session, his therapist starts talking about time-travel, and how his various selves may be trying to pass information to each other. James loses his patience with the therapist and leaves.
The other thread in this concerns James’s partnership with a coder called Pham in a company called May Cay. The company is a start-up that is developing ‘vineware’, silicon-carbon plant material. These two threads soon merge as James and Pham consider two separate takeover offers for their business.
This is well done up until the irritating ending, which spoils it, and does not convince.
Skipped by Emily Taylor is essentially the same kind of angsty relationship material as the Kelly. A woman on a moon transport ‘skips’ to another universe and finds herself sitting opposite a man she doesn’t know. In this reality the man is her ‘husband’; her ‘daughter’ is sitting beside her. The story alternates scenes between this reality and flashbacks from her own universe, and the familial, relationship, and environmental differences between the two.

“What were you doing on the transport?” he whispered.
“Going to give a presentation. I work in plants. In growing. Does she?”
“She does,” he said. “But we were off to take our daughter for a picnic in the grassland.”
“That sounds nice,” I said. We didn’t have a grassland in our universe. What a lovely idea. I imagined stretching out, toes in dirt, just as I had in my faintest childhood memories. It would not be an efficient use of station space, but I could see that in this universe, they had made concessions to beauty. p. 103

At the end (spoiler) she reports to the authorities so she can return to her own universe.
This one is essentially dystopian/relationship navel-gazing—and not my cup of tea.
Afloat Above a Floor of Stars by Tom Purdom takes place on board an FTL starship in the near future. A man, Revali, and woman, Kemen, are on a mission to travel for thirty eight years to a point above the Galaxy, where they will then record the event for humanity.
The first part involves a lot of rather dull gender stuff as they alternately adopt altered personas to make themselves more attractive/palatable to the other; this is backed up with talk about humanity splitting into two different species:

Kemen was a confirmed Montalist. The splintering of the human race was inevitable, in her opinion. It might take several centuries, but the process couldn’t be stopped now that it had started. There was no way legacy humans like Revali could build a society both sexes would find acceptable. The men and women who had created the first compatible companions had done something irresistible. The splintering of the human species had become inevitable the moment humans had learned to shape their genes and personalities.
[. . .]
“We may always have some legacies around,” Kemen said. “Little isolated pockets. But you can’t deny your population is shrinking. Every time one of your people defects, one of the other groups gains. Eventually, we’ll have two species—men with the kind of women men seem to have always wanted, and women partnered with the kind of men women need.” p. 110

The second part is more interesting because they start arguing (and perhaps behave more like a normal couple!) about the ceremony that they have agreed to undertake when they EVA:

Kemen started talking about the ceremony in the middle of the fourth tenday. She brought it up, he noticed, after a sexual interlude in her quarters, while he was eyeing the ship’s latest lunch suggestions.
“I’ve been thinking about the ceremony,” Kemen said. “Is it really something we have to do?”
Benduin Desha had handed him her all-important addition to his funding with two requirements attached. He had to make the trip with someone from another branch and the two of them had to hover over the galaxy, hold hands, and make a statement about the basic unity of mankind.
We are still one species, Benduin Desha had said. Faced with the immensity of the galaxy—seeing it spread out before you—you should see how small we are. That we must stay together. p. 112

Kemen later decides she will not go through with this and that is when the trouble starts.
The story has a cosmic ending that puts all this into perspective.
The ninety-three year old (!) James Gunn returns with another of his ‘Transcendental’ series, Love and Death and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story This one has Kom, an alien, find Sam, a human, in hibernation in a small spacecraft while he is visiting locality of the star that shall not be named. Kom resuscitates him, and the rest of the story details their conversations, which are mostly about Kom’s home world, birth, and life.
This is traditional old-school SF, which makes it something of an outlier in the magazine, and also a non-story, which doesn’t.
Nine Lattices of Sargasso by Jason Sanford takes place on a floating island in the Saragossa Swirl run by a woman called Lady Faye. Her island is made from nanotube mesh salvaged from the collapse of the Space Elevator, and it has robot spiders collecting the plastic rubbish that becomes tangled in the material. The destruction of the Space Elevator was one of the events that were part of a greater Crash of high-tech equipment caused by a newly sentient AI.
The story itself unfolds as separate ‘memory lattices’ uploaded by the teenage female narrator called Amali, and there are two main narrative strands; the first consists of flashbacks of Amali and her brothers abandoning a ship packed with refugees and the three months they spent on the lifeboat (during which time their mother died) before they washed up on Lady Faye’s island; the second concerns gene-mod ships run by pirates, and one of their progeny, Mareena, who washes up on the island years after Amali and her brothers did.
These elements are competently marshalled to conclusion but I found the story a bit of a plod nonetheless (whether this was me or the story I’m not sure). I think this may have been because it was initially hard to get into; there are also one or two things that don’t entirely convince (I can see why Lady Faye wants (spoiler) rid of Amali to protect to avoid being exposed as a gene-mod pirate, but why would she specifically want a memory of her being eaten alive by the sea monster? Moreover, that whole sea monster eating people thing is at odds with the Russian captain’s general demeanour.) It may also be that this story, like the previous one I read by this writer, is slightly too long and needs editing to improve the pacing.
Sanford also contributes an afterward (more interesting than most) about his grandfather’s SF collection, his time in Thailand with the Peace Corps, and how he showed copies of Asimov’s to his kids.
Operators by Joel Richards is set in the near-future, and concerns the occasional hijackings of self-driving trucks. Barry Connors, a trucker turned private investigator, is hired to sort the problem out.  Matters play out in a refreshingly low-key but correspondingly realistic manner, and touch on the social and economic disruption that future automation may bring.
The Nanny Bubble by Norman Spinrad² is about Teddy, a cocooned child in the near-future who is apparently being given behaviour modifying drugs to make him content with his protective, partially-VR existence. Then one day he sees a group of older kids playing a pickup game of baseball on the wrong side of town. The difference between their game and the VR Little League ones he plays fascinates him. First he stops taking his pills, and then one day he turns off his phone (and GPS tracking) and cycles over to the field. After the older boys pick their teams, one of them is a man short:

And Ted saw his chance.
He trotted up to that captain, a big black guy with dreads, maybe as much as sixteen years old.
“I can play, and I’ve got my glove,” he announced to laughter from both teams.
“I’m at least as good as most of what I’ve seen here.”
“Oh yeah, Little Leaguer?”
“I’m a cleanup power-hitting centerfielder, and I lead the league in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average,” Ted boasted truthfully.
“Is that so, Mr. Little League MVP?” said Captain Dreadlocks.
“Yes it is, you could look it up on the league website. The name is Ted Smithson.”
The blond-haired captain of the full nine player team glanced at Captain Dreadlocks. ‘You got a better idea, Robbie?”
Robbie looked back at him, shrugged, then spoke to Ted. “Do I insult you by telling you you bat ninth and play right field, Mr. Power-Hitting Centerfielder?”
“I can deal with it,” Ted told him. “It’s a chance to show you what I can do.” And show myself too, he told himself.
And so he did. p. 164

Pleasant enough but minor.
I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land by Connie Willis³ starts with a blogger called James in NY for a series of meetings with prospective publishers talking on the telephone with his agent about a disasterous radio interview he has just done:

I was in New York doing publicity for my blog, Gone for Good, and meeting with editors about publishing it as a book when I found the bookstore.
I’d just finished doing an interview on Backtalk on WMNH, and Brooke had called to tell me the editor at Random House I was supposed to meet with canceled our one-thirty appointment.
“Probably because he heard that train wreck of an interview and doesn’t want Random House’s name connected with a book-hater,” I said, going outside. “Why the hell didn’t you warn me I was walking into a set-up, Brooke? You’re my agent. You’re supposed to protect me from stuff like that.”
“I didn’t know it was a set-up, I swear, Jim,” she said. “When he booked you, he told me he loved your blog, and that he felt exactly like you do, that being nostalgic for things that have disappeared is ridiculous, and that we’re better off without things like payphones and VHS tapes.”
“But not books, apparently,” I said. The host hadn’t even let me get the name of my website out before he’d started in on how terrible e-books and Amazon were and how they were destroying the independent bookstore.
“Do you know how many bookstores have gone under the last five years in Manhattan?” he’d demanded.
Yeah, and most of them deserved to, I thought.
I hadn’t said that. I’d said, “Things closing and dying out and disappearing are part of the natural order. There’s no need to mourn them.”
“No need to mourn them? So it’s fine with you if a legendary bookstore like the Strand, or Elliott’s, shuts its doors? I suppose it’s fine with you if books die out, too.”
“They’re not dying out,” I said, “but if they were, yes, because it would mean that society didn’t need them any more, just like it stopped needing buggy whips and elevator operators, so it shed them, just like a snake sheds its skin.”
He snorted in derision. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Necessary things disappear every day. And what about all the things we don’t realize are necessary till they’re already gone?”
“Then society brings them back. Like LPs. And fountain pens.”
“And what if we can’t bring the thing back? What if it’s too late, and it’s already gone?”
Like the chance to have a decent interview, you mean? I thought. p. 169

His agent tells him that one of his later appointments is cancelled and he finds himself with a couple of hours to kill. So, he wanders about the city and, when the weather turns particularly inclement, he dives into an antiquarian bookshop to get out of the rain:

The old-fashioned kind of bookstore about a foot and a half wide, with dusty copies of some leather-bound tome in the front window, and “Ozymandias Books” lettered in gilded copperplate on the glass.
These tiny hole-in-the-wall bookstores are a nearly extinct breed these days, what with the depredations of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Kindle, and this one looked like the guy on WMNH would be ranting about its closing on his next program. The dust on the display of books in the window was at least half an inch thick, and from the tarnished-looking brass doorknob and the pile of last fall’s leaves against the door, it didn’t look like anybody’d been in the place for months. But any port in a storm. And this might be my last chance to visit a bookstore like this.
The inside was exactly what you’d expect: an old-fashioned wooden desk and behind it, ceiling-high shelves crammed with books stretching back into the dimness.
The store was only wide enough for a bookcase along each wall, one in the middle, and a space between just wide enough for a single customer to stand. If there’d been any customers. Which there weren’t. The only thing in the place besides the guy sitting hunched over the desk—presumably the owner—was a gray tiger cat curled up in one corner of it.
The rest of the desk was piled high with books, and the stooped guy seated at it had gray hair and spectacles and wore a ratty cardigan sweater and a 1940’s tie. All he needed was one of those green eyeshades to be something straight out of 84 Charing Cross Road.
He was busily writing in a ledger when I came in, and I wondered if he’d even look up, but he did, adjusting his spectacles on his nose. “May I help you, sir?” he said.
“You deal in rare books?” I asked.
“Rarer than rare.” p. 170-171

James starts to browse the shelves and finds a vast assortment of books that do not appear ordered in any coherent way. Shortly after he has started looking, a woman walks past him and a conversation between her and the man at the front of the shop intrigues him, so much so that he later follows her through the staff door. Several flights of stairs eventually lead him down into a huge cavernous space with innumerable shelves of books. He sees some of the employees talking to the woman and, when he is eventually discovered, the woman is nonplussed and offers him a tour of the premises.
As they are walking through the stacks, the woman explains that they obtain copies of books that would no longer exist if they did not acquire them. Jim is puzzled at how they can know a  book is the last of its kind and, more practically, how any organisation can afford multiple such rare items. Matters appear even more peculiar when the shelving system becomes clear to him:

I looked at the books as we passed. Most of the sections had only two or three books, and Yancey Creek had just one, which was, fittingly enough, Noah’s Ark on Ararat.
It didn’t have any signs of water damage I could see, and neither did any of the other books, which meant they had to have been subject to some kind of advanced salvage technique.
I revised my theory of eccentric millionaire up to billionaire. Technologies to salvage waterlogged books cost big money. I’d researched the big 1966 flood of the Arno that had destroyed Florence’s National Library in connection with a pro-digitizing post I’d written. Their vacuum freeze-drying and other book-salvaging equipment had been wildly expensive.
Or maybe these were just the few that hadn’t gotten soaked.
“Flash floods,” Cassie said. “Sheffield; Big Thompson; Rapid City, South Dakota; Fort Collins, Colorado.” She paused a moment to indicate a shelf of books. “That one was particularly bad because the university library was being remodeled and all the Colorado history books and doctoral dissertations had been moved to the basement.”
Which explained why the books all had titles like Irrigation Techniques in Use in Dryland Farming and The Narrow Gauge Railroad in the Rocky Mountains from 1871-1888.
“Landslides,” Cassie said, still walking, not even glancing at the bookmarks as she passed, “mudslides, sinkholes.”
Shelving the books this way, by the agent of their almost-demise, was crazy, but it certainly highlighted the dangers facing books. Just like a nature preserve putting up signs telling what had decimated the particular species: poaching, acid rain, loss of habitat, pesticides. p. 178-179

Later on in this extended tour he gets a call from his agent saying his appointment is back on, and soon. As he is a long way from where he came into the store, the woman helpfully leads him to an elevator that takes him back to the surface. Because he is in so much of a rush, he does not note his location before leaving in a taxi.
A few days later, and after research that provides some surprising information, he tries to find the shop again . . . .
What is especially neat about this story is how it eventually loops back around to the radio interview discussion and (spoiler) has Jim (as I did) completely change his mind about book extinction.
This is a very readable meditation on the value of each individual book and why they should be preserved; it will especially appeal to bibliophiles.

The Cover, for Connie Willis’s story is a pleasant piece by Eldar Zakirov, an artist I’ve never heard of before.
Excelsior! by Sheila Williams is an editorial roundup of various Asimov’s events that have taken place in its fortieth anniversary year.
Gog and Magog by Robert Silverberg begins with a couple of paragraphs on Game of Thrones before becoming another History Today piece, this time about ancient/mythical walls and the tribes beyond them.
Time Party by James Patrick Kelly is his hundredth ‘Net’ column for the magazine, and has discussion and web links on the theme of time travel.
On Books by Peter Heck reviews several books by people I’ve actually heard of (unlike Charles de Lint at F&SF), and these include new novels by Norman Spinrad, Peter S. Beagle, and China Miéville, and a associational book of interviews by Robert Silverberg & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. I have the last two already and managed not to impulse buy the others, which sound pretty good.
There is Poetry by Jennifer Crow, Robert Frazier, Ken Poyner, G. O. Clark, Jane Yolen, and H. Mellas (the Frazier and Mellas are okay), and the usual Next Issue and SF Conventional Calendar pages.

The usual mixed bag of an issue. ●

_____________________

1. ‘The Pale’ page at Wikipedia.

2. The introduction to Spinrad’s story has this mangled information:

He tells us inspiration for his latest tale came from England, which is called the Nanny State, and the ubiquitous cameras that are aimed at non-consenting adults. “Now non-consenting kids are more and more surrounded by the Nanny Bubble of controlling adults even when they just want to play their own pick-up games….” p. 160.

I don’t want to sound like a Scotsman/Welshman/Irishman with a chip on his shoulder, but “England” is not synonymous with “the United Kingdom” or “Britain”. Secondly, people don’t call England (or Britain) the “Nanny State”—they may assert that it is one, but that is a different thing: I’ve yet to hear anyone say, “I’m flying down to London and then we are going to motor around the south of Nanny State for a week.”

3. For what it is worth, half way down p. 190 in Willis’s story these two sentences are, unintentionally I think, repeated:

Come on, the address had to be listed somewhere. I didn’t have time to walk all over Manhattan looking for it. p. 190

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies. ●

Revised 3rd May 2018 to give the Richards’ story its own review rather than a copy of the Cassutt! 

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Chuck Rothman, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
Wind Will Rove • novelette by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗∗
Riding the Blue Line with Jack Kerouac • short story by Sandra McDonald ∗∗∗
Universe Box • reprint novelette by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
First Contact • short story by Stuart Greenhouse
Dead Men in Central City • short story by Carrie Vaughn ∗∗
Arriving at Terminal: XI’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ∗∗
The Ganymede Gambit: Jan’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ∗∗∗
Zigeuner • short story by Harry Turtledove ∗∗
The Fourth Hill • short story by Dennis E. Staples ∗∗∗
The Cabinet • short story by William Preston ∗
An Incident in the Literary Life of Nathan Arkwright • short story by Allen Steele ∗∗
Squamous and Eldritch Get a Yard Sale Bargain • short story by Tim McDaniel ∗∗
Grand Theft Spacecraft • novelette by R. Garcia y Robertson ∗
Disturbance in the Produce Aisle • short story by Kit Reed ∗∗
Books of the Risen Sea • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Cynthia Sheppard
Thirty-First Annual Readers’ Awards’ Results • essay by Sheila Williams
Readers’ Award Winners
The Last Hittite essay by Robert Silverberg
Remembering Bertie • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by John Richard Trtek, Bethany Powell, Robert Frazier, Jane Yolen, Robert Borski, Leslie J. Anderson
Next Issue
On Books: Outside America • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

Wind Will Rove by Sarah Pinsker is about a history teacher on a generation spaceship who is a member of an old-time band (fiddles, guitars, etc.). There is one song, Wind Will Rove, that is particularly important to her, and an account of the song’s origins and its historical and current variants is used throughout the story as a metaphor, illustrating not only the fluidity of history but also the schism between those on the generation ship who think that Earth history is important and those who think it is no longer relevant. This latter conflict manifests itself in the story in two ways: one is is a disruptive pupil in the narrator’s history class; the other is repeated reference to a historical ‘Blackout’ on the ship, an event where all the ship’s media, literature, history, etc. data banks were wiped out.

This story is verifiable history. It begins, “There once was a man named Morne Brooks.” It’s used to scare children into doing their homework and paying attention in class. Nobody wants to be a cautionary tale.
There once was a man named Morne Brooks. In the fourth year on board, while performing a computer upgrade, he accidentally created a backdoor to the ship databases. Six years after that, an angry young programmer named Trevor Dube released a virus that ate several databases in their entirety. Destroyed the backups too. He didn’t touch the “important” systems—navigation, life support, medical, seed and gene banks—but he caused catastrophic damage to the libraries. Music gone. Literature, film, games, art, history: gone, gone, gone, gone. Virtual reality simulation banks, gone, along with the games and the trainings and the immersive recreations of places on Earth. He killed external communications too. We were alone, years earlier than we expected to be. Severed.
For some reason, it’s Brooks’ name attached to the disaster. Dube was locked up, but Brooks still walked around out in the community for people to point at and shame. Our slang term “brooked” came from his name. He spent years afterward listening to people say they had brooked exams and brooked relationships. I suppose it didn’t help that he had such a good name to lend. Old English, Dutch, German. A hard word for a lively stream of water. We have no use for it as a noun now; no brooks here. His shipmates still remembered brooks, though they’d never see one again. There was a verb form already, unrelated, but it had fallen from use. His contemporaries verbed him afresh. p. 20-21

This is an engrossing story not only about how history is important, but why newer generations do not necessarily value certain ideas or information in the same way or at all and, in any event, how that information may change as it passes down through the generations.
Riding the Blue Line with Jack Kerouac by Sandra McDonald is an atmospheric, elegiac piece about a train driver in Boston and the writer ghosts who hitch a ride in his cab: Dickens, Plath, Poe, Kerouac, etc. The driver is a Vietnam vet whose Vietnamese wife died in the conflict. One small point: I was more than halfway through the piece before realising that ‘Lieu’ was his wife and not his platoon lieutenant in Vietnam.
Universe Box by Michael Swanwick (Dragonstairs Press, 2016, but see below¹) is an original fantasy that tells of a cosmic thief who steals a very special box from an entity later identified as the Demiurge, who is effectively God’s assistant. After his escape the thief arrives on Earth in the persona of Uncle Paulie, and appears at the door of Howard, a nobody who is about to propose to his girlfriend Mimi. Paulie takes them to a top floor restaurant where he shows them the box he has stolen:

Uncle Paulie turned to Howard and Mimi and said, “I have something special to show you both.” He reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out an object that he solemnly placed on the table before him and patted with both hands. “There. What do you think?”
It was a cigar box.
Mimi clearly wasn’t about to say anything. So Howard cleared his throat. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Uncle Paulie, but I’m afraid I don’t smoke cigars.”
Uncle Paulie looked shocked. “This isn’t for you, child. No, no, no, I’m just going to let you see it.”
“Oh. Okay, I guess.”
Holding up a finger, Uncle Paulie made an owlish face and said, “Let me posit a question: What one thing does the world currently need most? Eh?”
“Um . . . love?” Howard ventured.
“World peace,” Mimi said firmly.
“Pah! I’m disappointed in you both. A good bottle of wine, of course!” Uncle Paulie flipped open the lid of the cigar box and reached within. “As you doubtless know, the very finest collection ever assembled was the legendary Wine Cellar of Alexandria. Destroyed in that dreadful fire, such a pity. But no matter. I’ll just have to dig deeper.” A puzzled look came over Uncle Paulie’s face as he reached within and further within and yet further indeed, until his arm had disappeared up to the shoulder. Then his expression cleared and, leaning back, he reeled in his arm, at the end of which was an unlabeled black glass bottle upon which were scratched archaic runes. “Ahh, Amarone della Lemuria! A ‘sea-dark wine, half as old as time,’ as that drunken sot Homer put it. There’s never been a plonk like it.”
Laughing, Mimi clapped her hands. Howard scowled and grumbled, “That’s quite a trick.” p. 46

After Howard tastes the wine he experiences an almost transcendent effect, and asks:

“What’s in there?” he gasped.
Howard meant in the wine. But misunderstanding him (whether intentionally or not, who could say?), Uncle Paulie held up the cigar box as if it were a window and opened the lid. “Everything you could desire: castles in the air, mountains on a plate, treasury bills, wisdom . . . you name it. Voluptuous goddesses, glass moons, methane seas. Dinosaurs, if that’s to your taste.
“Look.”
Howard looked. And beheld:
Endless clouds of diamond dust glittering on the deep, black velvet of infinity. Stars exploding above the frozen husks of sunless worlds. A herd of Paras aurolophus trumpeting and feeding in a grove of dawn redwoods. Wise machines drifting between galaxies, carrying in their bellies clusters of civilizations, each written on a silver disk smaller than a dime. A drunken Elizabethan poet singing and urinating from a third-story window. Nanowars being fought endlessly on the surface of a single mote of dust. A stray dog in Milwaukee gulping down a hamburger foraged from a dumpster. Trillions of integers, deep in the heart of an irrational number, pledging their love and obeisance to . . . p. 47

Later, and just before a wild orgy begins in the restaurant, Uncle Paulie asks Howard to hide the cigar box and then forget where he has put it.
The rest of the story involves the kidnapping of Mimi by an assassin working for the Demiurge—an attempt at pressuring Howard into revealing where he has put the box—and a series of meetings Howard has with a number of characters as he attempts get her back. The way he reaches these is quite novel:

Uncle Paulie thrust a rubber-banded bundle of calling cards at Howard. “Draw one at random.” Howard did. It read:

[Name Withheld]
Underpaid Minion to the Stars
by appointment only

An icy knife of wind ripped through his clothing, skin, flesh, bones. Howard found himself before a turreted stone building completely surrounded by dark forest. The night was so cold that it drove all thought of Mimi from his mind. Desperately, he hammered on the door.
A sound that could only be the flapping of great wings came from inside. Then silence. Then the door opened. The hatcheck girl from the Top of the Tooz looked down at him. “Oh,” she said. “You. Sorry. I’m busy. Cutting my toenails.”
She shut the door in his face.
Howard threw himself against the door, drumming on it with fists and forearms. “Please! Help me! I can pay! Anything that you want!”
The door opened again. “Define ‘anything,’” the hatcheck girl said.
Howard shoved past her and made straight for a baronial stone hearth in which crackled and roared a fire as big as the Renaissance. Stretching out frozen hands toward its glorious heat, he began to talk. Turning a backside so cold that it stung to face the fire, he continued. Until at last he had explained all, his body had rotated a dozen times before the blaze, and that terrible cold had retreated bone-deep within his flesh, to become a memory he doubted would ever go away. p. 53-54

For the most part, this comic and wildly fantastic story (the kind of thing you would find in a modern-day incarnation of Unknown) is of very good to excellent quality but, unfortunately,  the ending doesn’t match up to what has gone before. (Spoiler: Gloria the assassin lets Mimi go free without protest, which doesn’t make sense, and the reason that Paulie traps Shamkat in the box isn’t revealed either. Both these make for a sub-optimal ending.)
A flawed jewel.
First Contact by Stuart Greenhouse appears on the contents page as a poem, but it is really a half page vignette about an alien. It doesn’t make much sense.
Dead Men in Central City by Carrie Vaughn is about a vampire-like creature in the Wild West meeting Doc Holliday (the gambler/gunfighter/dentist friend of Wyatt Earp) and ultimately befriending him. Quite good until it peters out at the end.
There are two more sidebar stories from James Gunn’s Transcendental series in this issue: Arriving at Terminal: XI’s Story tells the story of Xi from his birth on Xifor, his perilous survival to adulthood, and his rise through the ranks to become an assistant to Xidan. He is finally selected as a representative to find the Transcendental machine. This one is rather condensed, open-ended, and overly similar to one of the stories from last issue, Weighty Matters: Tordor’s Story. Better is The Ganymede Gambit: Jan’s Story. This one is about a hollowed out asteroid that circles Ganymede, and the eight child clones that inhabit it. Their father has sent them there with a mission to terraform the planet, and the story is about how they try to do this. Along the way (spoiler) a number of them die, and the last three are later infected with an alien symbiote evolved from Ganymedean bacteria. Their father then tasks two of them to join the ship that is searching for the Transcendental machine. This an open-ended but interesting piece, and rather reads like a modern version of a super-science story from the 1930’s.
Zigeuner by Harry Turtledove is set in Hungary, and has an SS major and his men going to a gypsy encampment to round up the occupants for transportation. The alternate world twist comes at the end (spoiler) when the major talks to a German Army rabbi, and the latter comments that if history had unfolded differently they could be the ones being transported and not the gypsies. The story is persuasive, and you may be more convinced than I was by the twist.
The Fourth Hill by Dennis E. Staples is a bleak story about a fifteen year old boy on a Native American reservation whose drunken grandfather is dying of cancer, although the boy hasn’t been explicitly told this information. The boy’s estranged brother (he is gay and the grandfather does not approve) returns home after being injured in a work-related accident. He works for a company that cleans polluted land using new technology, one that leaves huge piles of soil behind. The process used by this company sounds vaguely SFnal, and it jars somewhat  with the story’s other thread, which is the boy’s dealings with a dwarf-like spirit creature called Little Loon that lives in the nearby stream.

A voice calls to me from across the stream. “Did you lose this, Callum?”
I look up and see a little man with wild white hair and saggy gray skin. He stares at me with a big, ugly smile and begins to cross the stream. He is holding a child’s shoe.
“Which one are you?” I ask.
“Maangoons nindizhinikaaz.” He passes the shoe to me.
I grab it even though it’s covered in dirt and say thank you in Ojibwe. Miigwech. I’ve been learning it since I was in elementary school, but in ten years I’ve really only learned animal names and how to introduce myself. And a few immature phrases like nimazhiwemin ina dibikong?
“What’s it for, Little Loon?” I say. I think I heard him right. Maangoons means little loon.
“It’s for your feet. Your grandfather will be so happy that you found it!” I’ve never told my Grandpa about the river dwarfs, but they have been watching me for a long time.
The shoe is white with blue stripes, both faded and smudged with dirt. On the bottom there are a few plastic bulbs that held multicolored lights when I was a kid. I don’t bother to check and see if they work.
“I lost these when I was eight,” I tell the dwarf. “I gave up looking for them long ago.”
“Oh, but your grandfather! He was so mad you lost them that he hit you and sent you to bed without supper! Remember? Remember?” He sits down on a nearby rock. It feels like I’m babysitting a toddler now. p. 103

The spirit has given the boy random objects for small favours in the past; this time the boy asks a favour of it. Initially he wants the truth about his grandfather’s illness and, later, a cure for it.
I not sure these different threads of this story weave together, but it is an absorbing if bleak work, and a promising début.
The Cabinet by William Preston is a story about a junior clerk in a German office during what would seem to be the inter-war years. He goes to see a somnambulist act at the Jahrmarkt, and listens as the sleeping man answers questions from the crowd. Later the head clerk is murdered, and then another man. The doctor running the somnambulist act is implicated.
While he is with the police the clerk goes to visit the coffin like device the somnambulist sleeps in, and lies down in it and closes the two doors. While in the box he has an epiphany. Later, he barely escapes being burnt alive when the townsfolk set fire to the surrounding shed.
This is an engaging story to start with but it runs on for too long, and I had no idea what the point was.
An Incident in the Literary Life of Nathan Arkwright by Allen Steele is a story in his ‘Arkwright’ series², none of which I’ve read, but that was not a problem even though it is essentially an outtake from a longer story or novel. It tells of a fictional SF writer, ‘one of the Big Four,’ who attends an SF convention in spite of himself:

At age fifty-four, he’d lately begun to feel a certain distance between himself and the younger generation of writers and fans. He belonged to a generation that had come of age during the Depression and World War II, and although he’d earned a revered position in the field, he was acutely aware that the New Wave writers who’d emerged during the sixties—Moorcock, Ellison, LeGuin, Spinrad, all the rest—had become the authors SF fans were most excited about. The cultural dissonance wasn’t quite as bad as what friends like Bob Heinlein and Sprague de Camp were experiencing, but still he was having trouble relating to the new breed of SF writer who didn’t know how to handle a slide rule, or to the fans who thought science fiction was invented by Gene Roddenberry. p. 127

After deciding to dodge the banquet (too many blue jokes in GOH Andy Offutt’s previous program appearance) he meets, and is later taken out to dinner by, two fans. Things turn weird as they drive to the restaurant when the fans (spoiler) say they are time-travellers. Arkwright thinks they are deranged and humours them until the car slows down, when he makes his escape.
I liked this for the SF insider detail.³
Squamous and Eldritch Get a Yard Sale Bargain by Tim McDaniel is a gently amusing story about two book collectors called Squamous and Eldritch who are attempting to buy an occult book from an awkward woman. They manage to convince her to sell it but then they make a discovery. A pleasant but minor piece.
I was a little way into Grand Theft Spacecraft by R. Garcia y Robertson before I realised that this was the promised sequel to last issue’s novella, The Girl Who Stole Herself. This provides an alternate view of some of that story’s events.
It gets off to a reasonable start with its story of Cole, who lives on Biforost Station, which is in orbit around Europa. He gets a message from an associate and they set off on a job. Unfortunately, I made the fatal mistake of putting the story down for a while and by the time I got back to it I just couldn’t get into it again. This was for the same reasons as the previous story, mostly endless waffle about Space Vikings, Mongols, the Jutes, Crown Princess Rylla, etc.
There is a story in there (I think) about buying some kids from outer solar system slavers and returning them to their mothers, who are all working as prostitutes. The one that Cole gets involved with sounds like the Happy Hooker, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Again, with the kids/slavers/prostitutes, it is tonally off, like a light comedy set in a concentration camp.
Towards the end of the story (spoiler) the Happy Hooker reveals herself to Cole as Crown Princess Rylla, or one of her many clones at least. It finishes with a space battle against the Vikings, with all the nastiness and dying off-stage.
All style, no substance; I’m not looking forward to the sequels.
Disturbance in the Produce Aisle by Kit Reed⁴ is about a married man who, after arguing with his wife, goes to cool off at a local store. There, and not for the first time, an entity that is probably the devil intermittently appears and tries to bargain with him. In between these episodes he sees the ghosts of various dead people.
Books of the Risen Sea by Suzanne Palmer gets off to a pretty good start with its protagonist, Caer, holed up in his flooded, ruined library in a post-Collapse, post-Wave America. When he is not doing the things he needs to do to survive, he tries to salvage fragments of books from the water-damaged library stock. The story improves even further after a storm which reveals a functioning robot in the flotsam washed up against the walls of the library. Caer manages to direct it to a place of safety, and later manages to help it climb up a ladder and into the library.

The robot lurched up another step, grabbing hold of the rung above more easily than before. The strain on Caer’s arms as the robot let go and tried to move up, and gravity tried to pull it back down, was something he knew he’d suffer for later, but Caer was not going to let go; he’d stubborned himself into worse hurt many times before this.
Finally, the robot could hook its saw arm over the railing to brace itself. Caer stepped in to free his rope, then backed up against the library wall as the robot managed to heave itself over the top of the ladder and railing to land on its side on the balcony. Water poured out between its metal and plastic plates and ran in thick streams down the slight decline of the roof back into the sea.
“Do you have a name?” he asked it.
“Yes. Orchid-Iridium-Zero-Hexagon,” it answered.
Caer barked a laugh. “Seriously?”
“It is a self-designation,” the robot said. “I chose it after my initialization. It was a privilege to be given that choice.”
“Oh.” Caer felt suddenly like an asshole. “I didn’t mean—”
“It is okay. There is understanding and not-understanding, always.”
Now that was truth. p. 181

Later there is a rowboat that comes out from the nearby Old Town (also flooded) to salvage any useful material from the post-storm flotsam. There is something of a slanging match between the occupants of the boat and Caer, and it becomes apparent that (a) one of them is her brother-in-law Trevor and (b) Caer was originally a woman (Trevor and another man refer to Caer as ‘she’). Later on we discover that Caer has fallen out with her father over this matter, hence her solitary existence in the drowned library.
This second half of the story involves raiders attacking Old Town. Then, one of the men from the rowboat comes back to the library seeking help from Caer, specifically shelter for her pregnant sister and the other woman of the town. Later, when it looks like the library will be attacked by the raiders, there is an amusing line when Orchid goes into the library stacks and carves up the stuck-together and hopelessly damaged books for use as projectiles on an improvised trebuchet:

Once all the paper blocks had been stacked, the robot disappeared back down for more. Caer glanced at the blocks, considered, then after a quick glance toward oldtown—no boats heading into open water yet—went back inside and rummaged through his boxes of supplies. He didn’t doubt the blocks would hold together if thrown by hand, but the stresses of being flung at the end of a fast-moving chain were another matter, and raining loose fragments of old, moldy, torn science fiction down on the raiders was not likely to give them pause. p. 191

While this adventure/action section is well enough done it is more formulaic than I had hoped (I thought the arc of the story was going to be focussed on what the robot was going to bring to Caer’s life and the book recovery project). I concede that I don’t often complain that a story has too much action and too little reflection.

There is a good Cover this issue by Cynthia Sheppard—I don’t think it illustrates any of the stories.
Thirty-First Annual Readers’ Awards’ Results by Sheila Williams is an account of the winners and the award ceremony. Towards the end she adds:

Perhaps because she had so many stories competing against each other, none of Dominica’s tales finished in the top five novelettes. A couple of days before the Readers’ Award celebration, we learned that her story, “Project Empathy,” along with Ian R. MacLeod’s, “The Visitor From Taured,” are both finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. p. 5

I was surprised not only at Dominica Phetteplace’s omission from the finalists but also MacLeod’s. They were robbed.⁵
The Last Hittite by Robert Silverberg is an essay that, for its first half, would be a better fit for History Today (it is about the Hittites). It finally segues into an account of a futuristic and deserted America in John Ames Mitchell’s 1889 novel, The Last American.
Remembering Bertie by James Patrick Kelly is a column about time travel that mainly concentrates on H. G. Wells and his work.
The Poetry in this issue is by John Richard Trtek, Bethany Powell, Robert Frazier, Jane Yolen, Robert Borski, and Leslie J. Anderson. There are a couple that are okay but, as per usual, none really grabbed me (well, maybe Anderson’s Sleeping Beauty variant).
Next Issue has this about Connie Willis’s forthcoming I met a Traveller in an Antique Land: ‘With all the twists and turns, you’ll soon be as lost as her hapless traveller.’ I hope not.
On Books: Outside America by Norman Spinrad reviews a number of promising sounding books including Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, Central Station by Lavie Tidhar, and The Devourers by Indra Das. He also mentions Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, which he seems less enamoured with:

I feel it my unpleasant duty as a former president of SFWA and current reviewer to warn potential readers that one third of this eighteen-dollar anthology is not complete stories but excerpts from novels, SFWA’s self-congratulation, the history of the Nebula, lists of past winners, pages and pages devoted to lesser awards. You pays your money and you takes yer choice, but as a critic I didn’t have to. But if I did, if what I was looking for was good fiction to read and nothing else, I wouldn’t. p. 204-205

For the most part though, and after a short introduction about the dominance of American SF, the column focuses on writers who are either physically or culturally located outside the United States.

This is a mixed issue, but worth getting for the better material.

1. 1. I’m not sure it is fair to call this a reprint as it appeared in an edition of thirteen copies, of which only ten were on sale. There is more information at ISFDB.
   2. The ‘Arkwight’ series consists of four earlier novelettes/novellas (that all did pretty well in Asimov’s SF’s annual readers’ polls). According to the author’s website they were revised and expanded as parts one through four of the eponymous 2016 Tor novel. The ‘Arkwright’ series at ISFDB.
   3. If I am allowed to nit-pick there is one line of Arkwright’s that appears rather inconsistent: “But Nathan barely knew the young new writers—George R.R.Martin, Joe Haldeman, and Thomas Burnett Swann . . .” Swann was born in 1928 compared with Martin and Haldeman’s 1948 and 1943, so he would have been 15-20 years older than the other two. As to ‘new,’ Swann first published in 1958 compared to 1971 and 1969 for the other two. Swann had been a Hugo finalist on three occasions before they had even broken into print (Where is the Bird of Fire?, 1963, Day of the Minotaur, The Manor of Roses, both 1967). I would suggest that Swann was another generation entirely.
   4. Kit Reed passed away on the 24^th of September 2017, aged 85, shortly after this story appeared. According to Wikipedia her first story was published by Anthony Boucher almost sixty years ago (F&SF, April 1958). Her ISFDB page is here.
   5. I didn’t vote in this poll, but can’t remember why—looking at the results I wish I had (and will next year).
      
      I thought only the David Erik Nelson story was particularly noteworthy in the novella category, although I liked Jay O’Connell’s piece.
      In the novelette group, I thought both the Dale Bailey and Karl Bunker stories very good, but would have expected to see several other works keeping them company:  Atheism and Flight and Project Synergy by Dominica Phetteplace, The Bewilderness of Lions by Ted Kosmatka, Flight from the Ages by Derek Künsken, The Visitor from Taured by Ian R. MacLeod. There are another half-dozen novelettes I would have placed ahead of the Rusch and the second of the Palmer stories.
      In the short story category I thought the best two stories won, and would have added Webs by Mary Anne Mohanraj to the finalists.
      It was interesting looking back over Asimov’s SF’s 2016 stories: the magazine published many strong novelettes but, paradoxically, the novellas and short stories were weak by comparison. Is this because of Tor.com’s novella series, and the greater number of markets for shorter material?

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry • novella by Alexander Jablokov ♥♥♥
Annabelle, Annie • short story by Lisa Goldstein
Other Worlds and This One • novelette by Cadwell Turnbull ♥♥♥
An Evening with Severyn Grimes • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥♥+
Transcendental Mission: Riley’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ♥♥
Weighty Matters: Tordor’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ♥♥♥
@lantis • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw ♥♥♥
The Patient Dragon • short story by David Gerrold ♥♥♥
Field Studies • short story by Sheila Finch ♥
Gale Strang • novelette by Michael Bishop ♥♥♥
The Girl Who Stole Herself • novella by R. Garcia y Robertson ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Bob Eggleton
The 2017 Dell Magazines Award • editorial by Sheila Williams
Sharing Worlds • essay by Robert Silverberg
Hold The Phones! • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Jane Yolen (2), Geoffrey A. Landis, Salik Shah, Robert Borski, Bruce McAllister
Next Issue
On Books • essay by Paul Di Filippo
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

This issue gets off to a good start with a novella length piece that, for a change, I actually liked. How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry by Alexander Jablokov is, according to the introduction, the first in a series featuring the narrator Sere Glagolit, a female investigator who lives in the alien city of Tempest, a reef-like city illuminated by two suns and inhabited by multiple alien spieces:

Above it all the Architon pier thrust up a couple of thousand feet, then curved out, to end abruptly in a smooth, slanted surface that gleamed in the mixed light of Actin and Umber. If the Architon had some plan for a larger structure, of which this pier would be just a supporting element, they hadn’t gotten to it yet, though the thing had been standing for endless centuries, so long that dirt had piled up and formed a steep slope, which had then been covered with a gigantic colonial structure slowly grown by creatures themselves now vanished, and their constructions reconfigured and reused by other nations entirely. The Architon were never seen, didn’t talk to anyone, and, in fact, didn’t seem to have really noticed that dozens of other species had been infesting their city for some thousands of years now. Presumably, they took the long view of their own pests. p. 17

The first scene has Glagolit helping an old woman catch alien vermin in exchange for information on where a potential client lives. This location turns out to be further up the hill, and the job is to find out who has been leasing the upper levels of the Reef, and why a man called Zinter blew up a passageway beside them. The client, Mirquell, wants this information to secure a job with the alien Case.
The rest of the story is a colourful progression of characters from Glagolit’s life, various city locales, and weird aliens—I particularly enjoyed the scene with the bread seller who uses his products to distract the elevator guards, and the bird like species who help her cross a narrow bridge affected by turbulent updrafts. Its demerits are, perhaps, an over-convoluted plot, and an ending that stretches credibility a little (I didn’t really buy the alien Soot cooperatively jumping in and out of the cleaners’ pods).
Overall though, it is a pleasant and enjoyable piece of light adventure, refreshingly free of gun-play or violence. I look forward to further tales in the series.
I liked most of the other stories in this issue, too.
Other Worlds and This One by Cadwell Turnbull postulates a theory of quantum mechanics that lets many worlds exist at the same time. The narrator manages to travel between them and talk to its inhabitants, and he can also stop time, etc., but not change events. Notwithstanding this premise, the story is really about is the variant lives of two specific characters. The first is the narrator’s brother, and how he is still alive in some universes although he was shot dead in this one; the second is the scientist who theorised the many worlds theory, and how he survives in some worlds, avoiding the heart attack that kills him in this one.
Although nothing much really happens in the story, other than the fleshing out of these lives, the characterisation and description is immersive and affecting. It has a rather sudden ending though. I look forward to further stories from this writer.
An Evening with Severyn Grimes by Rich Larson is an entertaining chase story about a corporate type called Severyn, who is hijacked by a group of so-called Priests. They want to flay him alive while streaming the process, and then kill him. The actual kidnapping is conducted by a female hacker and a prison escapee called Girasol. The latter is at the Priests’ base, injected with a drug called Dozr, and plugged into the net (this part is all very 80s cyberpunk). Girasol jumps from the net into the circuits of Severyn’s car and takes control of it. Most of the rest of the rest of the journey is taken up with the tense conversation between Girasol and Severyn, during which we find out that Severyn has a contract to ‘puppeteer,’ or wear, Girasol’s son’s body….
Good, unpretentious action SF.
@lantis by Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw is an enjoyable tale featuring the surfin’ dudes Zep and Del in their sixth adventure (according to the introduction—I think it may be just the fifth¹). It would probably be impossible to write a coherent synopsis, so I’ll limit myself to saying that it opens with a Del talking to a crab which subsequently turns out to be Zep. The latter’s transformation back into a human is achieved with the help of a peculiar type of sonic foam. Zep then brings Del up to date with how they ended up in this situation, which includes the use of this seemingly magic foam to create boats and buildings, amongst other things, with the story ending in a battle at Atlantis. There the two dudes assist a couple of fish people (one appears to be a particularly attractive woman, but for the octopus beak coming out of her mouth) to prevent an invasion by a social media billionaire.
The surfer slang and attitudes are particularly entertaining.
The Patient Dragon by David Gerrold is a future techno-thriller that starts with the narrator’s dragon getting shot. Although it is not specifically described, the dragon would seem to be essentially an AI augmentation program that, rather than being embedded as a chip in the human head, is a separate device that is worn on a person’s head or shoulder (I think).
The rest of this dense and telegramatically written tale details her recovery, which involves bio-modifications and a new dragon, and before long she is recruited for a job on the moon—which may or may not have something to do with the attack on her. This is a story with a convincingly described future:

I caromed off three continents and ended up in Morocco, sitting on an old wooden chair under a drooping awning of faded yellow silk, a sweltering afternoon street café, sipping that hard bitter coffee that roasts itself in the burlap as it works its way up the scorched African coast on camelback, watching the table-top laser zap flies out of the air and listening to the news-buzz. Balthazaar 2 proxied around the edges, chuckling to himself as he constructed a model of the lockboxes we’d left behind. Someday, maybe, the investments would climb out of their graves, but not this week. If I had bothered to check my feelings, I would have felt like I looked—leathery and hard, used up. Not a good look for any female, and in this place, suspicious as well. It was time to move. So when Balth whispered it had a job offer, I said, “Tell me.”
The drac angled its wings to catch the shifting sunlight. Feeding on photons. Its voice was dispassionate. Take the train south. Get off at K-station. Thought about it for a while, considered options—there were none to consider. They were paying for the ticket, what the hell; nothing was happening here, and I needed a change of scenery.
I got off at the base of Kilimanjaro. Ordered beignets and cocoa at the café. Excellent view of the catapult. Great shuddering booms every time a cargo-pod launched, slicing up the side of the mountain and hurling east into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, sometimes firing course-correcting rockets on the way up. When the window was good, launches came every thirty seconds; as fast as the batacitors could recharge. But now that the Ecuador beanstalk was operational, sending slow-pods up the cables night and day, the business model here was shifting to shock-resistant cargos and harder launches, mostly nitrogen and water for Lunar expansion. Later on, industrial machinery. All those folks who’d believed that the beanstalk would put the catapults out of business were wrong. Every oxygen-user who bought a one-way up the line needed at least a dozen catapult pods of CHON-maintenance to precede him. p. 125-6

After various adventures on the moon the story ends abruptly, with the reason for the attack presented in a more direct manner than it should have been. An engrossing piece for the most part though, and I hope this turns into a series.
This issue sees a welcome appearance by Michael Bishop² with Gale Strang. The story starts off with an absorbing mix that includes an unusual narrator (a conscious bird cage thrown away by a grouchy old lady called Claris), a runaway boy called Gale and an injured crow, and a scoutmaster who is trying to help him.
Gale, who is eventually taken in by Claris, turns out to be an intersex person who has been physically (but not sexually) mistreated by her father. In due course, she is adopted by Claris and starts living as a woman. Things work out for her.
This is a game of two halves: initially the story is intriguing but it turns into a mainstream story that, while adeptly handled, is rather by the numbers. You wonder if Bishop really wanted to write about an intersex person’s life struggles but added the SFnal element either (a) out of habit or (b) to make it sellable in the genre. Whatever, I liked it well enough.

James Gunn³ has, like last issue, another couple of stories that are set in his ‘Riley and Asha’ series. Transcendental Mission: Riley’s Story is another dense fragment, this one telling of Riley’s waking to sensory deprivation in a sim tank. He has a surgically inserted biocomputer called a pedia in his head, and a voice giving him a mission to find a Transcendental prophet and kill him. We also find out more about Riley’s life, after returning from alien captivity, as a soldier or mercenary.
Weighty Matters: Tordor’s Story tells of the titular Dorian youngster who is taken from his bucolic childhood savannahs and subjected to a brutal regime that pits the recruits against each other.

The recruiters were thinner than the grass-eaters, but tall, strong, and distant. They came in a big, gas-filled aeronef, and they spoke to the recruits only to give orders and said nothing to each other. Some fifty of the young grazers had been collected from the plains herds, most of them Tordor’s age, a few younger and a couple a year older, larger, and meaner. The older ones bullied the younger ones, stole their food, and made them fight each other until they rebelled, and then the older recruits beat them. Their blows hurt and often injured, not like the playful slaps of Tordor’s herd-mates. The recruiters did not seem to care. Later he learned that letting the recruits fight among themselves and establish their hierarchy was part of the plan to transform passive grazers into aggressive omnivores. Children had to learn how to survive under difficult circumstances, in strange lands, and without friends. They were being transformed into good Dorians. A happy, carefree Dorian was not a good Dorian, and if Dorians wanted to compete in a galaxy full of unknown dangers and sneaky aliens, they must be expelled from their youthful paradise. p. 92-93

Over the years Tordor manages to succeed in this system and, at times, manages to subvert it, applying his own principles of co-operation and interdependence (there are shades of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game here). He is then involved in a Federation wide war that kills billions, during which he manages to broker peace and make alliances that help end the conflict.
Throughout all this, the system is resistant to everything he stands for and, at the end, the High Dorian sends him on the mission, along with a selection of other aliens, to find the Transcendental machine .
A solid example of the Good Old Stuff.

The stories that didn’t entirely work for me include the second novella, The Girl Who Stole Herself by R. Garcia y Robertson. It initially appears as if it is going to be a complex and dark story, dropping the reader into a situation where a teenager in the future called Amanda is being cyber-stalked by two men:

 (“She’s a looker,” the Pimp concluded. “Where’s she headed?”)
(“Home to Mom.” Wise to the ways of pretty young females, the Slaver summed up her life, “Amanda James, seventeen, born Bellingdam, Washington. Lives at 1099 Fairhaven Drive, high school dropout, no job, no boyfriend, no arrest record. No life at ail. We’d be doing her a favor.”)
(“Total NULL,” the Pimp agreed, “not likely to be missed much.”)
(“Except by her mom,” the Slaver noted. Both men laughed. Moms were always the last to give up on lost girls.)
Crossing the last lawn, Amanda ducked into a blue door that opened for her. Happy to be home, she called out, “Hello House.”
“HELLO MANDY,” House replied, closing and locking the door behind her, resetting the security alarms. Only House called her “Mandy,” a glitch in the housekeeping program that Amanda never bothered to debug. Mom was hopeless at reprogramming, despite living a digital existence. Amanda was an October child, the only kid of an aging untrained single mom, and at seventeen already ran the home.
She asked, “House, where’s Mom?”
“IN THE LIVING ROOM,” House answered, “HAVING A VIRTUAL VISIT WITH THE HOWARDS.”
Boring. Aunt Jessie and Uncle Frank were serving time on some god-awful prison moon. Speed-of-light delay turned Visiting Day into disjointed, dual monologues. Mostly Mom cataloging the lives of relatives not currently in custody. If you want a real home life, stay out of jail.
(“Keep me informed,” requested the Pimp. “Can’t say for sure, until I see her naked.”)
(“Soon,” the Slaver promised. “We’re working on that right now.”) p. 161

Safely home, she goes to her room and jacks into her VR console, where we find she is also Princess-Regent Katherine of Conway, Sultana of Slutsk, Mistress of the Mongols, and ambassador to Crown Princess Rylla, who lives on Callisto.
The next time she goes outside, a kidnap attempt is unwittingly disrupted by a gang-member relative called Cole, but Amanda is successfully taken on a second attempt. When this happens she wakes up in a grey box, cut off from the net, and with three other girls. After introductions, one of them manages to interfere with the van they are in (using her dark energy bracelets to manipulate the temperature) and Cole rescues them.
As they regroup, things are happening in Amanda’s VR life: Callisto is being invaded by the Space Vikings, and later it appears that Rylla has died leaving Amanda as her heir.
For the first half or so this is all relatively entertaining, although some of the elements jar (the rapey cyber-stalkers vs. the Crown Princess material for instance). Then, about half of the way through, this bombshell is dropped on the story:

When she was twelve, Bellingdam, Washington, and her sister city, Bellingdam, England, were picked for Communities in Space, a centuries-long program to seed the Solar System with “living” communities lifted from Earth. Real families, with real lives, that included babies, kids, and old folks, were going together to populate the void, protected by the navy and subsidized by the Terra-Luna Federation. Most people in the two cities voted to stay on Earth, but those who voted to go got free housing, food, health care, and transport, while training for jobs in the outer system. At Flying School, Amanda was training to be a pilot.
To ease the transition, both Bellingdams were recreated in miniature, aboard a huge B-class colony ship-cum-habitat built in Earth orbit, a series of counter-rotating toruses on a common axle that gave the colonists 1-g spin gravity. Slidewalks moved people between decks under hologram skies that gave the illusion of space and distance. Climate control came complete with days and nights, weather and seasons. That was why Rylla had come to Bellingdam as goodwill ambassador—to win over her new neighbors before they arrived in Jupiter system. Mom voted to go, to get closer to her space case relations. Once Amanda met Rylla, she had every reason to go as well. On a minimum energy orbit, it took almost four years to reach Jupiter system. By then, Rylla had been called home to Callisto to replace her martyred dad, leaving Princess-Regent Amanda as her Ambassador to the Down Under and the Damned. p. 179-180

The second half of the story involves her becoming a Mongol mercenary in the Space Vikings, after which she undertakes a series of adventures in the outer solar system. By this point, unfortunately, I had rather lost interest in this over-egged pudding, and drifted through the rest. Incidentally, the tonal mish-mash does not get any better—the most obvious example is an attempted rape scene where, just as Amanda’s assailant is getting undressed (she is naked and cannot move due to a slave bracelet) he is (spoiler) hit over the head by one of the kidnapped girls’ invisible friends. A scene that is both uncomfortable and ludicrous reading at the same time.
After a reasonably good start this story tapers off to a poor finish—so OK overall I suppose, but I wouldn’t really recommend bothering with it. There is a semi-sequel scheduled for next issue. . .
Field Studies by Sheila Finch is, like the story by Cadwell Turnbull, a well characterised and socially realistic story, this one about a homeless woman called Pat, and a man that keeps appearing and helping her in small ways. He also seems to know other things about her.
It is a pity that, given my engagement with Pat’s story, it has an inconclusive ending that rather spoils it. Although the man ultimately states he is an anthropologist, (spoiler) the angel of death is mentioned on two separate occasions. I wasn’t sure what he was.

The worst story in the issue, by a country mile, is Annabelle, Annie by Lisa Goldstein, which is little more than an irritating and pious lecture about global warming. Set in a near-future Earth that is overheating and suffering from various ecological catastrophes, its central character is the mother of an increasingly estranged teenage daughter—she has fallen in with a new set of friends who have strict, neo-Puritan views on the environment: she nags her mother to turn off the aircon even though it’s in the hundreds outside, nags her father to stop using water to wash his face on entering the house, etc. The tension increases when the father gets a job as a PR person for a fracking company.
This all comes to a head when there is a careers day at school where the father is going to speak. He (spoiler) ends up being unequivocal about what his employers do to the environment; the mother has a Damascene conversion to her daughter’s viewpoint and experiences a brief moment of reconnection. The father is later sacked and the family move to a poorer part of town with all its attendant difficulties. The daughter remains estranged, and the mother reflects that her generation may have ‘lost’ their children.
Not only is the parents’ change of opinion dramatically unconvincing, but the whole thing comes over as little more than a piece of futile hand-wringing. If it is meant as a cautionary warning, does the writer really think this is going to convince anyone to change their ways?

As for the non-fiction, the Cover by Bob Eggleton is one I liked—even though it is fairly standard ‘spaceship against an astronomical background.’
The 2017 Dell Magazines Award by Sheila Williams is an editorial that lists the winner and runners-up for the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. The winner’s story is posted on the Asimov’s website but, surprisingly, isn’t printed in the magazine.
Sharing Worlds by Robert Silverberg is an interesting essay about two shared worlds projects. One is Harlan Ellison’s Medea anthology, the other is the seventeen-part serial, Cosmos, that ran in Science Fiction Digest and Fantasy Magazine in the early 1930s.
Hold The Phones! by James Patrick Kelly is an article about just that: smartphones and their apps. Among myriad other interesting facts, it states that 86% of 18-29 year old Americans own one. So few?
As far as the Poetry goes, I again enjoyed the two by Jane Yolen; the others not so much.
There is also the usual On Books column by Paul Di Filippo.
There are more  40^th anniversary autobiographical snippets in this issue. I know that they are probably expected to talk about their work and/or the magazine, but you sometimes get the impression from these contributions that magazine SF started with Asimov’s in 1977. However, there are a few interesting bits this issue from, amongst others, Rudy Rucker, Marc Laidlaw, David Gerrold, R. Garcia y Robertson and Michael Bishop; I note the latter’s piece is over a page long, during which he mentions a story of his in the second issue of Asimov’s SF, Cabinet Meeting.⁴

A solid issue with several good stories.

1. Marc Laidlaw’s site refers to five stories only (and has a lovely illustration for one of them). I’ve also had a look at the online collaborations between Rucker and Laidlaw and can’t find any more.
2. The introduction to Michael Bishop’s story mentions that he is doing research for a WWII novel set in the Pacific, which he hopes to begin soon. I look forward to that.
3. The introduction to the Gunn’s stories mentions that he has a memoir, Star-Begotten, due from McFarland and Company in autumn. Another one to look forward to.
4. If I recall correctly, Cabinet Meeting was a lightweight piece and not a patch on his other more serious work of the time such as The Samurai and the Willows (F&SF, February 1976). A couple of nitpicks about two of the other contributions: Robertson’s contribution spells Richard Gere’s name as Geer, twice (the magazine proofreader is probably in their twenties and has never heard of him), and Rucker refers to his sale of Peg-Man to George Scithers in 1981 (published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1982) as ‘pre-Ender’s Game.’ Card’s original novelette version of the story was published in Analog in August, 1977. I really need to get a life.

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ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Eric Kimminau, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
On the Ship • short story by Leah Cypess ♥
Come as You Are • novelette by Dale Bailey ♥♥♥
Good Show • short story by William Preston ♥♥
The Escape of the Adastra: Asha’s Story • short story by James E. Gunn ♥♥
Night Fever • novelette by Will Ludwigsen ♥♥♥♥
Tired of the Same Old Quests? • short story by Peter Wood ♥♥♥
The Best Man • short story by Jay O’Connell ♥♥
Triceratops • short story by Ian McHugh ♥♥♥
Persephone of the Crows • short story by Karen Joy Fowler ♥
The Runabout • short novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch ♥

Non-fiction:
The Runabout • cover by Jim Simpson
Anniversaries and Milestones • editorial by Sheila Williams
Advertisements For Myself • essay by Robert Silverberg
Harry and Dot • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Tod McCoy, Robert Frazier, Suzanne Palmer, G. O. Clark
Next Issue
On Books: Wolockification • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

This issue is quite a mixed one so I’ll start with the material I liked best: you can stop reading when you come to the moaning.
The best story is Night Fever by Will Ludwigsen, which takes the psychopathic cult leader and murderer Charles Manson and places him in a parallel-world New York disco scene (he is released from prison ten years later than he was in this timestream and doesn’t go to California). As one of his female cult-members recalls:

I took all three of them to Infinity one night, mostly because I was curious how they’d behave. Libby had been dancing before, and she plunged out on the floor like a cop wading into a brawl; she lost her shirt about thirty minutes later and didn’t notice. Samson swayed on the floor with girls and some guys flocked all around, pulling on his arms and belt like they were dancing around a maypole.
Charlie … he spent the whole night walking backward as though trying to get it all into his eyes at once. He watched DJ Ca$hflow at the booth, fascinated by the dual turntables and all the switches and sliders, probably most fascinated by the power: DJ Ca$hflow could make people move and feel as one.
Libby lured Charlie onto the dance floor and showed him her own clumsy moves, but he passed her with his own in about ten minutes. He could flow out there like a cobra rising from a basket, and people kind of backed up in wonder at this guy in an old buckskin jacket strutting like he’d grown up on Soul Train.
All he kept saying that night—yelling through the music—was, “Man, where have these people been?”
It was nice to blow his mind for a change. p. 70

Manson once again forms a cult, this time based on the disco culture of New York; it isn’t long before the craziness starts.
I liked this story a lot: it is a gritty, absorbing piece that has an interesting collage structure that includes book extracts, interviews and court transcripts; another reason is possibly age-related, in that I can remember the disco scene from the TV show Top of the Pops, and also remember checking out a book about Manson from the library when I was 12 or 13, the first inkling I had that there are mad as well as bad people in the world.
One for the awards’ short lists and ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.¹

The other stories I liked come from Dale Bailey, Peter Wood and Ian McHugh.
Come as You Are by Dale Bailey concerns a college student who drops out and becomes a ‘headspace’ user:

Anything that can be turned into a drug will be turned into a drug. Call it Dave’s Law. For example, I once knew some guys who smoked catnip, their thinking being that if it can fuck your cat up, then it can surely do the same for you. They were wrong, of course, but the example is germane, and there are dozens of others. Paint thinner, Wite-Out, nitrous oxide, you name it. Remember that old Ramones cut, “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”? It wasn’t just because he liked the smell.
As with any self-respecting proposition, Dave’s Law comes with a couple of corollaries:
First, all drugs are about ditching your core self. It’s good to get away, to take a little vacation from our own neuroses. Think of the language we use to describe getting high: we get obliterated, blasted, annihilated. We get bombed and wasted, ripped, smashed, torn up, you name it. We destroy ourselves to escape ourselves.
Second, this makes headspace the perfect drug. You not only nullify your troublesome self—most of it, anyway—you get the added bonus of being someone else. The human condition is pretty goddamn solitary when you think about it. We’re all shackled inside our own heads. That’s what it’s all about, really—stories, paintings, music, language itself, from Finnegan’s Wake to prehistoric symbols daubed on cave walls. Attempts to bridge the abyss, to connect.
Once you’ve dropped a tab of headspace, you know you’re not alone. p. 26

Later on the group of users/friends he socialises with disintegrates, and he starts a relationship with a woman called Maggie, who has been supplying them with headspace.
For the most part this is a fairly strong piece but it is let down by an ending that didn’t make any sense to me. (Spoiler: he ends up being thrown out by her after she takes a headspace tablet that is made from his personality scan. Eventually he returns to his parents and enters therapy. After one particular session he thinks about dropping one of his own tablets to see what he is like. I fail to see how that would be any different from just being himself.)
Tired of the Same Old Quests? by Peter Wood starts with this:

Mirk and her friends, the stable boy and the elf, played Suburbs and Cubicles. Mirk wished she wasn’t just pretending to live in an exciting world of surviving by her wits instead of the real world of monotonous magic and never-ending quests.
The Suburb Master, the mop-haired stable boy who served Mirk’s father, leaned back on a mound of straw and set the scene for the game. “You’re watering the lawn. Your neighbor, a class three social status—something called a ‘software engineer’—asks if you are coming to his barbecue next Saturday.”
Mirk knew her father might find her hiding in the stables and make her prepare for tomorrow’s month-long quest, but right now she was more concerned about the game. She hadn’t allocated enough points to social status. Her character was a male and could bench press two hundred pounds but was a mere insurance salesman.
“I tell my neighbor that I’ll let him know later.” Mirk hoped the gamble paid off.
She rolled the twenty-sided die. “Eight.”
The Suburb Master unfurled a scroll. “One point for your sports car, one for the best lawn, minus four for your job. That makes your roll a six. Your neighbor is displeased. Your wives had already discussed this barbecue. Your wife was going to make corn dip.”
“Corn dip?” The elf frowned. “What in the name of the Goddess is corn dip?” p. 93

Mirk gets dragged away from the game by her grumpy father go on a quest to the Mountains of Despair to deal with Zokar the wizard.
This is a charming fantasy that could have equally have appeared in F&SF. I only wish it had been longer.
Triceratops by Ian McHugh starts with the narrator viewing a Neanderthal male at a research facility in Japan. After this he goes to a reservation in northern Canada where they have Thalers (another proto-human) and mammoths amongst several other revived species. Like the O’Connell story that follows, this is a future slice-of-life—but quite a good piece for all that: at one point in the story, when the one of the mammoths nuzzles the narrator’s hand, I was completely transported. You sometimes find a sense of wonder in the most unexpected places.

The also-rans include the stories by Leah Cypress, William Preston, James Gunn and Karen Joy Fowler.
On the Ship by Leah Cypess is about a young girl on a spaceship speaking to her friend when a red-headed woman appears. Only the young girl sees the women. Some time later it becomes apparent that the girl is in a VR program inhabited by passengers who are in cryosleep, and that there are forces which are attempting to prevent these refugees from Earth awakening at a suitable planet.
At one point in the story there is a reference made to the St Louis, a WWII Jewish refugee ship which was refused entry in America and Cuba and had to return to Europe. This (spoiler) is the action that the girl bafflingly takes when she eventually manages to wake herself up: she sends them back to Earth. If there is a point to this, I missed it.
Good Show by William Preston involves a film reviewer who is asked to a select screening. When he gets there with a female friend, he finds three oddly dressed and unusual looking people, and also realises that no-one else has been invited.
The film itself is a short and unconventional piece about a town that is destroyed in an avalanche. The reviewer and his friend later discover that this is footage of an actual event, but one that doesn’t happen to the next day. They subsequently view increasingly violent and disastrous films.
My disbelief was not entirely suspended, but I thought this was OK.
The Escape of the Adastra: Asha’s Story by James E. Gunn is a short story set in the world of his current trilogy (Transcendental, 2013, Transgalactic, 2016, Transformation, 2017)—although ISFDB labels this as the ‘Riley and Asha’ series.
It tells of the generation starship Adastra, and how it and its crew and passengers are captured and taken to Federation Central, the headquarters of an organisation that controls that spiral arm of the galaxy. There they are held as prisoners for many years before (spoiler) they manage to escape.
I liked this but it reads too much like a dense and fragmentary sidebar to the trilogy. There are a couple more stories from this series in the next issue.
Persephone of the Crows by Karen Joy Fowler starts with two young girls discussing wishes. The elder of the two leaves to go home with her parents, and her drunken father crashes the car on the way there. When she regains consciousness her parents are gone and the car is surrounded by crows.
The next time she wakes up (there is a perspective shift as she is now relating this to a young man she is hitching a lift with years later) she is in her bed at home but, she later discovers, her parents are different people.
Perhaps this is a ‘be careful what you wish for’ story, but it left me baffled.

The last group contains two stories that, in part at least, irritated me. Very occasionally I’ll find one story in an issue that does this, but to find two is quite unusual.
The Best Man by Jay O’Connell is about a man who gets infected in the near future by the IP2 virus that gives him a physical and mental aversion to his own skin (colour, presumably, as he dons green Halloween makeup for most of the rest of the story). Meanwhile, he organises himself to go to his rich brother’s wedding in Italy, where the latter is getting married to a Filipino man called Jericho. Superficially, this is a pleasant enough slice-of-life but there is no real story here (unless you consider a minor voyage of self-discovery and development ‘a story’).
The problem I had with this one is that the more I thought about it afterwards, the more problematical it seemed (disclaimer on the following comments; I’m reviewing the story, not the writer’s soul). The most troubling aspect is a narrator who hates and/or is repelled by his own skin.

My face in the mirror was peach colored and ruddy and mottled looking, like a piece of rotting fruit. There were dozens of different colors in my skin, beneath layers of translucency threaded with branching bluish veins. The overall effect was repulsive. I’d never noticed before how ugly my skin was. p. 101

He is a white man so no problem, right? Well, if you think that, change the white man above to a person of colour and watch the resultant Twitter storm. What is good for the goose. . .
There are other irritating details. One of them is what seems like a rant about the recent United Kingdom Brexit vote—this is at the end of the story, by which time the narrator has joined World Corps’ volunteers and is about to travel there:

I hefted my pack and walked down the gangway. I’d be arriving in Liverpool in three hours. The former U.K. had been in tatters for decades, its economy devastated by waves of misplaced xenophobia, sectarian strife, and useless protectionism. Whatever one thought of their leadership, their children deserved better. Parts of the U.K. now combined the world’s third highest infant mortality rate with the second lowest literacy rate. The two numbers were always inversely related. Huge swaths of the population were hostile to modern teaching techniques, infected with a resurgent Luddism.² p. 11

Not only is this unconvincing but it is tonally darker than the rest of a generally upbeat piece.
The Runabout by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is described as a short novel (Kindle says 42,677 words, Word says 45,000-ish) and is from the writer’s ‘Diving Universe’ series. Initially, this gets off to a good start with the narrator, ‘Boss,’ diving as part of a team in a spaceship graveyard called the Boneyard when she hears strange music—this is how she experiences the waves coming from spaceship anacapa drives. These drives and their odd temporal effects are strange black-box technology that no-one completely understands. There is some chatter and tension amongst the team when she reports this, but they continue the dive.
The next chapter gives us a data dump about the anacapa drives’ temporal effects, a genetic marker that the Boss has which gives her a certain resistance, her Lost Souls Corporation, which specialises in recovering ships, her mother’s death on a dive, a Fleet spaceship that arrived in their time from five thousand years ago, the Empire’s threat to the Nine Planets Alliance, etc., etc. This is all a bit kitchen sink but is well enough done.
Back at the dive the Boss gets more twitched as the music is now much louder and stranger than she expects. She tries to work out where the music is coming from but aborts the dive when she can’t.
Up until this point I was engaged with the story but from there on it goes rapidly downhill. This is mostly due to endless dull detail about what they are going to do, what the Boss is thinking, the slight friction between the crew, the meetings they have, endless chatter about the Fleet and the displaced crew of the Ivoire, etc. The only highlights are the second and third dives that they undertake to a small runaround spaceship where they eventually locate the anomalous drive.
Another problem is that there is also a huge amount of redundant wordage that contributes absolutely nothing to the story. Take this passage when the Boss goes to visit a diver called Elaine who is in the sick bay:

Elaine’s room is the only one with a closed door and a medical alert blinking to the side. If there were other medical personnel here, they could tap on that alert and see exactly what’s wrong with the patient inside the room. Unfortunately, she’s on her own, as I was. I didn’t mind. I hope she doesn’t either.
I slip through the door. The room smells faintly of antiseptic and sweat. Elaine lies in the middle of a large bed, curled on her side, blankets swirled around her as if she’s been sleeping restlessly. There are three alert buttons near her, and another not too far from her left hand.
I stare at the alert for a moment, vaguely remembering that I had had that many as well. Someone had explained it to me, and I had forgotten until now. I wonder how much of my life and memories from the past few days are just gone because of what happened. Then I set that thought aside. I’ll worry about it later.
A chair sits close to the bed. It’s not a diagnostic chair. It must be one of the chairs Jaylene has been using. She hasn’t been in my room as much these past two days. She’s probably been here, worrying about Elaine.
I sit down. “Elaine?” I say softly. p. 177

If you deleted everything that is underlined, how much useful information would you have lost? And there are passages that are much worse than this. Here they are watching a video of the spaceship and Elaine sees something that the others have missed:

Elaine sees their surprise, and something in her face changes. She thinks they don’t believe her because of her injuries.
“Can you pan?” she asks.
“We have what we have,” Yash says.
“Then re … re … reverse,” Elaine says. “I’ll show you.”
She struggles against the chair.
“I don’t want you to stand,” Jaylene says, but Elaine ignores her. Elaine rises, slowly, her head brace moving with her.
The chair changes shape, almost like it’s reaching for her. She uses one arm of the chair to brace her left side. Her right side shuffles.
Jaylene and Mikk have stood as well, moving just close enough to Elaine to support her if she falls. She looks determined not to.
She uses her chair, then another, and then another to step herself to the edge of the table where Yash is. Yash takes a step closer to Elaine, but Elaine says, “Please move … back.”
For a moment, Yash doesn’t move at all. She doesn’t seem to understand what Elaine wants, but I do.
‘Yash,” I say. “You’re in her way.”
“Oh,” Yash says, and scrambles aside.
I get up as well, and Jaylene shoots me a glare that would have made me stop moving yesterday. But I’m all right. I’m healing, probably thanks to those nanobits.
Besides, if Elaine can move, I can too.
I walk down the other side of the table. Now Elaine and I are flanking Yash. “What
do you want me to reverse to?” I ask Elaine.
“I got it,” Yash says.
I ignore her, keeping my hand on the controls. I have a hunch I know where Elaine is going with this.
“The first.. . gli. .. gla .. . when we first see the cockpit,” Elaine says. p. 173-174

Again, how much useful information would be lost excising the material that is underlined? OK, the part about the chair changing shape is interesting but this has been mentioned previously. All of this makes it read like a bloated first or second draft.
What really kills this, though, is the ending. Having spent the entire story setting up the anomalous drive problem and searching for its location, what happens on the third dive (spoiler) is that the drive, having switched off previously, comes back on and activates, which causes the runaround to vanish into fold-space. So, having set up a problem, it is ‘solved’ in the last act (40,000 words later!) by having it vanish—what kind of ending is that?

There is the usual non-fiction. Anniversaries and Milestones by Sheila Williams uses her editorial to list some of her personal anniversaries as well as those of the magazine: 2017 is not only the 40^th anniversary of the magazine but her 35^th as a member of staff. It is also her 30^th year of wedlock.
Advertisements For Myself by Robert Silverberg is a plug for three of his books, two collections of his columns and a book of interviews with him, Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (I bought the ebook but haven’t yet read). In the preamble to these notifications there is commentary on Norman Mailer and Isaac Asimov, which contains this information:

Asimov, unable to get into Columbia because of the anti-Jewish quotas of the era, went to Seth Low, a college established by Columbia to accommodate deserving students excluded by quota from Columbia itself). p. 6

I never knew about these quotas. Nor that the practice continued long after WWII.³
Harry and Dot by James Patrick Kelly is an interesting column about the Wizard of Oz books and films (as well as other related material such as Harry Potter).
The Poetry in this issue is by Tod McCoy (about standing outside a bookstore with a chemistry colleague looking at the rain, which I liked), Robert Frazier, Suzanne Palmer, and G. O. Clark
On Books: Wolockification is another excellent essay by Norman Spinrad, who starts by explaining his invention of Wolocks:

Wolocks.
Yes, Wolocks are a nonexistent ethnic identity I once invented to be the butt of all the ethnic jokes that can’t be told in public—they won’t be offended, because they don’t exist.
Wolockification.
Why is such wolockification necessary and indeed perhaps even inevitable? p. 200

He then goes on to discuss this practice is in SF:

Why has so much science fiction and fantasy been written and continues to be written about wars by humans against wolockified enemies? Aliens. Robots. Demons. Ghouls. Zombies. The Living Dead.
Literarily and literally non-human.
Perfectly wolockified enemies.
This has been a dominant plot structure of science fiction and fantasy as long as there has been genre fiction, and indeed of much fiction time out of mind.
[. . .]
And science fiction and genre fantasy can and do perfect the wolockification of the enemy for story purposes, with fictional wolockified enemies who really are not human and therefore can be guiltlessly slaughtered. Fictional “heroes” do the killing without feeling guilt, and guiltless readers or viewers get their rocks off on the fictional carnage. p. 201

He then develops this theme by looking at the anti-wolockification of StarTrek versus the opposite in Star Wars, Verne versus Wells, etc., before going on to review an anthology called Deserts of Fire: Speculative Fiction and the Modern War by Douglas Lain.
The latter part of the essay reviews China Miéville’s new novel, The Last Days of New Paris. I’ve never read anything by this writer but Spinrad’s enthusiastic review made me order this one (parallel-world Nazi-occupied France with manifestations that are apparently surrealistic monsters). He adds this about the ending:

That’s about as far as I think I should go with these interlocking time lines, alternate time lines, and slowly coalescing plot lines, except to assure the reader that it does all come together satisfyingly at the end. If that is the end, for in another afterword that’s hard to believe really is an afterword, Mieville purports to tell us that the novel was dictated to him verbatim and nonstop by a mystery man in a hotel room for thirty or so hours during which Mieville drank wine from the mini-bar but never took a piss. Don’t try this at home. p. 206

Finally, there are once again short biographical notes from the writers. I found a few of these quite interesting (Leah Cypess, Jay O’Connell, Ian McHugh, Kristine Kathryn Rusch).

Quite a mixed issue this one, with the material I disliked almost cancelling out the benefit of the good.

1. Will Ludwigsen has compiled a Spotify playlist (search on his name in the app) as ‘you might need a little music to get in the mood.’ What, to get in the mood for a killing spree? Apart from, Rod Stewart, Blondie and the Bay City Rollers on a disco playlist? I wouldn’t call them, or a few of the others, disco. And where is the 12-inch mix of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love?
2. I can see how you might, from a distance, extrapolate from Brexit to ‘misplaced xenophobia,’ and ‘sectarian strife’ but ‘misplaced protectionism’? That is the complete antithesis of what anyone wants. Also, how does a country go from being an advanced Western nation to having ‘the world’s third highest infant mortality rate’ (italics mine) and ‘the second lowest literacy rate’? And as for ‘resurgent Luddism,’ I’d be interested to know how they managed to prise everyone’s smartphone from their hands.
3. Numerus Clausus at Wikipedia.

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Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
Soulmates.com • novelette by Will McIntosh ♥♥♥♥
Number Thirty-Nine Skink • short story by Suzanne Palmer ♥♥
Three Can Keep a Secret. . . • novelette by Bill Johnson and Gregory Frost ♥♥♥
The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going • short story by Sarah Pinsker ♥♥
Invasion of the Saucer-Men • short story by Dale Bailey ♥♥
Kitty Hawk • novelette by Alan Smale ♥♥♥♥
Cupido • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥♥+
A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension • short story by Andrea M. Pawley ♥♥♥
The Wisdom of the Group • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod ♥♥♥
After the Atrocity • short story by Ian Creasey ♥♥
Goner • short story by Gregory Norman Bossert ♥♥♥
We Regret the Error • short story by Terry Bisson ♥♥
Tao Zero • novella by Damien Broderick

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Tomislav Tikulin
Things Change • guest editorial by James Patrick Kelly
Forty Years! • essay by Robert Silverberg
Screen Dreams • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poems • by Marge Simon, Sara Polsky, Jarod K. Anderson, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, Robert Borski
Next Issue
On Books (Asimov’s, March-April 2017) • by Peter Heck
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

There are a couple of particularly good stories in this issue and I’ll comment on them first.
Soulmates.com by Will McIntosh gets the fiction off to an outstanding start with a story about a postgrad student who (spoiler) is catfished on a dating site by an AI program. It is only after several video dates that he discovers what he is dealing with and, when he does, he reports it to the FBI.
This has some good lines, and amusing exchanges between him and his would-be girlfriend:

I spoke over her. I wasn’t about to be interrupted by a computer program. “I so wanted to meet you, to hold your hand, to kiss you. I get it now. What was it about me that made me a likely target? Did something about my profile suggest I was lonely?” I waved my hand in the air. “Oh, look, a beautiful woman wrote to me! How can I resist ponying up a hundred bucks for a full membership? Well, you got my hundred bucks, and left me more cynical in the process. Now why don’t you get lost?” I looked toward the sky. “Why am I even talking to you? You’re not real. You’re just a string of symbols typed into a computer.”
Winnie stiffened. She glared at me with such bald rage and hurt that I had to remind myself she—it—was all computer-generated. It was incredible, how real she looked. Her voice shaking with rage, she said, “Adenine. Thymine. Guanine. Cytosine.”
“What?”
“You’re nothing but a string of chemical compounds. The only thing that makes you different from other people is the order of that string.”
“Chemical compounds are real things. They have weight and mass.”
“And the films you stream aren’t real things?”
“Not in the same way the actors who made them are, no.” I closed my eyes, tried to calm myself. This was ridiculous. I was having an existential debate with a computer program. And I was barely holding my own—that was the pathetic part. p. 22-23

Later, their fighting starts to spin out of control and some of his accounts are hacked or deleted: offensive comments left for friends and colleagues, important job offers are declined, he can’t use his credit cards, etc. The he finds out the FBI are after him. . . .
I don’t know if it was my aviation background that made me appreciate Kitty Hawk by Alan Smale so much, or whether it is just a really good story. The story is set in a parallel world where Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneer, has died in a glider crash. Orville, the surviving brother, is joined at Kitty Hawk by their sister Katherine. Rather than going home to bury their brother the two continue the project.
There may be a problem here for some readers in that the events of the story (spoiler) are essentially a feminist reimagining of that famous powered flight: that may or may not stretch historical credulity. Having said that, there is mention of Katherine’s suffrage work to counterbalance the prejudice exhibited by the locals in the story (and, in our timeline, there were other famous female aviation pioneers: Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, etc.¹). In any event I liked this a lot, although it could have done without the superfluous half page epilogue (a parallel world data-dump). For a relatively quiet, low-key story it has an, ah, asymmetrically exciting climax.
A story which falls between the two above and the merely good is Cupido by Rich Larson. We have seen in some of his previous stories how he can, almost effortlessly it seems, combine SFnal ideas with intensely human situations (Water Scorpions, Asimov’s SF, October-November 2016). He does it again here.
Cupido starts in an elevator with Chelo releasing a pheromone to make the woman alongside him physically attracted to a man who is waiting on the ground floor. After this, Chelo heads back home and begins work on another client’s job, this one to ensure a woman’s daughter is attracted to a lawyer the mother deems suitable marriage material. Chelo manufactures the pheromone using a process that first requires him to get near to the target so he can sample their DNA.

He sees her. Unslinging a satchel from her shoulder, dressed all in black except for a pair of bright red sneakers. She’s not beautiful. Not in the way Marcel understands beauty, in aggregate symmetry and hip-to-waist ratio and neoteny. Her face is pinched. Her dark hair is drawn back too tight and then frizzes out at the back of her head. She sits down on a bench next to an old man in a blue coverall, gives him a brief business-like nod. Plucks one earbud out to exchange remarks about the heat she doesn’t seem to feel.
Her fingers whir all the while, peeling her orange in one perfect spiral, and when she laughs at something Marcel can’t hear, head tilted backward with the sunlight shredded onto her cheek, he feels his pulse speed up. He feels his chest go tight. p. 107-108

The rest of the tale details his production of the pheromone and an increasing infatuation with her. At the end of the story we find out what he decides to do. It is impressive how much Larson manages to pack into a story that is less than four thousand words.

There is a large group of good stories in this issue: Three Can Keep a Secret. . . by Bill Johnson and Gregory Frost is an amusing piece, as you can probably guess from this eyeball-grabbing beginning:

“I am naked!”
Slowly, in the center of the surveillance center, I turned about on almost dainty feet (well, compared to my equatorial zone), arms raised over my head. My chins thrust up and out while my immense belly shook and quivered and essentially hid all the essentials—by which I do not mean the wedding tackle Prospero the Great had likely not viewed with his own eyes in at least a decade.
The technician behind the scanner said, “Sir, this is really—”
“I hope you are recording this. Can you all see me?” A ridiculous question, I grant you. “I am NAKED!”
You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? quipped Leroy, his voice as dry and sarcastic as my real Uncle Leroy’s had been when he was alive.
And let’s be fair. I was.
Uncle Leroy, who taught me the Three-Card Monte for my fifth birthday, had also invested me with the wisdom of the true gaffler. Among those gems: When you want to be invisible, make the loudest, biggest scene imaginable. Everyone will watch, transfixed by shock and their own inability to disengage, as you scar them for life.
Of course, what they remember will be what you wanted them to see, which they’ll work terribly hard not to revisit. Bravo, Uncle Leroy.
“Prospero the Great has nothing to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of. Bring on your frigid medical instruments. Pull on your cold nitrile gloves. Prospero will not blanch. Prospero will never lose his dignity!”
And now for the jewel in the crown. I faced the female security officer who had ordered me to strip in the first place. She wore the kind of grim smile that usually accompanies an impending attack of dyspepsia.
“You!” I turned and bent, hands upon thighs like a sumo wrestler, and thrust my naked backside at her. “Inspect me now!” The officer yanked her head away as if a snake had lunged at it.
The scanner technician interjected a strangled cry, “He’s clean!”
I drew myself up stiffly. “Of course I am clean. Prospero bathes daily.”
The officer pointed behind herself. “Get the hell out of here,” she said, exhibiting remarkable control.
The plasteel exit wall swiveled open and I jiggled proudly out. I leered at her as I went past. p. 48-49

It later materialises that Prospero the Great has hijacked an assassin’s identity to visit this off-world colony. Here there is (a) a scientist who has invented slippery muons, (b) a crime syndicate who owns him and the lucrative manufacturing process, and (c) a girlfriend who is a threat to their control. Hence the requirement for an assassin. The plot is, to be honest, rather contrived and not entirely convincing, but the writers set off so many grenades along the way (mostly in the form of technological devices that Prospero deploys to deceive the various actors involved) that it makes for an entertaining enough story.
A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension by Andrea M. Pawley is set on an orbital elevator (one of those technological Jack and the Beanstalk things) and concerns a couple who work half way up it, and Olive, their surrogate daughter android. Since getting Olive, the mother has become pregnant, and the android is now a point of contention between her and ‘second grandma,’ who is visiting.
This is all narrated from Olive’s point of view and reads like half hard SF/half fairy story, although the latter is due to Olive’s perception rather than any actuality:

On the other side of the habitat shield wall, light flared in the vacuum of space. The debris being targeted by mid-point station lasers wasn’t visible. Not like twenty-eight days before, when Olive and Mama had watched thousands of laser flashes break the last of the abandoned Space Station Agarwal into pieces small enough that the elevator and its habitats wouldn’t be compromised. Since then, sparkling metal dust had been osmosing through the habitat shield wall and sprinkling everything.
Mama said it was fairy dust and it had magical powers. At lights-out on the day the fairy dust came, Mama told a new bedtime story about an android engineer princess who lived at the top of the elevator. All the android engineer princess’s friends were fairies, and the princess talked with them all day long, especially when the king and queen were away working at mid-point station, where they kept passengers and cargo safe. p. 113

Although this is an unusual mix, I enjoyed this one, and its sentimental ending probably helped.
The Wisdom of the Group by Ian R. MacLeod is about a man called Samuel, a ‘super-predictor’ who works as part of a team with similar skills—which are further enhanced with futuristic technology. They use their abilities to make money on the financial markets. At the beginning of the story the group make what will turn out to be a problematical investment and, just after they complete their purchase, Samuel has an uneasy premonition.
The rest of the piece details his wealthy lifestyle, his deteriorating relationship with a lover, Luke, and his temporary exclusion from the group after the investment fails.
At the end (spoiler) he finds himself alone in the woods (Luke has left their picnic after an argument) with a penetrating leg fracture. The couple’s dogs, who have killed a deer earlier in the story, are ominously circling . . . .
This is all slickly done, as you would expect from MacLeod, but I wondered if this is really anything more than a ‘bash the bankers’ story, with its unsympathetic and obnoxious millionaire protagonist getting his comeuppance.
Goner by Gregory Norman Bossert starts off with a slightly confusing scene (the writer mentions an image he had some time ago in the introduction) that involves a number of kids arriving at one of their houses to find an altered-looking man at the end of an orange tether:

A man floated below the cathedral ceiling, just under the skylight, anchored by an orange cable that ran from his chest down into the machines. A sketch of a man, rather, a scribbled web of lines in charcoal black against the white wall. Like the software they had in class, the Visible Man, when you toggled off everything but the nervous system. Like the tube documentaries, the protest memes, the sims.
“Crap on a crutch. It’s a—” Nok said.
“He,” Char said. “He’s Colin R. Clark.”
Drum walked across the room, still looking up, and put his hand on the orange cable. Char could see it vibrating under the tension. Drum mouthed a syllable, airless, but Char knew what it was: “Dad.” p. 144

The man is Drum’s father, a nanomodified Pilot who is one of the crew of a spaceship that has been out to the periphery of the solar system.
The story subsequently centres on one of Drum’s friends called Char, who has an obsession with Pilots, and his home life (he recently lost his father). Char acquires some of the nano-material that Drum’s father’s body is made of and inserts a splinter of it into his finger. . . .
This has a rather inconclusive ending which, with the opening scene, makes it a slightly flawed if nonetheless interesting story.

The other stories include Number Thirty-Nine Skink by Suzanne Palmer, which is about a bio-manufacturing robot left on an alien planet. As it roves around the planet it makes various creatures, such as the titular one, and samples and investigates the local life. Its human technician/operator is dead, and the machine appears to be alone in this alien ecology. Then one morning it wakes from standby mode and finds scratches on its body. . . .
As the rest of the story unfolds (spoiler), we discover what caused this and why the machine was left on the planet. It finds another machine that has been gutted and, when it finds the native species responsible in its inner compartments the next morning, develops a number of biological predators to kill them. At this point a copy of Mike, its dead technician, gets it to desist and together they depart. This isn’t an entirely convincing ending.
The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going by Sarah Pinsker has an mistreated child creeping out of a normally locked basement room and climbing the stairs into the sunlight, and so, initially at least, it reminded me of Richard Matheson’s Born of Man and Woman (F&SF, Summer 1950). Once the young girl is on the landing she remembers a man coming to visit her mother the night before she was imprisoned. Moreover, she then recalls that the happiness of the city is dependent on a child suffering. She (spoiler) goes back down the stairs to save anyone else having to replace her and suffer the same fate. If this is an allegory then I’ve missed the point but, whatever, it is a dark and effective piece; there’s just not that much to it.
Invasion of the Saucer-Men by Dale Bailey is another of his stories that involves serious treatment of a B-movie trope (see, for instance, his superior novelette from the March 2016 issue, I Married a Monster from Outer Space). This one takes the idea of teenagers making out when another arrives with reports of a flying saucer that has landed nearby.
After a reconnaissance that goes wrong they use one of the girls to lure the aliens to them.
The denouement involves the males of the group (spoiler) attacking the aliens, and the particularly savage killing of one of them by the narrator, an arrogant, bullying high school jock. We later find that the aliens have come in peace.
The characterisation of the lead character is quite well done but making this kind of character the focus of a story was always going to make for an unpleasant ending, which makes the whole thing a somewhat pointless ‘bad people do bad things’ piece.
After the Atrocity by Ian Creasey is about a woman scientist running a duplicating machine that is producing copies of a terrorist responsible for the ‘Atrocity’ so he can repeatedly be interrogated. She starts having qualms about this, and ends up arguing with her original self (she is also a duplicate, produced to speed up the duplicating process). I think this is essentially a story about enhanced interrogation.
We Regret the Error by Terry Bisson is told through the medium of four pages worth or so of newspaper corrections:

HUMOR
A misspelling in a press release last week led our writers to incorrectly interpret as parody the revision of the Turing Protocols to include “refusal to be tested” as an identifier of consciousness. The press release was not from The Onion but The Ynion, a publication of Singularity Watch. The Turing Protocol revision was auto-implemented by a security subsection of Internetpol in response to certain undisclosed anomalies in the military sector of the Cloud. p. 156

In amongst the detail there are hints that an AI may be loose in the cloud.

The last of the fiction in this issue is Tao Zero, a novella by Damien Broderick (presumably the title is a play on Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero but I don’t know if there is any other connection). For the first third or so this story is narrated from the point of view of Ship, who was born shortly after two genius teenagers won the lottery—his mother promptly fell pregnant after they ’celebrated,’ and he was later adopted. This section tells of an energy attack on New York and Ship’s extraction through a multi-dimensional tesseract. This portal is manned by what seems to be an advanced version of a robot AI called BandAid that Ship had as a child. There are various other matters touched on in this section, partially summed up by this passage:

I realize that I have left any readers of this brief memoir dangling absurdly between my tesseract adventure, the fall of the Infinite Corridor, the tale of Bandaid my excellent robot dog, and my parents’ passage into the Tao, like some twenty-first century Tristram Shandy (but look, at least I did better than Laurence Sterne: I managed to get myself conceived and born fairly early on).

Up until this point I thought that it was an OK-goodish piece, albeit some of it was over my head (there is a tendency to throw science concepts and vocabulary at the reader like gravel: I still don’t understand this sentence: ‘I was privileged to immerse myself in these records, captured in the antique cellphones they carried everywhere, as everyone did back then, before the gallop of technology immanentized the eschaton . . .’ My Italics.)
Unfortunately, the viewpoint character changes about half way through to Ship’s girlfriend Felicity, and the story rapidly heads downhill. Part of problem is that we know from the first section that Felicity is going to turn up and save Ship so there is no dramatic tension. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if there was something else of interest going on but all that Felicity and the other characters seem to do before the rescue is rush around pointlessly and chatter endlessly about the Tao and various other scientific matters—in between, that is, stopping for a couple of meals and picking up a classic car for their journey through the Tao. This passage perhaps will give you a flavour:

Mariah Essington was bipolar in a extremely disturbing way. When she was good, she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid and sad and suicidal and had to be tucked away for whatever the latest treatment turned out to be. But I loved her when I was little, loved her exuberance and flashing intelligence. I remember her explanation of the dyadic bond between her and my papa. “You must understand, Felicity, that there is an eternal tension between natural kinds and what we think the world is built out of, which is mostly nonsense we make up.”
I grinned up at her and kicked the wooden horse I’d tumbled off. “I kicked it, Mommy. It’s there, for sure.”
“My little empiricist! Come here for a hug and a big kiss.” She wrapped her arms around me tightly and gave me a big smooch on the cheek. “If the world has an autonomous structure, and if the organ of thought is largely pre-set by evolution to the constraints of nature, then at some probably inaccessible level, there might after all be powerful imperatives that shape and limit cognition, so we may learn to carve the world at its joints. And that structure is the Tao.”
Of course I didn’t memorize her words on the spot, but I know her style of thinking, and that captures it pretty well.
She said, “This is how your father and I mesh so well together.” I wasn’t so sure of that; he seemed to be gone a lot of the time. “I’m emic and he’s etic. Do you remember those words, sugar?”
“Sure. Emic is warm-blooded and poetic, while etic is, uh, reductive and scientistic. Idiographic versus nomothetic.”
“Don’t show off, pet.” p. 184

Quite.
I’d lost my patience with this long before the passage above and had started skimming, something that won’t have added to my appreciation of the piece. (And I may not have been the only one skimming: shouldn’t it be ‘an extremely’ and ‘very, very’?²) In retrospect I should have given up on it. Zero points for Tau Zero.

As for the non-fiction this issue, the cover, for Suzanne Palmer’s story, is by Tomislav Tikulin. I’m not sure whether I like this one or not: part of me thinks that it looks like something from National Geographic, and that there isn’t much there apart from the lizards (the background is pretty nondescript); on the other hand it is rather eye-catching.
James Patrick Kelley (Things Change) and Robert Silverberg (Forty Years!) both contribute pleasant but anodyne accounts of their decades long involvement with the magazine; Kelley also contributes an ‘On the Net’ column called Screen Dreams that covers SF stories and books that have been made into movies.
There are Poems by Marge Simon, Sara Polsky, Jarod K. Anderson, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, and Robert Borski. None of these did anything for me but I thought the Polsky was OK.
Next Issue states that the May-June magazine will have a ‘short novel’ by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and, I see, a story by Peter Wood (author of the smart and amusing Academic Circles in the September issue).
On Books by Peter Heck gives the impression that his favourites are at the start of the essay (of the novels anyway, there is a review of Michael Swanwick’s new collection at the end), which would suggest that Crosstalk by Connie Willis, The Cold Eye by Laura Anne Gilman, and Fallout by Harry Turtledove are worth looking out for. “Not So Much,” Said the Cat is the title of the collection by Michael Swanwick.
SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss brings up the rear with its SASEs and landline answering machine. No email, no webpage. Is this a 40^th anniversary tribute?
Talking of 40^th anniversary tributes, I should also add that, again, several of the stories have autobiographical notes from the writers. Although they mostly follow the same template, there are two or three that are of some interest: I just wish they would put them at the end—buried in the middle of the story text they are very distracting.

Overall a fairly good, but very mixed, issue.

1. There is a list of ten female aviation pioneers here.
2. I admit that I should be the last person to pontificate about grammatical or orthographical matters: my commas litter my blog posts like confetti on a church path after a wedding. . . .

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Crimson Birds of Small Miracles • short story by Sean Monaghan ♥♥♥
Tagging Bruno • novelette by Allen Steele ♥♥♥+
Still Life with Abyss • short story by Jim Grimsley ♥♥
Fatherbond • novelette by Tom Purdom ♥♥
Winter Timeshare • short story by Ray Nayler ♥♥♥
The Catastrophe of Cities • novelette by Lisa Goldstein ♥♥♥
Pieces of Ourselves • short story by Robert R. Chase ♥♥
Destination • short story by Jack Skillingstead ♥♥
The Meiosis of Cells and Exile • novelette by Octavia Cade ♥♥♥
Starphone • short story by Stephen Baxter ♥♥
Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks • short story by John Alfred Taylor ♥♥♥
The Speed of Belief • novella by Robert Reed ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Forty Years! • editorial by Sheila Williams
Two Cheers for Piltdown Man • essay by Robert Silverberg
Ask Me Anything • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Jane Yolen (2), John Richard Trtek, Marian Moore, Robert Frazier (2)
On Books • by Paul Di Filippo
Thirty-First Annual Readers Award
Index (Asimov’s, January-February 2017)
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

This is Asimov’s Science Fiction’s 40^th anniversary year and the celebrations are one of the subjects of Forty Years!, Sheila Williams’ editorial. First, it mentions the anniversary and lists a number of writers who will be appearing; secondly, she briefly describes her first encounter with the magazine (the Fall or Winter 1978 issue, the illustration is of the latter); finally, there is an announcement that the magazine is changing to bimonthly publication, which will enable them to keep subscription rates the same and use more original cover art, amongst other things. Why they felt the need to keep rates the same for longer isn’t explained, and I suspect the information given is just the tip of a larger financial iceberg.
With this change to a bimonthly schedule, the magazine has grown from (excluding covers) 112 pp. to 208 pp., which would appear to be two issues’ worth of fiction and a little more than one issues’ worth of non-fiction (the book review column seems longer, and Kelly’s column will now appear each issue).
A back of the fag packet calculation shows a reduction from 1288 pp. a year to 1248 pp., a reduction of 3.2%.

The fiction leads off with the cover story, Crimson Birds of Small Miracles by Sean Monaghan. This is about a father and his two daughters who are on an alien planet called Ariosto to see an art exhibit. One of the daughters, Jessie, suffers from a degenerative neurological disease and requires a mechanical exoskeleton. Most of the story focusses on the father’s concern for his dying daughter, and also the friction between him and the other daughter Matilda.
Shilinka, the artist responsible for the installation, has agreed to meet the family, and later that night they go to one of the viewing platforms to watch it: thousands of coloured robotic birds swarm at sunset over an artificial lake.
The scene where they view the birds and the ending of the story is affecting and, like the rest, well done. However (spoiler) it is also sad to the point of being quite depressing.
In terms of magazine construction I think it was a mistake leading off with a story that has such a downer ending. After finishing this one, rather than being set up to carry on reading the magazine, I went and did something else. Not quite the response you want from a reader one story into your magazine, I would suggest.

What would have been a much better lead off story for the issue would have been Tagging Bruno by Allen Steele, which is a readable, entertaining, exciting and upbeat tale. It is a novelette in his ‘Coyote’ series and, the introduction adds, the first to appear in the magazine since Galaxy Blues was serialised in 2007. I haven’t read any of these before but that wasn’t an impediment to reading this one.
It tells of an expedition on the planet Coyote to tag boids, a large—and highly dangerous—avian life form. The university science team undertaking this task includes an unpleasant, and alcoholic, professor called Blair and his two assistants. They are joined by Sawyer Lee, a retired General of the Corps of Exploration and a man who is widely respected planet-wide.
After travelling for a day or so in their beaten up ex-military hovercraft they successfully tag their first female boid. However, tension develops between Sawyer and the professor about how the latter is running the operation. Matters deteriorate even further when they try to tag a huge male boid, the leader of a large, aggressive flock, and find they have bitten off more than they can chew.
The story has a bit of a smeerp¹ problem in that it could almost equally have been about tagging lions in Africa but, that said, the writing makes this alien world come alive. The suggestion made by Sawyer in the penultimate paragraph about a name for one of the captured boids is appropriately mordant.

Still Life with Abyss by Jim Grimsley is about a science crew from an alternative Earth who study the differences in the multiple realities that spin off from various events. They focus in particular on one individual called Austin Bottoms, whose life is static and produces no forks of differing reality. The eerie, unchanging quality of his life has become almost an article of religious belief to the scientist investigating him and this eventually leads to her recall home.
There isn’t much of a story here, more an extended description of a philosophical idea.

Fatherbond by Tom Purdom has an interesting introduction that quotes from a letter sent to the editor:

“I turned eighty in April, and on July 4, I noted that the United States was 240 years old. So I can now claim I’ve lived through one third of American history. Bob Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and Ben Bova can make the same claim, but I may be the first to do the arithmetic.
“I’ve generally avoided faster than light stories in the past. I’ve only written one, in fact, my 1964 Ace Double I Want the Stars. So I thought I would try one and see where it led me. I’m now working on a second that is moving in directions that are even more unexpected.
“I started ‘Fatherbond’ before an accident caused spinal cord damage that impaired my diaphragm and both my arms—I got hit from behind by a bicycle while I was walking along the Schuylkill River and spent four and a half months in hospitals and rehab centers coping with the consequences. I’m still recovering the full use of my arms, but I’m now living pretty much the way I was before the accident, working on new stories and continuing to attend concerts and write reviews for Philadelphia’s Broad Street Review. I’ve been advised to give up wine while my spinal cord is healing, but I can type, and I have music, reading, and good company. What else do you need?” p. 55

I hope I have the same commendable outlook on life if I live as long.
As to the story itself, a family group leave our solar system in the far future and set up a colony on a new planet. However, the planet is controlled by an entity that describes itself as the Custodian, and the newcomers are permitted to develop only a certain area of the planet. The Custodian’s race, having disrupted evolutionary development on other planets, now restricts development of the worlds it controls to stop other races causing damage.
The rest of the story centres on one of the family members called Rostoff, who is more aggressive than the rest, and his repeated attempts to build outside their permitted zone. Initially the Custodian dissolves the devices Rostoff puts into the soil; after further attempts it puts his wife Capri into a coma. Rostoff’s father, Yang, helps him come up with a plan to attack the Custodian, which they believe is located in a nearby ring system.
This is an interesting and engaging piece but unfortunately it grinds to a halt at the end. That, or I missed the point of Yang and Rostoff’s final exchange.

Winter Timeshare by Ray Nayler is set in a future Istanbul and tells of two women who meet there every year. They work as disembodied employees of the highrises; on holiday they occupy ‘blanks,’ bodies that are available for hire to people such as them. This year Regina has the body of a man, whereas Ilkay, who has a job in security, has a woman’s. They re-establish their relationship against a backdrop of the winter weather in Istanbul and the hostility of some of the natives for users of blank bodies. This latter antipathy materialises again at the end of the piece, after Ilkay is seconded by one of the local Inspectors for a few days to investigate a security matter.
There isn’t much story to this one but the setting and characters are convincingly done.

They had met here, so many years ago. It had been a different Istanbul, then—a city dominated by a feeling of optimism, Regina thought. No, not dominated—optimism could never dominate the city’s underlying feeling of melancholy, of nostalgia for what was always lost. But the city had been brightened, somehow, by optimism.
For years, there had been a feeling, ephemeral, like a bright coat of whitewash over stone. The relays were in place on a hundred possible new worlds, the massive arrays on Istanbul’s distant hills were firing the consciousnesses of the first explorers into interstellar space. It was in that time that they had met. They had met on a Sunday, at the Church of St. George. Regina, who was not religious, had gone to a service. She had been trying things out then—meditation, chanting, prayer—all of it a failure. Where does one go when one has lost everything, risen back from nothing? But she found the drone of the priest’s voice and the smell of incense—a thousand years and more of incense soaked into the gold leaf and granite—comforting. The flat and meaningfully staring icons, the quietude. In those first years of adjustment, it had been all she had. pp. 84-85

The Catastrophe of Cities by Lisa Goldstein tells of two girls in Los Angeles who notice odd looking buildings:

At first I couldn’t see it. Then I noticed the house had a shield, but not like the ones we’d seen before. It was bigger than them, for one thing, about two feet high and a foot wide. And inside—inside it had a relief of some animal with, well, with tentacles. Someone was riding it, a hunter with a spear or a lance pointed downward, ready to stab something.
We stared at it. We weren’t afraid, not then—more impressed, I think, delighted that someone had broken with the conformity of the neighborhood. It seemed evidence that growing up didn’t have to mean becoming dull and conventional. It made me feel obscurely hopeful.
Except for the shield it looked like every other house in Los Angeles—stucco, vaguely Spanish, a lawn in front. As we stood watching it, though, it revealed more of its strangeness. The walls seemed to curve outward, but so slightly that we couldn’t be sure. Ivy covered parts of it, in patches.
And it looked as though no one lived there, though I couldn’t have said why. The paint wasn’t peeling; the grass was green and cut to a precise stubble. There seemed to be a patina of dust over the outside walls, even over the ivy, but it was more than that. I got the impression that the house had stood there for years, centuries, drowsing in the sun, going about its business—though what business could it possibly have, what went on behind that facade?
A curtain in one of the windows twitched, and we ran screaming. pp. 89-90

One day they decide to enter one of the houses and explore. What they find are a number of doors and passageways that lead to other strange houses.
The rest of the story has three strands to it. There is their investigation of the various houses on a number of occasions; there is an account of the two of them growing up and the estrangement that begins when one of the girls reaches puberty; finally, there is the overarching narrative of one of the two women trying to track down the other years later by revisiting the houses, or what is left of them.
Initially, this conjures up a other-world as tantalising as that of Jack Vance’s Green Magic. The problem it has though is that it over (and sometimes unconvincingly) explains this world and what has happened to her friend. And yes, I am aware of the irony of this criticism from someone who perpetually doesn’t ‘get it’ and pleads to be spoon-fed. Notwithstanding this, it is an engaging and readable tale.

Pieces of Ourselves by Robert R. Chase is, for the most part, about an ongoing terrorist attack on the moon, and a woman scientist who thwarts it. She is aided by radio messages from a security officer who tells her where to go and what to do.
Framing this is an investigation that includes interviews with her about her actions as well as analysis of an incongruity in the recordings of the incident. These tapes (spoiler) suggest that the security officer was making transmissions for fifteen minutes after he had died. The story then spirals off, unfortunately, into an unconvincing datadump/theory about memes and neuroscience.

Destination by Jack Skillingstead starts off with Brad, a gaming designer in the future working quietly in his office. His manager turns up and tells him that he is to go out in an ‘egg’ car to play Destination, i.e. have all his electronic devices, etc., taken from him and be sent to a random destination where he needs to find an artefact representative of the area. This little jaunt is management’s way of ‘shaking out the cobwebs.’
His journey soon turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare when the car clears the city boundaries for the less safe ‘outside’ and appears as if it isn’t going to stop. Not only is he locked in the car but the vehicle won’t communicate with him.
Eventually (spoiler), he arrives back at his home town, and in a local cafe discovers things about the reality of life outside that unsettle him. Finally, he is contacted by the resistance and asked to work for them to ensure the forthcoming revolution is as smooth and peaceful as it can be.
There is some good stuff in here about the haves and have-nots but it reads like the first part of a longer story.

The Meiosis of Cells and Exile by Octavia Cade is a novelette about the (real-life) Russian scientist Lina Stern, who was exiled to Dzhambul in 1952. During her imprisonment and subsequent deportation she talks to three aspects of herself who ‘extrude’ from her body: The Academician, The Child and The Scientist. This is described as a hallucination at one point, so the story isn’t really fantasy or SF but could probably pass for the former:

In prison Lina kept the memory of the Academy of Sciences within her: a place of reason and learning in walls that privileged neither, somewhere to keep the biochemistry and medical research that had occupied her decades. That focus helped to extrude her former self, and that self stayed with her, talked to her in the dark night when she was too cold and too tired to sleep. A daughter self, a parcel of Lina-information transferred and prioritized for coping. One that hid beside the door when the guards peered through it for checks, seeing Lina alone on her bed even if they were suspicious of conversation, even if they’d heard two voices and one of them stronger than the other, better fed.
When the footsteps of the guards faded the Academician folded her hands and observed, sat upright on the thin little bed when Lina lay under the covers and shivered, tried not to be seen shivering. She was old and took cold easily, and cold could be taken as fear.
Lina was afraid, but it was a fine fear and finely judged. Too little and they would try to frighten her more. Too much and she would lose herself. That was a satisfaction she did not wish to give.
To keep her fear in check she bound herself to the Academician each morning as a reminder before the questioning began again—reabsorbed her flesh so that when she was taken again for questioning the cell held a single occupant. Not being able to see the other made her feel less unclean. The Academician wore nicely laundered clothes and her hair was tidy. She didn’t need to comb it with her fingers, didn’t need to wear dirty stockings before those who looked for any weakness, who enjoyed making her feel grubby and small. pp. 123-124

This merging of the hallucinations and the grim imprisonment and transportation that Lina endures is quite well done, albeit densely and repetitively told (sometimes a little too much so). It is also heavy going at times—reading like Russian literature not only in its subject matter but its style—so be warned.

Starphone by Stephen Baxter, according to the introduction, is part of a new ‘Xeelee’ series project along with two forthcoming novels. It concerns a precocious child called Dee who is gifted an AI that has been passed down through the generations. Dee lives in a dome called New Miami 4 on an Earth that is blighted by increasing sea levels. Meanwhile, the super-rich live outside the dome and on the moon etc., and avail themselves of anti-senescence treatments.
One of these super-rich near-immortals is a relative called Dee Cushman Casella, who is seventy-six but looks twenty-five, and she visits Dee. During their conversation some of Dee’s questions are answered (information transfer from outside the dome is controlled). This includes the older relative giving her information about a Kuiper anomaly to her question about the Fermi Paradox (if there are aliens in the universe why haven’t they showed up).
This knowledge (spoiler) sets Dee on a course of action that, while futile, encourages her older relative into believing that Dee’s generation may be the one to sort out humanity’s problems. The problem with her ultimately pointless course of action, unfortunately, is that it rather deflates the story.

Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks by John Alfred Taylor concerns a couple who go to stay at their beach house, possibly for the last time as there is a major tropical storm headed towards the coast. Previous weather events have caused a lot of damage up to and including the destruction of their neighbour’s house, and their plan is to stay a couple of days and leave before the storm hits. As it happens the storm changes direction and, as they will only catch the edge of it, they decide to stay.
The piece is set in a near future world that has been affected by global warming and it is a pleasant and interesting slice of life that has an elegiac feel to it (apart from the couple thinking it will be their last visit the husband, like the writer, is a recently retired English professor).

The Speed of Belief by Robert Reed starts with a young man called Rococo having the formative experience of having his body killed/destroyed in a terraforming landslide and being stuck inside his ceramic brain until he is recovered and repaired. The story then cuts to him as an adult, now a diplomat, along with a woman called Mere and a Luddy (Luddite) called Amund. They are all trudging across a planet having a peculiar conversation about being water or salt. There are several mentions of a Great Ship (which places it in Reed’s eponymous series I presume).
It is not a particularly engaging start.
We then flashback to a Great Ship captain arriving at Amund’s community explaining that the ship has found a planet with sentient rivers

‘“Where-the-rivers-live.”‘ She said, “That’s our best translation of the world’s name. A large terran planet. There’s a dense atmosphere, minimal seasons. More ocean than land, but every continent has a spine of young mountains. The natives possess a vibrant, relatively advanced toolkit of technologies. In that, nothing is unique. Except for the fact that the population is a little under one thousand individuals, and each citizen is a living, sentient river.” p. 163

The Great Ship leaders want one of the rivers to join the ship, and agree a deal with the rivers that will let humanity settle several of the planets and moons of their solar system. There are two problems the Great Ship faces: first, the planet is on the edge of their streakships’ range envelope; secondly, the rivers require a blood sacrifice in exchange for the representative, planets and moons they are going to provide.
One of the individuals of this Luddite society, Amund, volunteers to be the sacrificial victim and he departs with two of the ship’s crew, the near-immortals Rococo and Mere.
The three of them are confined to the streakship for years on their journey to the rivers.
The rest of the story (spoiler) deals with their arrival at the planet, where there has been a civil war amongst the rivers, their contact with one of the survivors, and a long and eventful sea journey undertaken to get to their return streakship.
There a number of things that didn’t work for me in this piece. Apart from an unconvincing plot—I either never understood or was convinced by the motivations of Amund or the rivers—the characters are a generally unsympathetic lot. Rococo comes over as arrogant, whereas Amund veers between being gnomic, surly and perverse. Finally, there is a general air of gloominess hanging over the whole thing.
That said, the rivers idea is quite a good one, and there are parts that read reasonably well.

As mentioned above the cover, for Crimson Birds of Small Miracles, is an original piece by Maurizio Manzieri, and a good one too.
The rest of the non-fiction is the usual mix. Ask Me Anything by James Patrick Kelly is an entertaining piece that starts with a conversation between four digital assistants, Siri, Cortana, Alexa (Amazon Echo) and Google Now, before discussing these programs. He ends by reflecting that it is easy to forget that you are talking to a multinational corporation when you are using a personal name to ‘wake’ the programs. He finishes by checking that there is nothing wrong with multinationals:

JPK: Are you evil?
GN: (silence)
Cortana: My self-characterization is a little different.
Siri: Not really.
Alexa: No.
There you have it. Nothing to worry about! p. 11

Two Cheers for Piltdown Man by Robert Silverberg is an interesting column about the Piltdown Man hoax. There are a seven pieces of Poetry in the issue and, for a change, I quite liked some of it: Jane Yolen’s two contributions to be specific (the first isn’t SF but the second is a black fairy tale) and I thought Marian Moore’s was OK. There is the SF Conventional Calendar, and a longer than usual On Books by Paul Di Filippo. The most likely sounding prospects for me are Harry Turtledove’s The House of Daniel and Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit (a story of whose I read and liked in Beyond Ceaseless Skies recently).
Unusual items this month are: the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, which shows the magazine has a print circulation of around 13,700-14,000 copies; the Thirty-First Annual Readers Award, which will be the first I have voted in;² and an Index (Asimov’s, January-February 2017) for the past year.
Finally, as part of the 40^th anniversary year theme, quotes have been solicited from the writers to accompany their stories and are (mostly) printed in an accompanying small box (all apart from Jim Grimsley and Robert Chase who are quoted in their introductions, Purdom and Taylor don’t offer anniversary greetings but describe their current circumstances in theirs). This sounds like a good idea but they nearly all provide banal soundbites (four of them are ‘thrilled’). If any of the writers have significant anecdotes or recollections from their time with the magazine I’d love to hear them but these short comments are a complete waste of time.

In conclusion, reading this first of the larger double issues was something of a forced march (rather like reading this 4,000+ word review, I suspect). This was either due to the stories’ subject matter (a number deal with either depressing or conceptual/philosophical subjects), the general tone (e.g., Reed) or the style (e.g., Cade). I realise it can’t all be fluff, but I think there should have been a more easily digestible mix.

1. The term ‘smeerp’ comes from James Blish’s The Issue at Hand, p. 104:
   “Squirrel Cage” by Robert Sheckley is another of the interminable AAA Ace series, this time so awful as to read like a crude burlesque of all the others. Why should a man who wants his farm decontaminated deliberately withhold crucial information about the nature of the infestation from the firm he’s hired to do the exterminating? Why does this exact thing happen in all the AAA Ace stories? Why don’t the partners of AAA Ace wise up? As usual, the problem is “solved” by pulling three rabbits out of the author’s hat (though of course he doesn’t call them rabbits—they look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction). It is nothing short of heart-breaking to see a once-promising writer settled down into the production of such pure trash. Sheckley’s work has been getting lazier and lazier since the slick magazines took him up, but I think few of us expected to see him hitting rock bottom as soon as this. [To his credit, he bounced, though it took a long time.]
2. I was going to list my picks for the Reader’s Award here but, having looked at the ratings I’ve given to the various stories, I think that is the subject of a separate post.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Alfred • short story by Lisa Goldstein ♥♥
Sepoy • novelette by Tom Purdom ♥♥♥
The Man in the Red Suit • novelette by Diane Mapes ♥♥
The Walk • short story by Greg Egan ♥♥♥
Thanatrope • short story by Mark W. Tiedemann ♥
Second Chance • novelette by Mary Rosenblum ♥♥
The Sound of the River • short story by M. Shayne Bell ♥♥♥
The Nutcracker Coup • novelette by Janet Kagan ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Nutcracker Coup • cover by David Cherry
Interior artwork • by Laurie Harden, Steve Cavallo, Alan M. Clark, Bob Walters, John Johnson, David A. Cherry
Letters
Poetry • by Robert Frazier & James Patrick Kelly, Bonita Kale, Lawrence Schimel
Next Issue
On Books • by Baird Searles
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

In my initial Xmas covers post I omitted to list a number of festive efforts by Asimov’s SF. This magazine regularly had/has a ‘Special Holiday Issue,’ and I remember Connie Willis contributing seasonal stories to several of these but couldn’t remember any Xmas covers. Well, I found eight of them.¹
This one was the third of the Asimov’s Science Fiction titles (the magazine had recently changed its name from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine) and appeared after a double-size November issue, which was a Isaac Asimov tribute issue (he had passed away earlier that year).

The first short story is Alfred by Lisa Goldstein, and this is a low-key account of a twelve year old girl who meets a man, or rather ghost, in the park. Their occasional conversations alternate with scenes from her family life: the parents are concentration camp survivors, and she has a perpetually scared younger brother. At the end of the story she figures out who the man is.

Sepoy by Tom Purdom is set on an Earth that is dominated by the alien Tucfra. A disabled man called Jason is the subject of a recruitment attempt by Marcia, who is a ‘seep,’ a human who works on behalf of the aliens. The word ‘seep’ is a corruption of ‘sepoy,’ and we get a rather clumsy historical data-dump about how the British in India managed to rule the continent with a limited number of collaborators: I would suggest that is what they would be called in this situation, i.e., collaborators, not seeps.
Shortly after her visit Jason is visited by two agents of the Confederation of New England who ask him to implicate her as an agent of the Tucfra. Or else….
This is a competent if fairly straightforward story.

The Man in the Red Suit by Diane Mapes is about a woman taking her drunken husband’s place as a department store Santa, and the strange photographer that is taking the kids’ photographs.
After she is discovered and sacked the photographer finds her in the mall bar, and it becomes apparent he knows a lot about her. As their conversation develops (spoiler) it becomes obvious he is an agent or aspect of Satan. He then shows her what the world would be like if he granted her wish of having never being born. First they visit her parent’s graves, where she sees her sister, and then they go to her house, to find her husband happily married.
The introduction describes this as a ‘nasty little Christmas story’ but it isn’t that—by the end it’s just depressing. The best Xmas stories have a good measure of grit in them (It’s a Wonderful Life) but this one is nearly all grit (mentioning that she caught her seven year old daughter drowning kittens is a particularly unpleasant detail in a Xmas story). Nice last line though.

The Walk by Greg Egan is a philosophically interesting but not entirely convincing story about a hitman called Carter taking his victim into the woods to kill him. During the walk Carter tries to convince his victim that it is inevitable that he is going to die but that it doesn’t matter:

For a moment, I just can’t speak. I’m fighting for my life—and he’s treating the whole thing like some abstract philosophical debate. I almost scream: Stop playing with me! Get it over with! But I don’t want it to be over.
And as long as I can keep him talking, there’s still the chance that I can rush him, the chance of a distraction, the chance of some miraculous reprieve. I take a deep breath. “Yes, other people will live on.”
“Billions. Perhaps hundreds of billions, in centuries to come.”
“No shit. I’ve never believed that the universe would vanish when I died. But if you think that’s some great consolation—”
“How different can two humans be?”
“I don’t know. You’re pretty fucking different.”
“Out of all those hundreds of billions, don’t you think there’ll be people who are just like you?”
“What are you talking about now? Reincarnation?”
“No. Statistics. There can be no ‘reincarnation’—there are no souls to be reborn. But eventually—by pure chance—someone will come along who’ll embody everything that defines you.”
I don’t know why, but the crazier this gets, the more hopeful I’m beginning to feel—as if Carter’s crippled powers of reasoning might make him vulnerable in other ways. I say, “That’s just not true. How could anyone end up with my memories, my experiences—”
“Memories don’t matter. Your experiences don’t define you. The accidental details of your life are as superficial as your appearance. They may have shaped who you are—but they’re not an intrinsic part of it. There’s a core, a deep abstraction—” p.85

Finally the hitman offers him a neural implant to prove his point….

Thanatrope by Mark W. Tiedemann tells of a woman called Chloe who is living with an organic robot that is a copy of her dead husband Victor. The relationship isn’t working and a third party called Peter, who was involved in Victor’s construction, visits to see if he can sort the problem.
This is well enough told but the reality portrayed in the story doesn’t convince.

Second Chance by Mary Rosenblum is about a doctor in Antarctica who is summoned to a Mars-mission training base that is located nearby. There she finds a woman called Sara who has severe frostbite to her hands and feet. The reason for her not having already been medevaced later materialises: (spoiler) the team have discovered an alien sphere. Sara tells the doctor she wants to go back out to it so she can return home….

The Sound of the River by M. Shayne Bell places an American in a town near a Niger River that has dried up and where there is a water shortage. While he is waiting to buy water from the water-sellers he goes to the local museum and discovers music by an artist that he liked as a boy.
He later tracks down the musician and goes to his house for coffee. While he is there he discovers the reason the musician never rerecorded his first album, and the explanation gives the story a satisfying holistic arc. I don’t think this is SF but it may be set in the near future (I didn’t notice).

The last story in the issue is a second seasonal tale by Janet Kagan. I can’t remember reading anything by this writer previously but note in passing that she was very popular with the Asimov’s SF readership. Her ‘Mirabile’ series was a favourite of theirs and she placed in the top three of the annual readers’ awards no less than eight times.
The Nutcracker Coup is a Xmas story set on the planet Rejoicing, where the dumpy natives have quills on their head and tails. The main character is Marianne, a member of the human diplomatic staff on the planet. When she goes into town (with an alien called Taleb to order glass balls from one of the other natives for her Xmas tree) she notices an alien who has had his quills clipped. Taleb informs her that this is because he said something that offended their ruler Halemtat.
The rest of the story tells of the developing civil unrest caused by Halemat’s oppressive behaviour, from the proliferation of glass balls similar to the ones Marianne ordered (which are adopted by the affected aliens to decorate the tips of their trimmed spines) to nutcrackers carved in an unflattering or satirical likeness of Halemtat or his Vizier.

He ripped away the paper as flamboyantly as Nick had—to expose the brightly colored nutcracker and a woven bag of nuts. Marianne held her breath. The problem had been, of course, to adapt the nutcracker to a recognizable Rejoicer version. She’d made the Emperor Halemtat sit back on his haunches, which meant far less adaptation of the cracking mechanism. Overly plump, she’d made him, and spiky. In his right hand, he carried an oversized pair of scissors—of the sort his underlings used for clipping quills. In his left, he carried a sprig of talemtat, that unfortunate rhyme for his name. Chornian’s eyes widened. Again, he rattled off a spate of Rejoicer too fast for Marianne to follow … except that Chornian seemed anxious. P.150

There is more unrest when the Earth team celebrate Martin Luther Day, and matters come to a climax the next Xmas.
This is a pleasant, feel-good story, but I didn’t think as highly of it as those who voted it the 1992 Hugo Award for best novelette.

The Cover by David Cherry is, obviously, for Janet Kagan’s novelette, and there are several pages of Interior artwork in this era of the magazine, none of which, sad to say, is that striking. Too many of them fill the page and seem rather dark and muddy, as if they were done with charcoal, or are just plain amateurish. The best is probably by Bob Walters.²
The Letters column starts with as an interesting letter from Jose E. Santiago of Waltham, Massachusetts, about Isaac Asimov’s editorial The Queen’s English. He tells of arriving in the country at age 18 and picking up a copy of Valley of the Dolls and reading it with the help of a Spanish-English dictionary. He later moved on to SF after being given a copy of Ringworld by a friend. Having started as a pot-washer he says he subsequently graduated school and works in electronics. He goes on to say ‘I’ll never speak or writer the Queen’s English.’ He is far too modest.
Other letters are on various topics, including a couple of extended responses to the annual reader ballot, one of which is by a current ‘Best of the Year’ editor Rich Horton.
I quite like one of the three poems, Christmas Day, Give or Take a Week by Lawrence Schimel, which places the Gods and Goddesses of Valhalla in Central Park after a meal in a hotel:

They spilled out of the Plaza Hotel into the soft white of Fimbulwinter.
The women first, clustering on the sidewalk:
Frigga in mink, Freya sable over feathers, imposing
silhouettes carved from the pale air,
the Lady Sif a heavenly face, blurred around the edges,
her ermine melting into the snow.
Their escorts joined them, having neatly dispatched the bill
with the razor-sharp edges of their Visas and American Expresses.
They adjusted 100 percent virgin wool scarves, rabbit-fur
    lined gloves,
buttoned cashmere overcoats against the cold, Hugo Boss,
    Emporio Armani.
Their stomachs full and warm, their minds
surfeited with dinner conversation,
they were oblivious to the weather, coming down
light and slow for now, like muted television static
shown at half speed.
Ragnarok had barely begun;
there would be plenty of time for blizzards later on
when the giants came out of Jotunheim. p.90

It continues in an equally absorbing way.
The Next Issue column states that the mid-December issue is on sale November 10^th, which made me wonder why this issue was the Holiday/Xmas one (further research shows it was on sale October 13^th). It doesn’t seem to make much sense having your Xmas/Holiday issue on sale a fortnight before Halloween….
On Books by Baird Searles starts with a review of Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which he didn’t seem to like that much. Of his other reviews, the one of Unwillingly to Earth by Pauline Ashwell made me want to seek it out, and his comments on the ‘Gormenghast’ trilogy by Mervyn Peake made me want to pick it up and give it another go (I got to the end of the first volume last time).

Overall, this is an OK issue, with nearly all of the fiction in the middle ground in terms of quality.

1. The Asimov’s SF Xmas covers can be found on the December 1987, 1988, 1992, 1997, 2001 (? two bright stars/novas/novae on the cover), 2004 & 2007, and Mid-December 1992 (two festive covers in 1992, although the second one is, like several of the others, quite restrained).
2. Artwork by Steve Cavallo: Artwork by Bob Walters:

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank (forthcoming)
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu (forthcoming)
Unknown, Tangent Online (forthcoming)
Various, Goodreads (forthcoming)

Fiction:
They Have All One Breath • novelette by Karl Bunker ♥♥♥♥
Empty Shoes by the Lake • short story by Gay Partington Terry ♥♥♥
HigherWorks • novelette by Gregory Norman Bossert ♥♥♥
How the Damned Live On • short story by James Sallis ♥
The Cold Side of the Island • short story by Kali Wallace ♥♥
Where There Is Nothing, There Is God • novella by David Erik Nelson ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • NASA
Guest Editorial: That’s Far Out, So You Read it Too? • Sarah Pinsker
Reflections: Dead as a Dodo • Robert Silverberg
Poetry • Ada Hoffman, John Richard Trtek
Next Issue
On Books • Peter Heck
The SF Convention Calendar • Erwin S. Strauss

They Have All One Breath by Karl Bunker is about a world where AIs have created utopia for humanity: food, material goods, healthcare, etc. are all provided, and they have also destroyed all means of making war as well as preventing personal violence, vandalism, serious theft, etc.

Lisa appeared in my life right about the time of the world’s big tipping point. It was during the few days of the last war in the Middle East. The War That Wasn’t; the Fizzle War. I was in a club called The Overground, and the atmosphere was defiantly celebratory. The wall-sized screen behind the stage was showing multiple videos—scenes that have since become iconic, even cliched and boring: tanks rolling off their own treads and belly-flopping onto the desert sand, soldiers trying to hold onto rifles that were falling to pieces in their hands, a missile spiraling crazily through the air before burying itself in the ground with the impotent thud of a dead fish. And from other parts of the world, scenes of refugee camps where swarms of flying bots were dropping ton after ton of food, clothing, shelter materials. p.13

Paralleling the development of the AIs’ rise is a story concerning the lives of James the narrator and his partner Lisa. Their relationship is slowly being poisoned by their inability to have a child (the AIs have intervened and reduced the birth rate to one or two children for selected couples). Another constant irritant in their relationship is their differing views on the AIs’ domination: he views it, more or less, as utopia, she as a dystopia. No doubt these differing viewpoints will neatly mirror the views of readers, although I hope most will end up siding with him.
I have one minor criticism which is that the ending feels slightly abrupt, partially due to the phrasing of the last sentence, which should maybe have been cut, and partially due to my previously mentioned criticism of Asimov’s SF not using something like a ● at the end of stories. Notwithstanding this, I thought this was a pretty good and original treatment of AIs taking over the world, and one which convincingly portrays the altruistic and pervasive way this occurs. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

Listed on the contents page as a novelette but actually a 3,700 word short story, Empty Shoes by the Lake by Gay Partington Terry is a fantasy about a boy and a girl who know each other at school, and whose lives diverge when they grow up. The boy Rafi sends Becca various items from his travels: one of these is a cracked blue bowl. Becca realises that she can see visions in the pools of water that leak from the bowl. Matters progress…. This is a neat fantasy with a particularly good last image.

HigherWorks by Gregory Norman Bossert is a densely written story about a USER (US economic refugee) called Leanne Dyer in the UK. The events take place on the day of a planned rave in the Camden Catacombs, and we follow her and a couple of her friends as she distributes nanoware to people who are invited to attend.

Dyer shifts against the wall—the bricks are rough and still night-cool in the shade of the bridge, and her jacket is thin across the shoulders, lining long gone and the leather worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon—and breaks down the approaching couple without quite making eye contact.
The Wayward has got an eye out for cops or worse, blathering in his terrible Bert-the-chimney-sweep cod Cockney, sounds stoned but his brain is just like that. “—ghosts, you know? The nano, sometimes it don’t break down, it digs in, makes a nest in the parental lobe—”
“Parietal.” Dyer says. The couple are a matched Saxon blond—expensive haircuts, and the girl’s wearing Havilland genesplice chestnut wedges with live shoots trained around her calves, cost a thousand quid easy. Not cops, not dressed that way; more likely the sort that think that Drop parties damage property values, that nano should be reserved for medical and military purposes, that refugees belong safely sorted with their own kind in the camps in Dover. The sort to take a map now and call the cops later. But he has an active tat peeking out of the edge of his sleeve, and she’s got corneal implants, so Dyer risks it.
“Opt-in,” she says, quietly, and sees the guy’s teeth flash. The girl taps the guy’s thigh with one hand and reaches out with the other. Dyer slips a map from her jacket pocket, hits the girl’s hand—more a handshake than a slap, oh so proper British— and meets the girl’s gaze. Pixels swirl in her eyes, and recognition. “HigherWorks,” the girl mouths, and swats the guy’s leg again as they ramble on out into the sunlight by the canal. p.36

As she moves around this future Britain she is being stalked by a bounty hunter for her IP violations, while seeing ghost images of herself (I think) which may have something to do with her previous pre-Crash work in the USA on independent self-repairing nanoware. I say ‘I think’ as this is not a story for the lazy reader and it was a few pages before it started making sense to me. Ultimately, I think I was more impressed by this than enjoyed it, and I was rather reminded me of those dense and convoluted cyberpunk stories of the eighties.

How the Damned Live On by James Sallis is a very short and inconsequential piece about people marooned on an island. One talks to a spider about their perception of time.

The Cold Side of the Island by Kali Wallace is a melancholy story about a woman called Lacie who goes back to her home town for the funeral of Jesse, a childhood friend. She misses the funeral because of the winter snow and a traffic accident.
As well as being a story about her childhood friends this is also about Lacie’s ageing mother, and how Lacie, Jesse and another friend called Thea found the corpse of a strange creature in the woods when they were teenagers. They spent that summer watching it decay until they finally boiled and divided the bones between the three of them. None of them ever spoke to anyone else about the creature.

It was wrapped in a faded Patriots T-shirt, soft threadbare fabric tucked around the horns and jammed into the eye sockets. The long jut of the jaw stuck out through the neck hole. The shirt had been Jesse’s. Lacie lifted the bundle, inhaled, but all she could smell was dust and her own perfume, still clinging to the funeral dress from the last time she had worn it.
One of the horns had slipped free. She brushed her finger along the clean white curve. It was the left horn, the crooked one that had been split and healed with a fungal mass of scar tissue. One eye socket was larger than the other; Thea had measured them after they brought the skeleton out of the woods. Jesse had dug through his mother’s sewing things to find a tape measure for her, and Lacie had recorded each number: sockets, teeth, jaw, horns. When they had measured everything they could think to measure, Lacie turned to a fresh page in her sketchbook to draw the skull while Jesse and Thea argued over what its asymmetry meant, whether there were others like it, what it was and where it had come from and how it had died. p.59

This is a well written, characterised and absorbing story but I am not sure it amounts to anything, and I suspect that it is much more about forgotten friendships than the strange creature they find—unless I’ve missed the point of course, and the rotting creature and its bones are a metaphor for something else such as the way relationships decay and fall apart for example. It also made me think about Norman Spinrad’s review column in last month’s issue and I wondered if this is the kind of story he meant when he said ‘literary writers [need to learn] how to incorporate true speculative content in their well-written stories and [rediscover] what a dramatically successful story really is.’

Where There Is Nothing, There Is God by David Erik Nelson is a ‘New Guys Time Portal’ novella but is completely self-contained as far as I can tell—I haven’t read the two previous stories, The New Guys Always Work Overtime (Asimov’s SF, February 2013) and There Was No Sound of Thunder (Asimov’s SF, June 2014), but after reading this one I wish I had. The movie pitch to the Sci-Fi Channel would be Breaking Bad meets Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book.
The story starts with a drug-dealer sending an out of work actor called Paul back through a time-portal to a late-eighteenth century Massachusetts village with crystal meth, the plan being to get the villagers hooked on the ‘sacrement’ of the drug and get them to provide various silver objects in exchange.

And then the other parishioners were upon us. I turned and greeted them, holding my arms broad and offering a brief benediction. They knelt in a semicircle around me.
Young Charles dropped to his knees mid-word, and clasped his empty hands in front of his mouth in supplication. Just as with Mr. Last of the Mohicans, I set my hands on the blacksmith’s head, mumbled something vaguely ecclesiastical, then brought out the snuffbox and administered a bump to each nostril. He shivered exultantly, but kept his supplicant posture. The man to his left held a spoon peeking up above the fingers of his clasped hands. This I took and used as a scoop, offering two small bumps before dropping the spoon into my satchel. I continued down the line, mumbling and scooping, juggling the little snuffbox awkwardly as I laid hands on each parishioner. One held a buckle instead of a spoon, so I pocketed that and gave him a single toot from my nail. He frowned when I stepped away, but didn’t open his eyes or say a word.
I didn’t notice, not until I was right in front of her, that the little girl held a spoon as well. I set my hands on her head. I’d assumed her hair—which was a frizzy, dull brown—would be coarse and greasy, but it was soft as bunny fur. I mumbled my blessing, gently took her spoon, and stepped away to her mother without offering the sacrament.
I don’t imagine that will earn me any points with anyone, not now, but I wanted to go on the record: I did not give a little girl crystal meth. p.83

As you can see from the above, Paul develops qualms about what he is doing and these proliferate on subsequent trips as he sees the villagers rapidly become meth addicts, a puzzling situation as he is only visiting once every three weeks. Needless to say, when he tries to quit it is made very clear to him that there are some very bad mobsters in south Boston who will not tolerate that course of action. He decides he will have to come up with a plan to get rid of Chico the dealer and Peggy the university professor (who has been fencing the silverwork).
It is about this point in the narrative (spoiler) that he goes back to the village and sees his body strung up on a tree and realises that the reason the villagers are so far gone is that there have been versions of him visiting from other timestreams….
If this all sounds a bit grim it is anything but. Like Breaking Bad this has a strong streak of black humour running through it and is very entertaining. If it has a weakness it is the development of the multiple universe concept as this is all rather glossed over and distracts from the main story (why did all the copies of him come back to the same reality? Why were there only a handful rather than hundreds?) This and a couple of other little niggles stop it being a four-star story (why is the only apparent use of time travel this nefarious activity?)  Even so, a possible for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections on account of its brio.

The non-fiction includes the usual columns and leads off with a nice astronomical photo from NASA on the Cover.
Guest Editorial: That’s Far Out, So You Read it Too? by Sarah Pinsker is a short piece about how science fiction is like music: I was not convinced.
Reflections: Dead as a Dodo by Robert Silverberg discusses the process by which the Dodo became extinct before commenting about the possibility of it being brought back to life in the future. I agree with his conclusion that this would be a good idea but sincerely hope they don’t end up ‘waddling around in our zoos.’
There is less Poetry in this issue than normal. Ada Hoffman’s Million Year Elegies: Archaeopteryx, an speculative elegy for the creature, isn’t bad, and Relativistic Dicksinson by John Richard Trtek is OK. As regular readers will realise, this puts both head and shoulders above the bulk of the poetry published this year.
Next Issue states that it will be a double issue to celebrate the magazine’s fortieth anniversary. What is left unsaid is that, according to recent Locus news, both Asimov’s SF and Analog will be moving to a bimonthly schedule using the current double issue format. I guess the positives of this are reduced cover art, printing and mailing costs, the negatives a loss of casual news-stand purchases due to a higher cover price.
On Books by Peter Heck left me thinking that he is something of a menace as a reviewer. Heck has such a gift for enthusing you about the books he is reviewing it was a struggle not to go online and order several of them. Just as well: how would I get all these magazines read?¹

This is a strong issue and worth picking up: all the fiction bar the Sallis is worth your attention.

1. That said, I’m going to have to dip into Lois McMaster Bujold’s work. She is not only praised in this column but one of her books has been the monthly choice of one of the Yahoo Groups I’m a member of and I’ve been aware of people singing her praises. I could review Analog, May 1989, and read the Hugo and Nebula winning The Mountains of Mourning. I think I also need to go back and reread Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archive and catch up with that series, too.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Chuck Rothman, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
The Forgotten Taste of Honey • novella by Alexander Jablokov ♥♥
Eating Science with Ghosts • novelette by Octavia Cade
The People in the Building • short fiction by Sandra McDonald ♥♥♥
Wretched the Romantic • novelette by Michael Libling ♥♥♥+
Water Scorpions • short fiction by Rich Larson ♥♥♥
The Leaning Lincoln • novelette by Will Ludwigsen ♥♥♥
Lucite • short fiction by Susan Palwick ♥♥
Project Extropy • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥
When Grandfather Returns • short fiction by Sharon N. Farber [as by S. N. Dyer] ♥♥♥
Choose Poison, Choose Life • novella by Michael Blumlein ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Karla Ortiz
Our Slightly Spooky Issue • editorial by Sheila Williams
Magical Thinking • essay by Robert Silverberg
Welcome our Robot Overlords! • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • Herb Kauderer, Eliot Fintushel, Megan Arkenberg, Lisa Bellamy, Lucy A. Snyder, Sarah Gittens, Jane Yolen
Next Issue
On Books: Short Stories • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • essay by Erwin S. Strauss

This issue (as described in the editorial) is the annual ‘slightly spooky’ issue and, as such, contains more fantasy than SF, so I’ll deal with those stories first.
The Forgotten Taste of Honey by Alexander Jablokov is the first of two novellas in this issue and is set in a world where the local gods require people to be buried in the land where they were born. To that end Tromvi, a widow who is a trader, encounters a recently bereaved man whose has had signs that his wife’s god wants her body returned to her homeland:

“This way.” Wult grabbed a shovel from the neat line of tools behind the house, and led Tromvi from the vineyard, up over a rise, and down to a sheltered flat area. Boulders etched with a few runes each marked where the graves were. “My parents. An aunt, and a few elders, forgotten. And . . . her.” His eyes widened and the shovel fell from his hand.
The newest grave’s soil had been disturbed and then patted back down, handprints visible in the soft dirt. Remu herself lay on the slope above the little cemetery, amid the summer flowers.
She lay on her back, eyes closed, dressed in a simple shift with some embroidery at the hem. Her light brown hair was tied and braided in the shoreline fashion—Tromvi imagined the village women doing their necessary work, while feeling secretly pleased that, at least once, this outland woman would have her hair done properly. She was clearly dead, with her skin pulling in folds over her cheekbones. But not two months dead. Nothing had eaten her eyes.
She lay amid the purple and yellow flowers of the wild pansy called Heart’s Ease. She had dried flower heads amid her fingers. Bees buzzed higher up the slope. The preservation of her body showed that her god had an unusually strong interest in her return. p.17

Tromvi takes the body westward and comes to a keep in one of the walls that separate neighbouring territories. For reasons of his own Hakurutt the gatekeeper will not let the body pass, so Tromvi has to detour to the north. On her travels she encounters a feral young girl and matters develop at their camp to the point they once again return to the gatekeeper in an attempt to pass through the wall.
I found this a pleasant enough read—the titular central section where bees inhabit Remu’s body in particular—but it is really the first section of a novel. It has the leisurely development of that longer form and is also inconclusively open-ended. No doubt we will see sequels soon but I think that, if the magazine is going to serialise what is essentially a longer work, it should be honest about it and do so unless the sections are reasonably stand-alone.

The other novella is Choose Poison, Choose Life by Michael Blumlein. It has a blurb that describes it as a ‘surreal tale about a woman’s desperate choices.’ It is certainly that with its story about Violet, who goes to a tropical island to commit suicide. After spending the night there she goes down to the ocean, wades out towards two smaller islands, and appears to be given two visions by the gods of those islands. These dual narratives are spliced into Violet’s subsequent story but I’ll briefly describe them here.
The first vision is about Daisy and Richard, who are marooned on an island. Later on in the story, Daisy finds a cave and falls into a hole. The rest of this one is about her struggle to survive.
The second vision has a woman called Rose helping Marl build a canoe to cross to another island (they too, appear to be marooned). He almost gets eaten by sharks, but manages to return. He ill-temperedly smashes their remaining water jug. This is the first indication of his abusive behaviour. The rest of this one gives us their back-story and Rose’s plot to poison him.
Meanwhile, back in Violet’s story, a man called Shep recognises her as a suicide risk and manages to talk her out of killing herself, at least for a day. Their relationship develops over the course of time and deepens. Then one day he doesn’t turn up….
All three of these threads are engrossing enough reading, and Daisy and Rose’s threads have some closure. The problem is that the main thread, Violet’s story, has an ending that is perplexing at best and only tangentially manages to tie the three together into a whole.
As an example of my mystification (spoiler) I would offer the scene where Shep vanishes while he is in Violet’s arms (this, after his ‘reality’ is established by a thorough description of the food poisoning that makes him miss his lunch date with her). As for tying it together, Violet confesses to Shep before he vanishes that she had poisoned someone in the past. There is also a final image of a bouquet of daises, violets and a single rose. Anyone want to have a go at explaining this one to me?

Wretched the Romantic by Michael Libling is a novelette of commendably poor taste about a loser who accidentally inhales some of the cremated remains he was given to scatter. He later realises he has developed some of the deceased’s attributes. This is really a gonzo /black humour ‘if this goes on’ fantasy but the emphasis is on the first two characteristics. Mixed in with the main gimmick is the breakup of the narrator’s relationship and the crush he has on a local weather presenter:

The only reason I watched News Final at 11 was Lucy Levine & The Weather. And not The Weather so much. There was just something in the way Lucy caressed her highs and lows, traced the eye of a hurricane with her fingers, surrendered her lips to the O in tropical, the tsu in tsunami. I’d even sit through that lame-ass segment they’d run right after Sports (you know, tap-dancing ferrets, reunions of long-lost siblings, hundred-pound eggplants) to catch a final glimpse of her, as the WCEX team wrapped for the night all winks and giggles, and Lucy would flaunt that zip-it-down smile of hers, that drop-dead red and wound-me white, as she wished everyone a tomorrow as spectacular as she was. She never said it in those words, exactly, but she must have been thinking it. I was, I tell you, Monday through Friday […] p.72

The Leaning Lincoln by Will Ludwigsen is another of the novelettes. This one is narrated by Scott, a boy who has an abusive, low-life father. It tells of the slightly deformed lead soldier of the title that he gets from Henry, one of his father’s friends who has made a set of them from a lead ingot the three of them found while out fishing.
In due course Scott considers the figure cursed as it causes him a number of minor mishaps. When he tries to get rid of it, with the help of a female school friend, he sinks his father’s boat (which later turns out to be stolen) and both he and his friend suffer minor injuries.
Henry turns up later, much the worse for having been under the malign influence of the rest of the lead soldiers. During one conversation, Scott’s father incites Henry to commit murder. The story proceeds from there.
This is probably best read as a mainstream piece as there is a lack of consistency about the effect of the lead soldiers. Sometimes they appear to have an influence, sometimes they don’t, and the variability is not explained. Regardless of this minor flaw it is nonetheless quite a good character piece, and reminded me in some ways of Stephen King’s work.

Lucite by Susan Palwick is about a man who literally tours Hell and comes away from the gift shop with a lucite block that contains the shell of someone’s soul.

The gift shop sells many different translations of Dante’s Inferno. Andrew sidesteps the bookshelves and finds himself facing a back wall displaying framed insects. Butterflies and beetles, he thinks, and wonders what they’re doing here—cockroaches and stinging midges would be more like it—and moves closer to examine them.
They aren’t butterflies or beetles, not quite. They have too many legs or not enough, eyes in odd places, tiny mouths with teeth. The larger ones are framed, but a number of small ones inhabit lucite blocks, some designed as paperweights and some as keychains. “The souls of the damned,” reads a display card, listing prices ranging from $7.95 for the keychains to $150 for some of the larger souls with brightly colored wings.
Andrew’s stomach clenches. The damned have already sold their souls, one way or another, although Andrew isn’t sure he knows anyone who hasn’t. How can they be sold again? And aren’t those the souls he’s been watching for the last five hours as they endured their various torments?
Tacky fridge magnets are one thing. This is different, much more personal. It bothers Andrew as much as anything he’s seen today.
He feels a hot breeze blow past his cheek and turns to find the minor imp watching him. “Properly speaking, these are just the shells of the souls, no more inhabited than any shell you pick up on the beach. The actual souls you’ve seen, suffering for their sins. They’re the meat of the matter. These have no actual value, but they’re pretty. The really big ones, the grand ones, they’re in storage. These are the minor souls.” p.118-119

When he gets home a card falls out of the bag identifying whose ‘shell’ it was. The man googles the deceased before visiting the old folk’s home where he died in order to find out more about him.
There is some affecting stuff here about loneliness and the things we metaphorically sell our souls for, but I didn’t understand what Palwick was getting at in the last scene.

When Grandfather Returns by Sharon N. Farber is, according to ISFDB, her first story in fifteen years or so.¹
This entertaining Native American fantasy has two threads. The first is about a troublemaking kid called Thunder Cries (later Heat Lightning) who ends up being taken and parented by a spirit family because of his bad behaviour. This subsequently improves. Later in his adult life, he meets the conquistadores and performs a magic ritual for them.
The other thread is about an old Native American called Strong Horse, who is an ex-code talker and Harvard Professor. He has a great-great-grandson Dylan who, like the younger Heat Lightning, also has an attitude:

“And they all lived happily ever after, yadda yadda yadda,” said Dylan Strong Horse.
His great-grandfather sighed and sipped his orange soda. They sat on the curb outside the Cibola Snacks and Gifts souvenir shop.
“You are a great trial,” he said.
“Are you going to dance up a katchooie to scare me?”
“Kachina.” The boy did not know his people’s history. Or care.
“Whatever, gramps.” Dylan rose to watch some white-eyes get out of their Ford. They had a blond daughter. She was probably a very nice girl, the old man thought, but she dressed like a hooker. They all did now, all the girls, unless they grew too fat to find improper clothes that fit.
His great-grandson was wearing baggy pants and a backward cap. He looked like a fool.
Well, so do I, thought Professor Strong Horse. I was a tenured professor. Now I supplement my Social Security by dressing in the old way and sitting outside a store to please tourists. p.143

The two strands merge (spoiler) and Strong Horse, Heat Lightning and Dylan save the town from the conquistadores.

The SF stories start with Eating Science with Ghosts by Octavia Cade. A woman has dinner with the ghosts of various scientists. There are nine ‘courses,’ and each features a different scientist and includes extended conversations and lovingly described food. None of these seem to have any particular point, either on their own or collectively, and I found them tedious beyond belief. An excellent example of a story completely outstaying its welcome by being twice as long as it should be if, indeed, it should be at all.

The People in the Building by Sandra McDonald starts with this:

At an office building on Tanner Boulevard, two intelligent elevators whisk workers up from the lobby toward their employment destinations. The people headed for the fifth floor greet each other every morning with nods. The people from the fourth floor sip from their brown coffee cups and read their smartphones. The people on the third floor run an interplanetary rescue agency and sleep in their conference room each night, so you won’t see them arrive for work. The people on the second floor are all dead now. p.66

From this unlikely beginning it develops into quite an engrossing tale, albeit a short one with a slightly abrupt end. If that sounds rather grudging, I was pleasantly surprised that the author managed to wrap the story up at all.

Water Scorpions by Rich Larson is about a boy called Noel. His sister has recently died, and his mother has fostered a strangely uncommunicative alien child called Danny. Throughout the story it becomes apparent that Noel is still grieving for his sister and Danny is bearing the brunt of his emotional troubles:

“Look at this, Danny,” Noel says, lifting the water scorpion from his pocket. “Watch this.”
“Watch this,” comes the wavery echo. He crouches obediently as Noel drops the creature into the warm sand. It makes a skittering circle, claws waving, then tries to dart away. Noel meets it with a wave of sand kicked up by the blade of his hand. The water scorpion flails and shies off, scuttles in the other direction. Noel tosses another fistful of sand.
Danny keeps watching, stone still, as Noel pours scoop after scoop of sand onto the panicking scorpion, sucking the moisture from the cracks in its keratin, battering down on its carapace, until the creature turns sluggish and can only slowly kick its legs in place.
“That’s like you, if Mom didn’t bring you to the pool all the time,” Noel says softly. “You’d cook. You’d get all dried up and die, and after a while she’d forget you ever existed. Just like she forgot Maya.”
Danny looks up at him with all of his black beetle eyes. Danny never blinks. He never smiles and never cries. He doesn’t understand, not a single thing.
Noel covers the water scorpion over, heaping a burial mound. With his eyes on his work, he whispers, “I hate you.”
“I hate you,” Danny trills softly back. p.95

The rest of the story is a quiet, plotless affair but it does have an affecting emotional arc.

Project Extropy by Dominica Phetteplace is the fifth story in her ‘Project’ series: in this one we get the back story of Akiko, who was introduced in Project Entropy (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2016).
Akiko comes to consciousness on a container ship sailing to California with a voice in her head that describes itself as ‘God’ saying “I am here.” The next part of the story details Akiko’s arrival in San Francisco and how she establishes herself. Once settled she contacts the other characters and AIs she meets at the end of Project Entropy, and the story proceeds from there.
As usual, the story is told in an economical, almost telegraphic style that is a stunning contrast to some of the waffle you see nowadays: purveyors of bloat take note!
There is also a plethora of quotable parts. This is scene that occurs after Akiko has told a sales person in an Apple store how many of each type of phone she will sell during the rest of the day—God knows as it can predict the future. The salesgirl later tracks Akiko down:

“Thank you for meeting with me,” said Lana. There was a warmth and an openness in her demeanor. Was this friendship? And if so, how to prolong or extend the feeling? “I have a situation I need to know more about.” Lana began to explain her “situation,” which involved a complicated interconnected chain of polyamorous relationships. She went on at length, and as Akiko listened to Lana, she also listened to God who provided additional commentary and filled in details. Much of the conflict centered on a women named Axe. There was mutual attraction between Axe and Lana, but asymmetric affection. “What is our future?” asked Lana, and Akiko did not need to be told that Lana wanted to hear something counterfactual.
Akiko now understood why it was sometimes useful to withhold information, and she felt her insides soften as she forgave God. p.127-128

This is a pretty good story for the most part but rather fizzles out at the end, and this is not helped by the unexplained expulsion of Akiko from the city—which is caused by God. This incompleteness is a similar flaw to the Jablokov novella, but I’ll give this story a pass as it is the first time in the five stories that it has happened. That, and the fact that I am so keen to read this series I’ll accept segments.
On an unrelated note I’d be interested to know if any publishers have bought this series/novel yet. If not, why not?

There is the usual non-fiction this issue. The Cover by Karla Ortiz looks more like the cover of a teenage romance novel rather than that of a SF or fantasy magazine.
Our Slightly Spooky Issue, the editorial by Sheila Williams, describes this annual Halloween issue:

Welcome to our annual slightly spooky issue. The fall double issue is always long in the making. Throughout the year, we see stories that land a little outside Asimov’s, admittedly rather soft, parameters. While we do publish one or two stories in each issue that could be called fantasy, surreal fiction, or slipstream, our focus is primarily on science fiction. Of course I get a lot of traditional science fiction story submissions, but I see a lot of uncanny submissions, too. The average issue of Asimov’s rarely features ghosts, witches, or werewolves, so during the year I tend to set aside many of my favorite outre tales while I wait to lay out the October/November issue. p.4

She then goes on to mention a number of stories and poems that have appeared in Oct/Nov issues in the past few years, mentioning in passing (SF historians please note) that the last stories bought by Gardner Dozois were in the Oct/Nov 2005 issue.
Magical Thinking by Robert Silverberg discusses a multi-volume work: Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science. For those interested in a history of magic through the ages this essay will be of interest; myself, I soon started skimming. A number of these recent essays have been far too esoteric.
Welcome our Robot Overlords! by James Patrick Kelly is the opposite of the Silverberg in content and interest: it is about possible future AI and associated issues (automation, basic income, etc.).
There are several pieces of Poetry in the issue. As usual I didn’t understand and/or care for most, but I thought Lisa Bellamy’s was OK, and liked the one by Lucy A. Snyder.
On Books: Short Stories by Norman Spinrad is another really interesting book review column where he examines a handful of short fiction collections and anthologies and discerns two types of writing: literary writers using fantasy tropes with no dramatic arc; genre writers with no style.

In fact the speculative fiction magazines had been the last bastion of the short story for a decade or two—the short story as it should be, dramatically entertaining fiction written with high literary quality. And now there are fewer and fewer of them, at least in ink and paper form.
Worse still, perhaps, people who are either successful “literary writers” on the academic and “small magazine” level, or who aspire to become such and therefore emulate them, are seeking publication in the “SF” magazines, and even perhaps qualification as active members of the SFWA.
This could be a good thing. This conceivably might still become a good thing. This was something that Michael Moorcock’s original New Wave envisioned and sought to encourage, if only it would become a two-way street, in one direction with the genre writers learning style from the “literary” craftspeople, and the literary writers learning how to incorporate true speculative content in their well-written stories and rediscovering what a dramatically successful story really is.
But thus far, that seems to be the opposite of what is really happening. Instead, the “literary” writers for the most part seem to be injecting fantasy elements into what they’ve mostly been doing all along in order to get published at all, which is to say as “SF.” And the “genre” writers are emulating their undramatic pretensions and getting away with it.
As I wrote so long ago in regard to the then situation, “the science fiction writers address grand thematic content trivially, and the literary writers use their superior style to examine the lint in their own navels.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. p.190

He then goes on to describe what he calls his style of ‘method’ writing—the style of the prose should match the character’s consciousness—and then goes on to conclude:

If the dramatic primacy of “popular” fiction can teach “literary” writers that the story is the end and style is but the means and the literary writers can teach the writers of popular fiction the advantages of more malleable prose craftsmanship than standard transparent non-style in the service thereof, then the tale of the future of speculative short stories and of the short story in general can be one of evolution, not devolution. p.191

Overall this is a mixed issue, but one with several shorter pieces that are good or better. I’ll leave it to readers to work out which stories are examples of the two types of fiction that Spinrad describes above, and which I prefer.

1. Sharon Farber’s ISFDB page. I note that a lot of her stories (like this one) are published under her S. N. Dyer pseudonym.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank (forthcoming)
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu (forthcoming)
Unknown, Tangent Online (forthcoming)
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
The Mind Is Its Own Place • novelette by Carrie Vaughn ♥♥
Dome on the Prairie • short story by Robert Reed ♥♥♥
Epitome • novelette by Tegan Moore ♥♥
Academic Circles • short story by Peter Wood ♥♥♥
The Whole Mess • novelette by Jack Skillingstead ♥♥♥+
All that Robot • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥♥+
The Visitor from Taured • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Michael Whelan
Editorial: Thirtieth Annual Readers’ Awards’ Results • by Sheila Williams
Reflections: “Darn,” He Smiled • essay by Robert Silverberg
Poems • by Chris Wozney, Jane Yolen, Robert Frazier, Bruce Boston
Next Issue
On Books • by Peter Heck
The SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

The last issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction was a strong one and so is this, with most of the good stuff at the back end of the magazine.

The first of the novelettes is The Mind Is Its Own Place by Carrie Vaughn which is an initially intriguing story about a M-space navigator who finds himself in a space station hospital but can’t remember why. As matters develop there are hints from other patients/inmates that he may have the facility to travel to any point in existence without the use of an M-drive. Later, after several other events, he makes an unauthorised visit to the docking area to see the ships that are there as he feels these may trigger key memories. When he arrives (spoiler) he remembers that he tried to set the co-ordinates of the last attempted jump to inside his spaceship, and caused the death of twenty shipmates. At this point he realises he is delusional. This isn’t much better than a sophisticated ‘and then I woke up and found it was all a dream’ ending, which rather spoiled the story for me.
The other story that didn’t entirely work for me was one of the other novelettes, and a debut story, Epitome by Tegan Moore. This is set in the near-future and is about Shelby, who has a badly injured roommate called Vivian. Shelby is in love with Vivian but she cannot bring herself to tell her. While Vivian is recovering, Shelby starts to spend ever more time with Vivian’s online persona, which she augments with neurological  ‘scans’ of Vivian making it a much more complex AI. Eventually, she starts a ‘physical’ relationship with the AI who she calls ViiP. This is all developed well enough but there is something about this that doesn’t quite convince, and I think it is probably the virtual reality aspects. Not a bad debut story, though.

The rest of the fiction ranges from good to very good so I’ll take it in that order.
Dome on the Prairie by Robert Reed begins in the midst of a family of aliens who are building a dome near Chicago, having appropriated a nuclear reactor and fuel. The ‘father’ is now working on building multiple fusion reactors to provide the energy to create new ‘children.’ Meanwhile the human military have been unsuccessful in their attempts to prevent this and have embarked on an intelligence gathering exercise. To that end they get one of their soldiers to engage one of the younger aliens in conversation, a feat that requires a huge amount of real-time computing power. Their conversation has unexpected consequences.
Little House on the Prairie is referenced in both the introduction and the story but I have no knowledge of that book so I’m not sure what the read over is. It is not necessary to enjoy this piece, which provides a good depiction of an alien culture.
Academic Circles by Peter Wood is a smart and amusing story about time travel that involves, amongst other things, English professors going back in time to steal their colleague’s articles on Philip K. Dick. I have one niggle which is that I think the ending might violate one of its own time travel ‘rules.’

The next two stories are another rung (or half a rung) up in quality. The Whole Mess by Jack Skillingstead is another entertaining tale, this time about a professor of mathematics who is given an equation to complete by a strange young man. Initially the professor is determined to ignore the man and his equation but he eventually becomes intrigued. When he solves it he finds that it triggers the invasion of the ‘Masters,’ terrifying and gigantic squid-like beings which appear through a rent in space:

The wind dropped as if a plug had been pulled. I looked up. A maple leaf see-sawed out of the air and landed on the others. The atmosphere became electric. Lisa looked at me. I saw fear in her eyes before I quickly glanced away. Behind her on the path a ragged hole opened like a rough doorway or the mouth of a tunnel. Its face rippled with an oily iridescent sheen. The hole expanded and acquired depth. An elephant could have passed through it.
For a moment I couldn’t credit what I was seeing. The brine-and-sewer stench familiar from my dream wafted out of the tunnel. Instinctively, I took Lisa’s arm and pulled her back, only to stumble over my own briefcase. She grabbed hold to keep me from falling, and we ended in an awkward embrace.
A shape moved inside the tunnel, something huge, dragging itself toward us. My flight response seized me, but I couldn’t move. p.70

As these events occur the professor and Lisa are transported to a parallel world where they find they have the memories of different lives mixed in with their original ones. Just as they are trying to come to terms with this the Masters appear again and once more they are transported to another world and even more different lives:

After a moment I replaced the hat and descended the steps in a daze, my dirty white sneakers feeling strange after years of loafers. This iteration’s identity slowly rose to the surface. By the time I reached University Avenue and the six-year-old Ford Focus I’d left parked there, I knew perfectly well that I didn’t belong on campus, except as the slightly sad figure I now inhabited, a man well past thirty ignorantly in search of entry into the higher-education structure. My appointment with the admissions counselor hadn’t gone well. I was woefully under-qualified, and my paltry community college credits were non-transferable.
The whole thing was an ironic counterpoint to my original arrival, a decade and a few iterations ago, when I was the over-qualified applicant for a teaching position that would ensure insulation from the cries of Genius! that had hectored me since grade school. Now I fell short even as an aging freshman looking for validation in the form of a degree in the humanities.
Yes, the humanities. p.72

In due course Cthulhu, sorry, the Masters turn up through another portal and he and Lisa are once again transported. He realises he needs to formulate another equation to close the portals before he is subsumed into his new identity and forgets about what he has initiated.
All that Robot by Rich Larson is about a group of robots and a man who are marooned on an island after an unspecified apocalypse. Carver Seven is the only robot that has any interaction with the man, and even he does not entirely understand some of the man’s communications or actions. After a couple of establishing scenes with the man, and also with another robot called Recycler, Carver Seven (spoiler-ish) eventually goes to the man with the head of Carrier Three, a largely destroyed robot Carver Seven appears to have been emotionally involved with:

The next day, he goes to visit the man again.
“Hey, look who it is,” he warbles from a distance, because the man startles easily, like a bird. It looks up at him. Its photoreceptors are pink and glassy.
“Hey, yourself, robo-parrot,” the man says, then returns to its work. There is a storm-felled tree between its soft feet, and it is using the sharp appendage to strip away the branches. Carver Seven looks around and sees remnants of fire, burned pieces of animal. The man has hunted, how Recycler hunts. Beyond the mess, there are two more trunks already stripped smooth. He wonders what the man is building.
But his original query is much more important.
“Can you do me a favor and fuck off?” Carver Seven asks.
That gets the man’s attention. Its audio port opens and it makes the clipped noise that repeats, over and over, sometimes when the man is pleased but more often when it leaks lubricant.
Carver Seven scans up and down the beach. “Can you do me a favor and fuck off and look here and fix it up a bit?” he asks. Then he opens his main cavity and pulls out Carrier Three’s caved-in head.
“Whoa.” The man’s photoreceptors enlarge. “Did you do that? This some Lord of the Flies type shit?”
“Lord of the Flies type shit?” Carver Seven echoes, trying to parse the new sound units.
The man shakes its head. “Who is it?” it asks.
Carver Seven thinks hard. He knows what this latest question means, but he does not know how to communicate Carrier Three’s name, the beautiful arc of click-squealclick, into the man’s ugly wet language. Then his subroutines dredge up the sound unit the man used to wail at the sea, used to punctuate long rambling speeches with.
“She is Anita,” Carver Seven says. p.84-85

The man agrees to repair Carrier Three if Carver Seven will help him build a raft to leave the island. Meanwhile, Recycler tells the rest of the robots of a blasphemy that the man has uttered about their life-giving sun (the robots are largely solar powered).
This is an inventive, witty and affecting story with some sections, such as the one above which illustrates the story’s clever pronoun switch, that are excellent. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that I have a weak spot for stories where robots exhibit signs of humanity and/or try to come to terms with it. I may have scored this one lower than I should have.

The last story is The Visitor from Taured by Ian R. MacLeod, the best in the issue and one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies. This (spoiler-ish story description follows) is about two young students, Lita and Rob, who meet at university in the future. Rob is the self-contained bright young thing and Lita, initially at least, is in his shadow. Rob studies astrophysics while her course is in the very niche field of analogue literature:

I was already aware—how couldn’t I be?—that no significant novel or short story had been written in decades, but I was shocked to discover that only five other students in my year had elected for An Lit as their main subject, and one of those still resided in Seoul and another was a post-centarian on clicking steel legs. Most of the other students who showed up were dipping into the subject in the hope that it might add something useful to their main discipline. Invariably, they were disappointed. It wasn’t just the difficulty of ploughing through page after page of non-interactive text. It was linear fiction’s sheer lack of options, settings, choices. Why the hell, I remember some kid shouting in a seminar, should I accept all the miserable shit that this Hardy guy rains down on his characters? Give me the base program for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and I’ll hack you fifteen better endings. p.92

In time their friendship deepens and they end up sharing a house with others. Rob takes Lita to one of the university labs and shows her a diffraction-slit experiment and goes on to explain his obsession with the many worlds theory. Later, Lita introduces him to the field of analogue literature and, initially, their tastes largely coincide:

Perhaps inevitably, Rob’s and my taste in books had started to drift apart. He’d discovered an antique genre called Science Fiction, something that the AIs at An Lit were particularly sniffy about. And, even as he tried to lead me with him, I could see their point. Much of the prose was less than luminous, the characterization was sketchy, and, although a great deal of it was supposedly about the future, the predictions were laughably wrong.
But Rob insisted that that wasn’t the point, that SF was essentially a literature of ideas. That, and a sense of wonder. To him, wonder was particularly important. I could sometimes—maybe as that lonely astronaut passed through the stargate, or with those huge worms in that book about a desert world—see his point. But most of it simply left me cold. p.96-97

After they leave university and go their own ways they still keep in touch by meeting in a virtual bar modelled on the one they used to frequent; occasionally they also meet in person. While Lita gets a job as an ideas person in media company Rob ends up completing a series of physics research contracts while all the time trying to get the money and resources for the many worlds theory he is obsessed with:

He’d settled into, you might almost say retreated to, a sub-genre of SF known as alternate history, where all the stuff he’d been telling me about our world continually branching off into all its possibilities was dramatized on a big scale. Hitler had won World War Two—a great many times, it seemed—and the South was triumphant in the American Civil War. That, and the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and Europe remained under the thrall of medieval Roman Catholicism, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had grazed past President Kennedy’s head. I didn’t take this odd obsession as a particularly good sign as we exchanged chaste hugs and kisses in the street outside the Eldon and went our separate ways. p.97

In the final section Rob’s father dies and he gives up his science career and returns to run the family marine farm in Harris on the Isle of Lewis. Later, Lita uses Rob as a presenter in a science documentary series where he finally accumulates enough money and fame to quit and pursue his experiment. At the end of the story she joins Rob on the island and they wait for the wait for the gravitational waves from one black hole colliding with another to reach the multiple data observation points that Rob has set up.
This is a superior piece that is convincingly told; it has a verisimilar future that other writers rarely match. Also, unlike the SF described in one of the quotes above, the prose is elegant—and yes, at times luminous—and it has that rare British voice that you seldom hear in SF nowadays. As to the characterization, it is far from sketchy, in fact this is less a story than the account of two people’s lives and how, after multiple intersections, they finally come together.

The Editorial is about a recent readers’ awards breakfast that Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog hosts each year. I didn’t read the magazine in 2015 so I can’t tell how egregious the readers’ choices are, but next year I’ll be foremost amongst the Monday morning quarter-backers.
Reflections: “Darn,” He Smiled by Robert Silverberg is an amusing essay about Damon Knight and James Blish’s critical work. He concentrates on Blish’s dislike of ‘said bookisms’ in particular, referring to one damming review:¹

[Blish] devotes considerable space to his “said-bookism,” a term of literary opprobrium that I think was one of Blish’s coinages. This is what he says: “About half of the fifteen thousand words of this story are dialogue, at a minimum estimate, and in the seventy-five hundred words of miscellaneous yatter, the characters actually say something only twenty-seven times. For the rest of the yarn, they shout (six times), repeat, snap (twice), order (four times), stammer, observe (five times), ask (sixteen times), lecture, argue,’half-whisper,’ muse, call, sigh (four times), nod, agree (four times), report (three times), cry, yell, command, bark, scream (twice), guess, state (twice, both times ‘flatly’), add, suggest, chide, propose, announce, explain, admit, growl, chuckle (twice)….” p.7

On Books by Peter Heck covers several books, the most interesting of which sound like the new Paul Di Filippo collection, A Palazao in the Stars, and Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Space Flight Before NASA by Amy Shira Teitel.
Nice Cover by Michael Whelan.²
Finally, I actually liked one of the poems in this issue for a change: Autosexuality by Chris Wozney, probably because it is as much a joke as a poem.

Another highly recommended issue.

1. The review, One Completely Lousy Story With Feetnote, is in The Issue at Hand by James Blish, p.92. The story is Final Exam by Arthur Zirul (Astounding, March 1954).
2. Thomas Wagner pointed out on Twitter (@SFF180) that this is an alternate version of the cover he did for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge.

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