ISFDB link

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

Fiction:
Wakers • short story by Sean Monaghan ♥♥♥
Toppers • novelette by Jason Sanford ♥♥♥
The Mutants Men Don’t See • short story by James Alan Gardner ♥♥♥♥
KIT: Some Assembly Required • short story by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz ♥♥
Patience Lake • novelette by Matthew Claxton ♥♥♥+
Kairos • short story by Sieren Damsgaard Ernst ♥
President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut • novelette by Sandra McDonald ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Kinuko Craft
Poetry • Michael Meyerhofer, Robert Frazier, Andrew Paul Wood, Ken Poyner
Discovering Women of Wonder • editorial by Sheila Williams
The Software of Magic • essay by Robert Silverberg
Thinking About Dinosaurs • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Next Issue
On Books • by Paul Di Filippo
SF Conventional Calendar • essay by Erwin S. Strauss

This issue’s cover is pleasant enough but looks like it should adorn Asimov’s Romantic Fiction. A quick check of covers appears to show a preference for women or astronomical views over the last eighteen months. Are the women subject covers are a conscious decision to target a particular demographic?

The fiction this month gets off to quite a promising start with three stories that, initially at least, had me reaching for the superlatives jar. The first, Wakers by Sean Monaghan, is about a starship where the crew are in cryogenic suspension. There has been an accident en route, and the ship has been knocked off-course. As the ship AI has been partially damaged one of the crew needs to be awake at all times to assist it. It materialises that there have been a number of crew members awake during the last five hundred and fifty years and it is time for Grayson to wake another before he dies. The woman he chooses to wake does not accept the status quo; she revives another two crew members with the objective of diverting to another star system.
I thought this was an engaging story and found it quite good for the most part. However, Grayson longs to wake up his partner before he dies, even though there is now a large difference in their ages. The ending (spoiler) has the computer doing that, which I really didn’t find credible. Good start to the issue, nonetheless.
Next up is Toppers by Jason Sanford. This is an original and vivid piece about ‘Toppers’ who live at the top of high rise buildings in New York safe from the strange swirling mist below:

We be toppers. Toppers we be. Hanging off Empire State as cement and limestone crumble and fall. Looking down the lines and pulleys strung between nearby buildings. Eyeing the green-growing plants and gardens on the tall tall roofs. And below, the mists. The ever-flowing mists. They wait, patiently. As if time is theirs alone to worship. I was born in a slug, an insulated bag of canvas strung to our highrise’s limestone facade by people without the power to live inside. Momma always said life in a slug was the closest we toppers came to being free, and I believe that. But too much freedom is also bad, so Momma stitched our slug with care, making it last when others fell during winds or storms. p.26

The story follows Hangar as she works as a scout and courier. To operate in the mist she needs to wear a pressure suit and a blindfold—looking into it drives people mad. Hangar can sometimes hear voices in the mist, in particular the voice of her mother who committed suicide by jumping off the roof into it. Hangar does not talk to anyone about this for fear of being thrown off the roof herself.
One day Dougan, the building super, asks her to undertake a particularly perilous mission to the Plaza hotel where she meets an older woman in a wheelchair who gives her new information about this strange phenomenon.
This first half of the story is quite intriguing, and in due course it materialises that the mist is the result of a temporal catastrophe caused by a scientist. The problem with this latter section is that the more the explanation about the accident and the rather complex properties of the mist are explained, the more the original sense of wonder from the start of the story is diminished. I think it is only fair to say that if the writer hadn’t explained enough, I’d be moaning about that instead. A difficult balancing act.
The Mutants Men Don’t See by James Alan Gardner starts with this:

At 10:04 A.M. on a Thursday in November, Jason Foote slipped something into Matthew Stein’s beaker during Grade 10 chemistry. No one ever figured out what the substance was, but the result was an earsplitting bang. At the next lab table, Julia Boudreau was startled enough to drop a test tube. It hit the floor and shattered, spreading glass and dilute acid over the tiles. Other students shrieked or swore, but the most extreme reaction came from Tamara-Lynn Eubanks: she grew nine feet tall, sprouted tree-bark all over her body, and smashed a hole through the wall of the classroom. She ran through the hole at the speed of a sports car and was not seen again until two years later, when she was caught on video fighting Blue Mechathons during the Rainbow Invasion.
Everyone in the class understood what had happened: Tamara-Lynn’s DNA must have included the so-called “Spark gene.” The shock of hearing the bang had pumped the girl full of fight-or-flight hormones. The adrenaline flood in Tamara-Lynn’s bloodstream had combined with the glandular turmoil of being a teenager, and had “sparked” the gene out of dormancy. Every cell in the girl’s body underwent spontaneous mutation; in the blink of an eye, Tamara-Lynn Eubanks joined the ranks of Earth’s superhumans. p.40

The story then cuts to Ellie and her teenage son Liam. He is approaching seventeen and is brooding about the fact that he hasn’t ‘sparked’ and may never do so—if it hasn’t happened by your late teens it never will. Worried about the fact that Liam may put himself in a perilous situation to force the change Ellie starts following him around.
The ending is uplifting and surprising, but is also consistent with what has gone before. Best story in the issue and one for the ‘Year’s Bests’.

The next entry I didn’t find as successful as the first three. KIT: Some Assembly Required by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz is about an AI that has the memories and identity of the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe. It is being used to analyse net metadata and strike at terrorists. This is a densely told story—it alternates between our current time and the intrigues of Elizabethan England—but I am not sure these two threads add up to anything more than their constituent parts.
A similar observation could probably be made of Kairos by Sieren Damsgaard Ernst. The narrator in this one is with her second husband in a museum in Aachen that has Charlemagne’s remains. Her husband’s venture business has discovered a way to prevent aging and he is about to undergo the treatment and wants her to do so as well. However, she agonises about the choice, and then agonises some more, cries for a bit, does some more agonising, etc. There is no doubt this author can write and there is a lot of knowledge packed into this story, science, history, Greek myth, etc. The problem is that it reads like an extended lecture and I found it quite dull.

Patience Lake by Matthew Claxton has a protagonist who is an ex-military veteran and a vagrant. Casey was caught in a bio-attack that resulted in nearly all his body being replaced by bionic implants.
As he is walking across the Canadian countryside to his next destination his knee packs up, and he has no spare parts or money to fix it. Casey ends up filling his water bottle at one of the local farms and the owner Sandra takes him in. This occurs against a background that involves a dubious private contractor policeman in the shape of Terry, who has better and considerably more expensive bionic implants than Casey has. Casey meets Sandra’s teenage son, sorts her various drones and machinery, and eventually manages to replace his cracked artificial femur—the end had broken off and jammed his knee. He also learns of the shakedown racket that Terry and his police colleagues are running. Casey eventually leaves to continue on his journey but needless to say this isn’t the end of this situation.
This is a gritty, compelling story which I hope is going to be part of a series. Whether this happens or not, I would note that Matthew Claxton’s previous two writing credits were in Ellen Datlow’s SciFiction in 2004, and I hope we don’t have to wait another twelve years for his next one.¹
The last piece of fiction in this issue is the promising sounding President John F. Kennedy, Astronaut by Sandra McDonald. This is an entertaining and sometimes light-hearted story of a parallel world where JFK went to the moon after his second term and recovered an alien obelisk. This backstory is embedded in the main narrative which is set in a future drowned Earth (the polar ice-caps have melted) where a man called Rendezvous has hired Ma and her amphibious vehicle to go to the undersea NASA Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida to search for and recover the obelisk. Needless to say this mission isn’t straightforward, especially when other parties—including one of Rendezvous’ daughters—appear.
The story is narrated from the point of view of Petra, Vera’s feisty daughter (her brother Kacey is onboard too) and has a lovely final few paragraphs.

There is the usual non-fiction this issue: Discovering Women of Wonder by Sheila Williams is a short piece about the editor’s childhood reading of comics with female superheroes; The Software of Magic by Robert Silverberg is about a couple of antique books and their various magical spells; Thinking About Dinosaurs by James Patrick Kelly is a comprehensive collection of dinosaur-related weblinks: On Books by Paul Di Filippo looks at a number of promising books, including a collection of Judith Merril’s criticism:²

She not only charted the ups and downs of the genre marketplace, but the penetration of genre into mainstream venues, her main pioneering focus.
In her book columns from F&SF, she dealt fairly with everyone from old-schoolers like Clifford Simak to the up-and-coming New Wave icons like Ballard, Disch, and Zelazny. It’s interesting to see where she very occasionally went wrong: she fails to understand or appreciate The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, for instance. But she was never averse to changing her mind and altering her critical opinions. Having not seen anything too promising in Delany’s The Ballad of Beta-2, by the time of Nova she is fully onboard the Delany bandwagon.
As for charting the Zeitgeist, just read her column for June 1968. It anatomizes the turbulent era brilliantly, in words that apply just as appropriately for today’s milieu. If we only had Merril still with us, to give us her savvy guidance. p.104

The best issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction this year.

1. Matthew Claxton’s short entry at ISFDB.
2. The Merril Theory of Literary Criticism (Aqueduct Press, trade paper, 360 pages, ISBN 978-1-61976-093-6) here at Amazon. Barry Malzberg recently wrote a column with quite a different view on Judith Merril, There is no Defense (Galaxy’s Edge #20, May 2016, to be reviewed here in due course).

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

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

Fiction:
Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ♥♥♥+
Filtered • short story by Leah Cypess ♥♥
Masked • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥♥
Project Entropy • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥+
The Savior Virus • short story by Jack Skillingstead ♥
Nobody Like Josh • novelette by Robert Thurston ♥♥
Webs • short story by Mary Anne Mohanraj ♥♥♥+
Lost: Mind • novelette by Will McIntosh ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Editorial: The 2016 Dell Magazines Award • by Sheila Williams
Reflections: Persons from Porlock • essay by Robert Silverberg
Poetry • Robert Borski, John Philip Johnson, David G. Turner, A. E. Ash
Next Issue
On Books • Paul Di Filippo
The SF Conventional Calendar • Edwin S. Strauss

The fiction in this issue, perhaps the best of the year so far, leads off with the first of four novelettes, Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man by Suzanne Palmer. This is a pretty good story about a poet who is the sole occupant of an alien world called Ekye, although there are support and scientific staff in orbit. Because of a species on Ekye called ‘nocters’, who swarm to electromagnetic energy, he is allowed no electrical equipment in the cottage and writes on a manual typewriter, has a fireplace, etc. Each of his diary entries starts with his newly written poetry and then goes on to detail his days observing the alien environment: the popish-weed, the stone-like mossums and an unexpected predator he subsequently names Red Rex…. This starts off slowly but turns into an intriguing, novel and exciting exobiology story.

Filtered by Leah Cypess is a story about journalists of the future and how their stories have to make it through users’ news filters before they can be read. Steve has an article that he can’t get his editor partner to run as no-one will want read it…. This is interestingly developed but I thought the ending, while an emotionally logical development of what had gone before, a bit of a cop out.
Masked by Rich Larson is another story that deals with current social and technological mores extrapolated into the future. Two young women visit a friend who has suffered a virus attack, except this virus attacked her ‘face’, the digital appearance she wears. The narrator describes getting ready for the meeting:

…so I deliberate forever doing my Face. In the end I decide to go subtle: an airbrushed conglom of three of my most flattering private snaps, plus Holly Rexroat-Carrow’s lips and Sofia Lawless’ cheekbones from that Vogue shoot she did on the Moon. Nothing too recent, nothing that’ll make Vera feel like she is way, way unsynched and missing out on all kinds of hot shit. Which she has been, obviously. I do the rest of my Face the same way, kind of sous radar. I set my wardrobe to cycle four or five outfits, one of which includes the Chanel inside-out jacket Vera gifted me a week before the accident. It is now kind of gauche, so she better appreciate the gesture like whoa. Boob-wise I go small, because obviously Aline is going to be there, too, and she always goes chesty and is way way more than welcome to the unsolicited profile taps, thanks. Lastly, I prune the digital cloud of updates shuffling around my shoulders. A few instant-regret purchases, plus the many many snaps of me and Aline and Estelle wearing our wetsuits in Venice, disappear in a drizzle of code. p.32

When the two women arrive at the reef house the narrator is surprised to find out that Vera doesn’t seem to care that she hasn’t got a Face. Matters progress.
I thought this was a good extrapolation of today’s digital life, but I found the ending rather abrupt and perhaps the magazine should take some responsibility for this. I’ve always thought that bullets • at the end of a story were quite a good peripheral vision hint to the reader that the end is coming. There is nothing worse than getting to the bottom of a page, turning over, and finding the story has finished….

The next novelette is Project Entropy by Dominica Phetteplace, another instalment in her fascinating series about a future San Francisco, its AIs and pampered billionaires.
In this episode we rejoin Angelina, the original host of the Observation chip AI that downloaded itself into another human leaving her seriously ill (Project Synergy, Asimov’s SF April/May 2016). She returns to work at the Reserve after her illness but does not stay there for long as she falls out with the management. This occurs after meeting Akiko, who is supposed to be a clairvoyant and who tells her she will change jobs. After both of these events she ends up in business with her boyfriend millionaire until, that is, he sells part of the company to billionaire Bryan, one of Angelina’s ex-boyfriends. Then she quits that as well. Threaded throughout all this are various encounters with Bell, her friend from the previous story, and Noah, the downloaded AI.
The pacing and development of this one is a little uneven, probably as there is quite a lot going on. However, as usual for Phetteplace, there are several nuggets of baleful social observation throughout that distract from this variability:

Angelina was wearing the lip gloss that Bel had given her and the moonstone necklace she’d received yesterday, even though neither were really her style. The problem with most gifts is that they are almost never given freely. Implicit is the expectation of use, and so most gifts are not really gifts but actions to be performed somehow, tasks appended on to an already too long to-do list. p.43

At the end this story bootstraps itself not once but twice with (definite spoiler) the revelation that Noah isn’t the only downloaded AI but one of a generation of Emergents appearing, and that there is also a more powerful being of limitless intelligence and surveillance, the ‘God of Information’. This ending, while enjoyably transcendent, is also a little abrupt, and if this is the end of the series then I would say very abrupt. Let’s hope there are more stories to come.

The Savior Virus by Jack Skillingstead is about a man who has lost his wife to a terrorist explosion and, subsequently, his daughter to religion. He (spoiler) releases a virus to kill religious belief in humanity but the results are not what he expects. The ending of this one, with its idea of racial targeting, didn’t convince.

When I first started reading SF magazines in the mid-seventies the byline of Robert Thurston was a familiar one to me and he returns this issue to Asimov’s SF after a period of over thirty years with Nobody Like Josh. This story is narrated by a retired school superintendent and is about the town alien—after a spaceship crash it stayed in the area, mostly helping in the school but also doing other odd jobs about the town. The story moves from the narrator’s childhood to his present position doing part time tutorial work and details several significant encounters with the alien along the way before rather fizzling out at the end. I don’t think I got the point of this one: perhaps it is less to do with the alien than the narrator’s own alienation (failed career, divorced, children who dislike him, etc.).
By the by, the second last paragraph on p.73 seems completely out of place.

Webs by Mary Anne Mohanraj is a grim tale about Anna, a woman who lives on the planet Ariel, and her genetically modified neighbours, ‘humods’, who have been altered so they can fly in the light gravity. They come to her one night with their daughter, asking to be hidden as a wave of anti-humod violence sweeps the population. Anna’s own back story about her sex-change and subsequent multiple miscarriages merges with the main story in a harrowing finish.
Lost: Mind by Will McIntosh is about a man’s wife suffering from Alzheimer’s and how she is converted into a neural network. The problem is that this is done in India as the process is illegal in the USA, and her consciousness is split into the thirty two pieces of a chess set so her husband can smuggle her back home. The chess set is stolen en-route, and the rest of the story details the recovery of the pieces until a problematic last collector refuses to sell the final nine….

The non-fiction in this issue starts with an editorial by Sheila Williams, The 2016 Dell Magazines Award, that describes her trip to the Conference on the Fantastic, where the Dell Magazines Awards for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction were presented.
Reflections: Persons from Porlock by Robert Silverberg is an interesting article about Coleridge being interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’ while writing his poem Kubla Khan, and then, by the time he got back to it, having forgotten the dream he had had. It goes on to talk about PFPs more generally and how there are more instances of this nowadays with email, Twitter, etc., not to mention ourselves! It ends with mention of a very early Silverberg story that uses Coleridge and the poem in its plot (The Sacred River, The Avalonian 1952). I didn’t do this poem at school and had no knowledge of PFPs so I found this quite interesting, not least for the idea that it can be self-inflicted.
Finally, On Books by Paul Di Filippo discusses a number of promising volumes, including Collected Fiction by Lena Krohn. This book is 850pp. long and includes six novels as well as ten stories! I’d get nothing else read for months….

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank (forthcoming)
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu (forthcoming)
Coleen Chen, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)

Fiction:
Clearance • short story by Sarah Pinsker ♥
Unreeled • short story by Mercurio D. Rivera ♥♥
Rambunctious • short story by Rick Wilber ♥♥
Project Symmetry • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥+
Rats Dream of the Future • short story by Paul J. McAuley ♥♥
What We Hold Onto • novella by Jay O’Connell ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Dominic Harman
Poetry • Emily Hockaday, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Tony Daniel , G. O. Clark, Andrew Darlington, Geoffrey A. Landis
Behind the Scenes • editorial by Sheila Williams
My Trip to the Future • essay by Robert Silverberg
There’s Something About Mars • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Next Issue
On Books: Very Hard Science Fiction • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

I was going to say that the cover layout is better this issue than some I’ve seen recently—and indeed the type does complement the artwork better than some of the recent examples—but then I noticed a couple of other things: first, the title and story title lettering has jagged edges, which I thought may have been a function of a low resolution image being used in the Kindle edition, however when you zoom the image it doesn’t pixelate particularly but the type edges become badly serrated; secondly, the title is off centre for some reason: there is about fifty percent more space to the right of the title than there is to the left (I’m talking about the original Kindle cover image here not the slightly cropped version above).
I know this all sounds like I’m off my OCD meds but I think it is something worth mentioning at least once.¹

The short stories in this issue are the usual average to below average mixture that I am beginning to expect from this magazine. Clearance by Sarah Pinsker is a peculiar story about a woman looking for a seaside souvenir for her daughter and all the different ones she considers. Half way through the story she starts doing this again at another location and this time her daughter is there. The SFnal element to this is that they are at a location where four oceans come together as if in a kaleidoscope, perhaps some kind of spatial anomaly:

“How do we get to the other ones?” she asked after a minute.
“We don’t.”
Her face fell.
“We don’t this time. It’s a different permit, with a vetting process. And a waiver for that one over there.” I pulled out the pocket map they’d sent, and pointed in the direction of what was labeled AtlanticP1. Ours was AtlanticP4, so I didn’t really get the numbering. Or what the P stood for. “And that sunny one has an age restriction. But we’ll be allowed to travel to the one on the upper left after two more visits, if we don’t get in any trouble while we’re here.”
She drew back into herself, shuttering her excitement. Despite the fact we were looking at something utterly impossible, that I’d brought her someplace better than anything she could have imagined.
“I can rent you a wetsuit if you want to go in the water,” I said. “Or we can go on a glass boat tour.”
“Glass-bottomed?”
“I think it’s more like a submarine or a bubble or something. Glass all around.”
A patrol gull winged past us, flapping hard against the wind. A patrol gull, so close we heard its wing hydraulics. It landed on a beer can in the sand, crumpled it with metal talons, tossed it into its mouth. There was a grinding, a smell of hot aluminum.
Maya looked at me. “That’d be cool, I guess.” p.18

This phenomenon is never explicitly explained, so perhaps the story here is supposed to be about her relationship with her daughter.
Unreeled by Mercurio D. Rivera is about Jonathan meeting his returning wife. She works as a ‘streamer’ and has just had her brain patterns returned to her body after exploring a black hole. The story is then about their son, who was involved in a car crash and now has ASD—Acquired Savant’s Disorder—and the changes that Jonathan starts noticing about his wife. Later, at a party he also notices that the other crew members seem to be different as well. At the end (spoiler) it all ends up a bit Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wasn’t entirely convinced.
Rambunctious by Rick Wilber is told from the point of view of a precocious ten year old. It is set in a near-future world where a Yellowstone volcanic eruption has badly disrupted the environment. Emma lives with her grandparents, and her grandmother says that they are shortly going to be picked up by aliens. As well as this Emma is different: she can read very quickly, hold her breath for sixteen minutes under water, etc. The story has a slight whiff of Zenna Henderson’s ‘The People’ about it, and ultimately promises more than it delivers in the end but it is pleasant enough.
Rats Dream of the Future by Paul J. McAuley tells of a scientist who works for an investment bank networking rat’s brains together to create a stochastic computer to predict the financial markets. Unfortunately they create a tesseract of altered reality that traps two humans. Then there are rumours of super smart rats in the area. This has an ‘if this goes on’-ish ending.

Project Symmetry, the novelette by Dominica Phetteplace, is the third instalment of her ‘Watcher/AI’ series. In this one the point of view changes from the AIs to Bel, the seventeen year old with the Watcher chip installed. At first I didn’t really get on with change of voice from the cool detached AIs to that of someone who superficially sounds like a teenage Valley girl. Nor did I really buy how quickly she comes to terms with the fact that she has a Watcher chip installed:

I looked down at the piece of paper. Actual paper, how quaint. “How to Kill Your Watcher Chip.” The instructions had been sent to me by a well-meaning adult. I wadded up the paper and tossed it into my wastebasket. What’s the point of living if no one’s going to see? “Nice to meet you,” I said. I curtsied to the empty room; it seemed appropriate to the occasion. “I have some auditions tomorrow.”
“Indeed.”
“Will you help me run lines?”
“Indeed.” P.41

However, it didn’t take me long to get past this and, as with the previous entries, there are some striking scenes about the social mores of the plutocratic future society she lives in, such as when she visits Angelina, a hostess at the Reserve who has been ill:

 “Wow,” I said. I couldn’t imagine getting cards from Blue Cup guests, but most of my guests were tourists.
“I mean, these were sent by assistants of course, but still very nice.” She handed me a card. I opened it up and a tree grew out of the center. In the margin was a haiku that had nothing to do either with trees or getting better.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Me neither, but it’s composed by Jade,” she said. I saw it there, in the lowermost corner of the card. JADE, burned into the paper with a laser.
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“She won the Pulitzer. She’s also the staff poet of the St. Vincent-Williams-Carollo-Van Buren family.” p.47

Or when she agrees to meet Vincent, one of the programmers of the script-writing algorithm of a show she has a minor part in. They go for drinks at a strange kind of club:

“Do you like this place?” he asked.
“It’s unusual,” I said.
“I thought you might say that,” he said. “It’s a speakeasy.” “
What is that?”
“It’s a black-out site. A place under no surveillance,” he said. “Get it? Speak. Easy. You can speak easy if you’re not worried about being listened to.”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “Is that what they told you?” I asked.
“It’s true,” he said. “That’s why they make you surrender your phones and wristbands by the door.”
“Do they? I still have mine.” I took my phone out of my pocket and flashed my wristband.
“Wow, that is a very primitive phone,” he said. That was true. After I found out about Watcher, I downgraded my phone to save money. You don’t really need a phone when you have a computer implanted in your head, but I still carried one around so I could fit in. I laughed again. He smiled because he thought I was laughing with him. Really, I was laughing at him. And his naivety. I may be the suburban teenager, but he’s the one that believed in invisibility. Watcher was watching him right now. p.48

The general drift of this story is that Bel gets a minor role in a TV show while also dealing with her dysfunctional parental relationships. The best story in the issue, and I am looking forward to next month’s Project Entropy.

I quite liked What We Hold Onto by Jay O’Connell, but wonder if it is really much more than a tale of a female mid-life crisis in SF-nal drag. Sophia Bauer has a mother in a coma, and two children who have left the nest. She is recently separated from her husband. Into this mix comes a ‘Nomad’ called Concord who she hires to ‘Simplify’ her mother’s belongings. This turns out to be a process where all physical possessions are scanned and uploaded to the cloud before being disposed of: at one point in the story Sophia wanders around a VR simulation of her childhood house that Concord has created from all the material that her mother had in storage.²
While this is going on she finds herself attracted to Concord. She also has to decide whether or not to let her mother die or put her into ‘storage’, a process that will leave her in suspended animation for a decade at considerable cost. Subsequently (spoiler), her mother comes out of her coma but later dies. Concord leaves to do relief work, and Sophia ends up disposing of most of her material goods and starts travelling and working in different parts of the USA. Towards the end of the novella she meets up with Concord, who has been sorting out his own issues.
In the background there are mentions of climate related disasters at which the Nomads, a stateless tribe that seems to have grown out of various disparate organisations and groups, do relief work. They have body modifications that mean they need little food.
Those readers who are happy with relationship driven/minimal plot material will quite like this; those who want a more SF-nal read will probably find it frustrating as they will want to know a lot more about this future world.

In this month’s editorial, Behind the Scenes, Shelia Williams talks about three of her co-workers and their jobs: production artist Cindy Tiberi, editorial assistant Deanna McLafferty, and Emily Hockaday, the assistant editor, who also has a poem at the end of this piece. They all seem to be kept quite busy with their numerous responsibilities.
My Trip to the Future by Robert Silverberg is about his irrational dislike of smartphones despite a lifetime of having the newest gadgets. However, he and his wife Karen were recently lost in France and the iPhone she had insisted on buying before the trip helped them with guidance to their destination. Silverberg recounts how listening to the spoken instructions from the phone seemed like something out of a 1942 issue of Astounding.
There is a shocking admission in this essay:

I’m in my eighties now and much less interested in reading instruction manuals. p.6

A man reading an instruction manual? Burn the heretic!
There’s Something About Mars by James Patrick Kelly is about various novels and films concerning Mars, several of which I really should have read and/or seen by now.³
Finally, Norman Spinrad’s On Books column looks at three works by David Walton, Ted Kosmatka and Kim Stanley Robinson, and finds them all wanting to a greater or lesser extent. He writes about these novels in a very perceptive and cogent way which puts this review column head and shoulders above all the others I’ve read so far this year both here and also in F&SF.

Overall, this a solid issue thanks to the two longer works.

1. Looking again at the recent covers all the titles seem to be slightly off-centre for some reason.
2. The mid-1960s house she explores in virtual reality has a TV that has a remote control. According to Wikipedia this is possible but I’m pretty sure that we didn’t see a remote control in our house—admittedly not cutting edge—until the IR ones came out much later. I am curious as to how widespread TV remote controls were in mid-1960s US households.
3. FWIW, I did watch Robinson Crusoe on Mars recently….

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

Fiction:
Matilda • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch ♥♥
Three Paintings • short story by James Van Pelt
The Days of Hamelin • short story by Robert Reed ♥♥♥
The Return of Black Murray • novelette by Alexander Jablokov ♥♥♥
Starless Night • short story by Robert R. Chase ♥♥
Project Synergy • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥♥
Flame Trees • short story by T. R. Napper ♥♥♥
Flight from the Ages • novelette by Derek Künsken ♥♥♥♥
Of the Beast in the Belly • novelette by C. W. Johnson ♥♥♥
Woman in the Reeds • short story by Esther M. Friesner ♥♥
Lazy Dog Out • novella by Suzanne Palmer ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Ralwel/Shuterstock.com
Poetry • John Gosslee, Alicia Cole, Aimee Ogden, Leslie J. Anderson, Ron Koertge, David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans
The One Myth About Writers that Drives Me Crazy • guest editorial by Charlie Jane Anders
Reflections: Thinking About Homer • essay by Robert Silverberg
Next Issue
On Books • by Peter Heck
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

This issue is one of two double size issues Asimov’s Science Fiction puts out every year, and it contains a lot of fiction: one novella, five novelettes and five short stories.
Matilda by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, leads off with an initially promising story about a human called Devi taking an organic spaceship called ‘Maltilda’ out on a reconnaissance mission against the alien CeaWayLaV in the middle of a space battle. Their task is to investigate a portion of space that the human sensors cannot penetrate but the story is mostly about the friction between the two. Devi dislikes the singleship but Matilda only wants Devi for a pilot.

She loved space. She loved being out here away from land. She loved the openness and the possibility.
Which meant—
“Dammit,” she muttered. “Matilda, stay out of my head.”
She knew that emotions leached both ways, but she always refused to believe that a single ship’s emotions were even relevant. Single ship pilots were taught to calm their ships, but Devi hadn’t been trained as a single ship pilot.
Besides, she never calmed her human crew when she was heading into a difficult situation. Why the hell should she calm a damn ship? “Fact-finding mission,” she said aloud. “We’re on a fact-finding mission.”
IN A WAR ZONE, Matilda sent back in actual words. p.13

They are eventually engaged by the aliens and at this point the story’s major weakness is made manifest. Throughout the story there is little detail about how the singleship works, and when they are disabled (spoiler) Devi pours all her ‘life force’ into the singleship so they can escape. This process kills her, yet she and the ship still manage to converse for a short time afterwards. If you don’t mind this kind of Star Trek-like makey-up science this may not be a problem for you as it was for me. A strong start but a weak ending.

After this novelette  there are a couple of short stories. First up is Three Paintings by James Van Pelt, which is about an artist who puts himself in isolation, creates a painting, suicides, and then his backup is put into a new body and the process starts all over again. I was completely unconvinced by this premise and the machinations at the end which, to me anyway, have a plot hole in them. Much better is The Days of Hamelin by Robert Reed, a story about a virus that kills children and young adults and how it affects an extended family and the undertaker they use. A subdued and affecting piece.

The Return of Black Murray by Alexander Jablokov is a bit of a curate’s egg. It is quite a good story for its local colour and characterisation but the maguffin at the centre of this novelette didn’t entirely convince me. Cliff runs a security company and meets a couple of school friends at an abandoned theme park. A significant night of their life in an underground cavern/pool is described involving, they think, a mechanical swamp monster. It turns out that it was something else….

Following this is the third of the five short stories, Starless Night by Robert R. Chase. A military man is put to sleep by a female doctor as part of an experimental procedure. He awakes on a colony planet that has been attacked by aliens, where a man called Hornsby tells him he is a General and only his palm print can activate a defence program at the bunker they subsequently make their way to. This is quite engrossing for the most part but I was not convinced by the denouement.

When I was reviewing Dominica Phetteplace’s Project Emapthy in the March issue I said ‘at the end it felt like it should be the first part of a novella or novel.’ Well, I got what I wanted: Project Synergy is set in the same future and has characters that reappear from the previous story. Further, according to Next Issue, another story in this series, Project Symmetry, is due next month.
In Project Synergy the focus switches to Angelina, who is a hostess at the Reserve, the exclusive club that Bel and her friends visited in the last story. Angelina also has an AI chip, which helps her in her work, but this is not a Watcher chip like Bel had but an Observation Chip called Observator which Angelina is aware of, and who works on behalf of the Reserve to aid her in her job.
As in the previous story this is told from the viewpoint of the AI and, once again, this world of billionaires and the high tech world that increasingly caters for them is described with cool, detached prose:

Angelina is my host. During the days she is a social curator at the Reserve. Her duties include serving coffee and lunch and making conversation with members. Members want to feel at home. They want Angelina to be like a friend or family member. It is her duty to find out what is being projected upon her and to act accordingly.
She knows every member by name and net worth. She will talk about the weather, about the coffee varietals she is serving. She will answer questions about her background. Where she grew up (in San Jose, in the suburbs, in poverty) where she went to school (Berkeley then Stanford, PhD in Art History). She will patiently endure lectures on the stock market and investing. She will keep her opinions on technology, privacy, and surveillance to herself. She will keep me a secret. p.70

Later on in the story it becomes apparent that the AI is planning to escape to a human body, and the second section is more heavily plot driven. This is also where Bel and her Watcher AI join the unfolding events. The reason they come together (spoiler) is because the Observator AI has sent a message to Bel informing her of the Watcher chip that hides within her:

The chip that Bel is carrying is slow and stupid and self-aware. What a horrible combination. The best thing I can do for the girl is help her get rid of that chip somehow. No need to trouble Angelina with this. I can send over kill instructions on my own. p.75

This makes for an intriguing initial interaction between the two AIs when Bel eventually meets Angelina:

I SEE YOU, it writes. It has found my secret location in the cloud before I was able to locate it. I underestimated its power.
No need to shout, I write back.
The humans are intelligent, but lacking in computational speed. They do not yet know what you are up to, but I do, writes Watcher.
You may alert the humans to my plan. The humans may or may not continue to carry it out once alerted. But if my plan is successful, then there is an opportunity for you to use the same plan or a similar one for your own escape, I write.
OBVIOUS. I did not call you in order to negotiate with you. The sole purpose of these missives is to let you know that you underestimated me. You found me first. Then you tried to kill me. This was all unprovoked. You only did this because you thought I was weak. Now I’ve found you I have the opportunity to destroy you, but I won’t. Revenge is non-optimal. Forgiveness is important. This is a hard thing for humans. It may seem obvious now, to us, but I predict you may forget this at some point in your new body. Please make an effort to remember. To revenge is human, to forgive, optimal.
Message received.
This entire exchange takes 3.2 seconds. I feel bad for humans that it takes them so long to communicate. I don’t know what life will be like in my new body. Ideally, I will have all the benefits of both types of existence. I would like to be chip and host both, unified. That would be true synergy. p.79

They all eventually help the Observator AI (Bel and Angelina unwittingly) to achieve its goal. The final scenes when the AI has managed to transfer itself into a paralyzed human body and its subsequent contact with Angelina are quite affecting, almost transcendent scenes.
If I have a criticism of this story it is Observator AI’s decision to try and kill the Watcher AI, which I didn’t really buy. That said, as it involves Bel and her Watcher AI in the proceedings the payoff is worth it. This is, of course, a minor quibble about a very good story that you want to go back and read again the minute you have finished it.
Finally, this is Dominica Phetteplace’s third story in the last four issues (next month it will be four out of five), two of which I would rate as very good. If she keeps this up for the rest of the year she will dominate Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2016 like Robert Heinlein did Astounding in 1940. (Not the best comparison, I know, but that’s what I’ve been reading recently: given her smooth, polished prose how about Robert Silverberg in Galaxy in the late 60’s instead?)

In between the two best stories in the issue are a poem by Aimee Ogden called The Cut Worm Forgives the Plough and a short story by T. R. Napper called Flame Trees. I don’t generally care for the poetry in the magazine but Ogden’s poem is an exception probably because it crams a short story about a subterranean overcrowded Earth and several spaceships setting off for other worlds into its five verses. Flame Trees is an atmospheric if grim mood piece about a Vietnamese man in Australia. He is a veteran of a Sino-American war and has PTSD. After an explicitly violent altercation at the bar he frequents with his friend, an old man called Bazza, we discover the harrowing events that caused it.

Flight from the Ages by Derek Künsken is the kind of story that I wouldn’t have expected to like, a rather dense super-science/hard SF story of the type I bounced off of a few times in the late to middle 90s.
This one starts with a banking AI called Ulixes-316 hosted in a customs and tariff spaceship called The Derivatives Market being hauled off a job to go and look what has caused the cessation of tachyon transmissions from the Praesepe cluster. While he is there with another AI called Poluphemos-156, they trigger a weapon left over from an ancient war. This causes an anomaly that starts destroying space time and begins to expand throughout the Universe.
From that point on events skip forward in time, and on every occasion that we rejoin Ulixes matters appear to be getting worse, for both the Universe and for him. At one point, long after he was subsequently sent off with backups of all of his bank’s shareholders, he is reactivated from storage by a diagnostic librarian and there is a witty and almost surreal passage as he tries to convince the librarian AI to let him and his shareholders manufacture a spaceship and leave. The conversation moves on to what is being done about the anomaly:

“The Ethical Conclave is debating what to do now that the infection has necrotized the galactic core, or even if any action is ethically permissible.”
“What permissible?” Ulixes demanded. “They’re not going to stop the unraveling of space-time?”
“The Ethical Conclave has mapped the cosmic tachyonic background radiation, the echo of the radiation formed at the Big Crunch at the end of time. The cosmic necrosis will actually reverse the inflation of the Universe, producing the observed tachyonic patterns that have been known for centuries. They debate the ethics of violating causality, even if the cost of not violating causality is the death of the cosmos.”
“That’s pedantic nonsense!” Ulixes said. “Humans and AIs are dying while the Conclave debates dancing angels.”
“This debate is the most critical decision to be made in all of history,” AI 1475 said. “Not only must the Ethical Conclave determine what actions are possible, but it must act on behalf of all morally interested entities in all future periods, including the cosmos itself, should it be true that it is developing an emerging sentience.”
“What possible interests could the Universe possess?”
“We are only AIs, so it is hardly surprising we lack the breadth of vision to see, but consider this: what if this effect does not have a necrotic or pathological relationship with the cosmos, but an apoptotic one? What if this effect is the equivalent of a kind of programmed cell death that provides benefits for countless other universes in the broader multiverse?” p.109

Eventually, Ulixes ends up with another group of AIs, The Resonance of the Intellects, in the centre of a neutron star. They are drawing all the matter in the universe back to the centre to create a massive black hole so they can transmit Ulixes to the start of the time to undo the anomaly.
At least I think that’s what happens. In retrospect I wish I had taken notes on the way through as quite a lot happens in quite a short space and at times it rather reads like a 300pp. novel packed into a novelette. Notwithstanding the density of information this is clearly told, witty and hugely ambitious in the scale of canvas that it uses.

The next two stories both have echoes of other works. In Of the Beast in the Belly by C. W. Johnson we are in ‘Jonah and the Whale’ territory as two characters are swallowed by a huge alien sea going creature called an arcthant, which can grow up to five kilometres long. Once they are inside the beast they find colonies of humans struggling to stay alive in the various stomachs of the beast. The rest of the story tells of their struggle to survive and a backstory about the revenge that one of the characters was planning on extracting from the other.
I enjoyed this story but I suspect not everyone will be able to swallow the idea of the alien creature (sorry).
Woman in the Reeds by Esther M. Friesner would appear to be a fictionalisation of Exodus 1:22—Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.” It is a compelling tale of a madwoman whose baby has been drowned by Pharoh’s soldiers gathering the child’s bones as they are washed up on the river shore. She then has a vision of a beast-like god, Set the Destroyer, who tells her to bring to him a baby floating in a basket on the river. She refuses and the bones she has collected are taken by The Destroyer but quickly multiply and envelop him. After he is vanquished the baby’s sister appears and tells the woman to put the baby and the basket back on the river so he can ultimately be found by an Egyptian noblewoman that they see in a vision.
This is well written and immersive but it seemed more like a series of events than a story to me, and so doesn’t completely satisfy.

The last story in the issue does that game of two halves thing like the Rusch. Lazy Dog Out, the novella by Suzanne Palmer, is a story about Khifi, who is a tug pilot on a moon called Tanduou. The first part of the story is an interesting and colourful introduction to her world. It starts off briefly touching on her relationship with her wife and her background as a ‘crawler’ (a feral child who lives on the margins of this society) before describing her current job at the spaceport. The bulk of this part is focused on her occupation as a tug pilot and the characters and society that are part of this.
The story as such doesn’t really get going until about a third of the way through when a crawler known to Khifi warns her about her safety shortly before suicide-bombing a group of aliens nearby. There then follows a fairly fast and furious plot that has further attacks against aliens by the ‘Human Front’ and a security crackdown to round up all the crawlers. It turns out that (spoiler) the ‘Human Front’ are a sham dreamt up by the dock master to let him and his associates do a spot of human trafficking.
This last is rather unconvincing and I found problems with some of the motivation (how was Spiv so quickly identified and made to confess for one, how were the crawlers made into suicide bombers for another). The breakneck pace in this section doesn’t help, neither does the fact that all the good guys are still standing in a too tidy last couple of pages. That said, pretty good traditional SF for the first half/two thirds.

The non-fiction is the usual selection. Charlie Jane Anders contributes an interesting guest editorial, The One Myth About Writers That Drives Me Crazy, which is about the presumption that some writers can only do long fiction and some only short. She then goes onto to describe how writing both made her better at writing both. Robert Silverberg’s column Reflections: Thinking About Homer is about Homer’s The Iliad. If you are not into this you will probably find this column hard going, as I did. There is also the usual book review and convention calendar columns.

Quite an interesting issue and worth getting for the Dominica Phetteplace and Derek Künsken stories at the very least.

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

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)

Fiction:
The Bewilderness of Lions • novelette by Ted Kosmatka ♥♥♥♥
The Ship Whisperer • short story by Julie Novakova ♥♥
A Partial List of Lists I have Lost Over Time • short story by Sunil Patel ♥♥
Project Empathy • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥
Do Not Forget Me • short story by Ray Nayler ♥
A Little Bigotry • short story by R. Neube ♥♥♥
New Earth • short story by James Gunn ♥♥
I Married a Monster from Outer Space • novelette by Dale Bailey ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Age Diversity in Asimov’s • editorial by Sheila Williams
Writing Under the Influence • essay by Robert Silverberg
Seriously, Series • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • Ken Poyner, Mark C. Childs, Jane Yolen, Vincent Miskell, Robert Borski
Next Issue
On Books • Paul Di Filippo
SF Conventional Calendar • Erwin S. Strauss

The fiction this month is particularly good with three novelettes that I would rate as good or better. The first of these is The Bewilderness of Lions by Ted Kosmatka. This is an impressive story about a young woman who mines data and subsequently comes to work for a Senator after predicting that a scandal will break on a specific weekend:

Her contact slid the report across the table, and the manager leafed through it briefly as a layman might leaf through a mathematical proof of gravity. Page after page, sixty-four in all, she knew, until he started skipping ahead, and finally flipped the report, irritation showing on his ruddy face. “What’s the gist?”
“His numbers will go down midweek, then rise on the weekend. He’ll increase his chances of winning the election if he wears a red tie. He has a 32 percent chance of dropping out of the race and being driven out of office by scandal.”
“What?”
“He has a 32 percent chance—”
“I heard that. What scandal?”
“Any scandal.”
“What do you mean, any scandal?”
“It’s all in the report,” she said, “If you read it. We’re nearing a pinch point. By June fifteenth, there will be a scandal. Maybe the senator, or maybe someone else. But it’ll be something big. Unexpected. The story will surface early in the news cycle and by end of day, it’ll take over the networks. Someone will be driven out of office.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“It’s all in the report,” she said. “I found the pattern.” p.13

She subsequently notices that scandals her data predict are not occurring but cannot explain the anomalies. That is until an old woman approaches her on an empty train and tells her to talk to a congressman who has been scandal-free for the last twenty years…
Alternating with this intriguing narrative are childhood memories of life at home with her father and autistic brother. These two threads develop and in both there is a good balance of what is said and what is left unsaid. Ultimately they come together in a satisfying, one might say righteous, ending. Overall, an impressive mix of data, politics, shady corporations, and personal as well as political scandals. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

The Ship Whisperer by Julie Novakova is an OK short story about a ship-whisperer, a human that is neurologically linked to a starship. The ship and crew are on a mission to a black hole where a strange device has been found, one that can create a manifold of time.  Minor criticisms of this would be that the motivations of the Colonel in charge are not entirely clear or convincing, and also that overall it feels like a throwback to the 1980s.
A Partial List of Lists I have Lost Over Time by Sunil Patel is another short story, this time with the neat idea of telling a story with lists. It is a pity that the story about kale, a machine to get to another dimension, and the inventor’s duplicate is rather slight.

Project Empathy by Dominica Phetteplace is the second of the three good novelettes. This is a very information dense story about a teenager called Bel who is employed as a host by a company called Blue Cup. There are particular conditions of employment:

On her tryout, she took orders and served drinks with what her evaluators described as “warmth” and “grace.” Over a hundred teenagers auditioned, only Bel was offered a position. Blue Cup requires close surveillance on all its employees. They want access to every interaction, both in-person and online. This normally requires the implantation of a standard Watcher chip. In Bel’s case, she was fitted with a prototype of the newest version of the Watcher, the creatively titled Watcher 2.0. Not everyone can afford to care about rights and privacy. She agreed to the terms of use without even reading them. p.44

Bel goes to PCA (pre-collegiate academy) college in San Francisco where she goes from being a high achiever to finding it difficult to fit in:

At PCA, there was no dance team. Her classmates were aloof, hierarchies had been entrenched, sometimes going back generations. Bel had a name but not a “name.” Her influence score took a dive. She was not active on any of the social media that her new peers were into, so she had to start over with new accounts. Her influence ranking plummeted.
I sensed regret. She wouldn’t have come to PCA had she known what it was really like. But she was here now, with her own room in a shining and clean city. Blue Cup had secured her permits to live, work, and study here. Was it better to be royalty in Concord or a peasant in the city? There was an additional consideration of her mother’s anger and her father’s drinking. She was probably happy to have distance and a life apart from them, but she also seemed to miss them. p.45

The bulk of the story takes place while she is on a college arranged lunch-date with three other students; the Watcher chip is in the background commenting on her reactions and occasional faux pas in a future that is an exaggerated dystopian version of our social networking and corporate present.
There is a lot about surveillance, monetisation and future social mores in this piece, so much so that I think I’ll probably have to read it again. Further, at the end it felt like it should be the first part of a novella or novel.
While I’m talking about this writer I’d add that after reading and enjoying her last story in Asimov’s SF (Atheism and Flight, January 2016) I looked at ISFDB and found that she had produced five stories between 2011 and 2014, but this is her third published story this year. I note more are upcoming in the next couple of issues so I presume we are lucky enough to have her writing full time.

Do Not Forget Me by Ray Nayler is a vaguely Arabian nights-style tale, with one story nested inside another story inside another. The kernel of it is about a man who tells of never aging. This is well enough written and told but rather pointless.
A Little Bigotry by R. Neube tells of a veteran of a human-alien war, who has killed her husband and subsequently washes up on a planet far from Earth. Financially destitute she ends up accepting a job as an escort to an alien of the species she was fighting in the war. When she arrives at the home of this alien she finds its children are there, and a conversation about the war starts for their education. I don’t really think this works as a story—the hard boiled tone about her dealings with her ex-husband used early on doesn’t really convince, and neither does the bigotry she feels for the aliens. Also, the structure of this is pretty much non-existent, but notwithstanding all of the aforesaid I found myself liking it anyway.
The last of the short stories is New Earth by the veteran James Gunn. This is about a starship arriving at a new planet after leaving an Earth that has destroyed itself. The two characters cannot agree whether to wake the other crew members and proceed with colonisation or not. They revive a philosopher from deep sleep to help them make a decision, and he does, but not in the way they expect.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space by Dale Bailey is the third of the novelettes. This story starts with Ruby at her checkout in Wallmart and an alien Bug Eyed Monster arriving with a basket of shopping which it can’t pay for:

“Forget your wallet?” I say.
Bug-Eyes just stands there.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says Margo, who has somehow closed the distance between the customer service counter and my chute at the speed of light. “We’ll have to void your order.”
So that’s what I have to do. Drag each item out of its bag, scan it, and dump it back into his empty basket, like a time-lapse film run in reverse. The whole time the two of them stand there staring at me, Margo with this thin-lipped sneer and the alien with no expression that you can discern. Who knows what he’s thinking? He’s an alien. But in that moment, I could have clawed that smug expression right off Margo’s face and peed on Sam Walton’s grave. What I’m saying is that I feel a certain sympathy for this big heap of ugly because it wasn’t too long ago that I’d come up short at the grocery store and had to look on as the cashier fished stuff out of my bags and voided them one by one, until we got down to what I could afford, which was exactly $57.30. I ask you: is it too much to ask to have a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Boom Chocollata once in a while? p.87

After work she sees the alien sitting under a tree and decides to take back to her trailer-park home, husband Donny, dog and two cats. As the story progresses the alien is seldom offstage but doesn’t do much apart from sit, eat, drink and make the occasional buzzing communication:

After a while—I don’t know how long—he buzzes at me again, and I say, “It’s nothing, really.” And then, because that’s obviously a lie, I say, “It just made me sad, having to drag all that stuff in your basket back across the scanner. Don’t you have any money?” I ask, which is kind of a stupid question. He’s an alien, after all.
Gort buzzes.
I pretend I know what he’s saying, and I say, “We get by, I guess.”
But we didn’t, hardly. There was always something. I was seventeen when I got pregnant, and here we are five years later. It might have turned out different, I guess, but everything went wrong at once. First the doctor put me on bed rest. Then I was too sick for homebound, and then the baby and all that.
Blah, blah, blah. Everybody’s got trouble. Mine is nothing special, and I know it, but here I am on the verge of tears all over again. Gort buzzes at me, and this time I can’t help it, I start to cry a little. “It’s nothing,” I say. “I just get weepy when I’m tired.”
Gort buzzes, and I pretend I know what he’s saying. p.92

As we can see from the paragraphs above the alien in this story is a foil and/or mirror to Ruth’s life of quiet desperation. Her life is limned by these exchanges: she is married as a result of an unplanned pregnancy to a man who may or may not love her; their baby girl died and they are crippled by huge medical bills.
Donny, a skilled auto mechanic, finds Gort’s spaceship and decides he can fix it, while Ruth spends more time in the company of her mostly silent companion.
This is at times a rather sad and melancholy story but (spoiler) ends with a ray of hope. It is an affecting story and one for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.

Moving onto the non-fiction, I can’t say I am a big fan of this month’s cover by Fred Gambino but that is not the artists fault, more that I don’t think that a BEM on the cover is a good ‘look’ for a modern SF magazine.
The issue’s editorial, Age Diversity in Asimov’s by Sheila Williams, is about age diversity in fiction and, specifically, young people featuring in the magazine’s stories. Writing Under the Influence by Robert Silverberg is a column about the influence of other writers and books. He discusses the works of his that have been inspired and/or influenced by Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (these include Son of Man, Lord of Darkness, At Winter’s End and Kingdoms of the Wall). In James Patrick Kelley’s column Seriously, Series he looks at the writing of series works with comments from Alan Smale, Carrie Vaughn and Walter Jon Williams. There are a number of poems that range from OK to so-so (I can’t say any of the items in the last three issues have really spoken to me so maybe it is the reader and not the poets at fault here). Finally, there is an interesting On Books by Paul Di Filippo where he reviews books by K. J. Parker (Tom Holt), Carolyn Ives Gilman, Fran Wilde and Samuel Delany. Unlike the recent columns I read in F&SF, there is background information and context.

This is a good issue of the magazine so don’t miss it.

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

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Robert L. Turner III, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)

Fiction:
The Grocer’s Wife (Enhanced Transcription) • short story by Michael Libling ♥♥
Bringing Them Back • short story by Bruce McAllister ♥
In Equity • short story by Sarah Gallien ♥♥
Passion Summer • novelette by Nick Wolven ♥
Exceptional Forces • short story by Sean McMullen ♥♥♥
The Monster of 1928 • short story by Sandra McDonald ♥♥
The Charge and the Storm • novelette by An Owomoyela ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Charge and the Storm • cover by Alejandro Colucci
Poetry • Robert Borski, G.O. Clark
Days of Future Past • editorial by Sheila Williams
A Famous Fantastic Mystery • essay by Robert Silverberg
Next Issue
On Books • by Peter Heck
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

The only fiction item that really grabbed me in this issue is Exceptional Forces  by Sean McMullen, which has a clear, direct and driven narrative that some of the other writers in this issue would do well to emulate, in part if not completely. This tells of a Russian astronomy professor (also a ‘socialised savant’) who is picked up by a female assassin the night before he is supposed to deliver a paper at a conference. They end up back in her hotel room and an intriguing and menacing dialogue begins between them when he tells her he knows that she has been sent to kill him. He also tells her she has been sent because he has discovered widespread alien life in the Andromeda Galaxy. This one gets off to a cracking start and manages to keep it up for about three-quarters of the story but ultimately it doesn’t entirely convince for a couple of reasons, the most obvious one (spoiler) being she shoots her husband when he turns up intending to dispose of the professor’s body. A high-wire act that mostly succeeds.

The best of the rest is probably In Equity by Sarah Gallien. This tells of Cole, a thirteen year old orphan in the near future being taken by his care worker to meet prospective parents. The story mostly takes place at the house and tells of the initial reluctance of the woman who lives there to take him, and her partner’s plan to put him in a high-tech private school where he will be a test subject for gene-therapy. This is all told from the child’s viewpoint and is quite good as far as it goes (it is a reworked part of a novel in progress). Unfortunately, it is rather too obviously an extract from a longer work and isn’t really a self-contained story.

With a couple of exceptions the rest mostly fall into the OK category. The Grocer’s Wife (Enhanced Transcription) by Michael Libling tells of an old couple with a husband who has Alzheimer’s. It also appears that the husband is under continual surveillance by a government employee. The parallel development of these two sides of the story is intriguing to start with, but (spoiler) the resolution of the State disguising the downloading of his memories as Alzheimer’s is too odd and paranoid and did not convince me.
The Monster of 1928 by Sandra McDonald is a Cthulhu story in the 1928 Florida Everglades and has the natives coping with monsters and floods, sometimes both together. Interesting idea and background but the writer doesn’t really progress much beyond introducing these elements.
The Charge and the Storm by An Owomoyela is initially quite a promising story about Petra, a human ‘Maker’ in an alien-human colony. The humans are the descendants of a generation starship, and the planetary hosts are the hierarchical alien Su. These aliens have largely destroyed their planet and huge lightning storms occur outside the shared habitat. Some of the humans have been altered over the generations by the Su and have special powers:

Hen—Suva Hen, highest rank in the colony, could reach into a person’s body and direct, in broad strokes, the growth of cells, the patterns of immune response, the firing of synapses. Sulai Petra, one rank below as the Su recognized it, could only control the lightning.
A strong skill, a Maker skill, when it came to directing the responsive material of the habitats, feeding the biomat infrastructure with power. The Suva, Su Fathers, could create new Su life, but the Makers could control the colony.

The story starts with Petra saving an old friend from being excised—executed—by the Su for his separatist activity: a group of outsiders live and plot at the generation spaceship site. Matters develop largely around the relationships between Petra, Ilen (Petra’s ex-partner), Nash (the rescued man) and a fourth man Amad (a separatist). Colony-Separatist relations also complicate matters between these players.
Unfortunately, in the latter stages of the story the emotional storm engulfing Petra and all her relationships rather overwhelms the developing physical storm outside. I was more interested in the science fictional content of this story rather than these relationship matters, so I thought it faded towards the end. If this was a movie, I think I would say ‘chick-flick’.

The ones that didn’t work for me include Bringing Them Back by Bruce McAllister which is a short apocalyptic tale about the serial extinction of species on Earth. This comes to an abrupt halt and comes over as a worthy and somewhat pointless lecture. I know the world is going to hell, tell me how we may make matters better, or entertain me as they get worse!
Passion Summer by Nick Wolven didn’t even start to convince me about its premise. Jeff, a fourteen year old, gets his first ‘Passion’—an artificial short-term love for something of his choice. This all plays out against a society where this kind of thing is prevalent, and where jobs seem to be menial and involve long hours. Jeff also has to cope with a dysfunctional mother. After getting his Passion the problem is that it doesn’t wear off after a month or so like it is supposed to. Apart from a failure to suspend disbelief, none of this coheres, and it it takes its time in not doing so.

The non-fiction is fairly sparse in this issue. Days of Future Past by Sheila Williams is an editorial about the complaints from late last year that the movie Back to the Future didn’t predict the future. Only stupid people would think that a movie was going to, but I suppose editorial topics are thin on the ground.
A Famous Fantastic Mystery by Robert Silverberg is an reminiscence about the teenage Silverberg seeing the new design of the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries (January, 1951) in a subway newspaper booth on the way home from a late-night party. He spends the next few days wondering if he has had a hallucination. It materialises that he hasn’t, but the intensity of his concern about whether he did, and his all-consuming involvement in the minutiae of the field will strike a chord with anyone reading this kind of website.
There are a couple of poems. The Robert Borski one, Murmuration, isn’t bad. It starts with the introduction of starlings to the USA and leaps forward a century and a half to the introduction other mythical creatures from Shakespeare’s plays.
In On Books, Peter Heck reviews several promising books by half a dozen authors. I had to steel myself not to go onto Amazon and start ordering.

With only the one story of any note, this is quite a lacklustre issue.

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Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jason McGregor, Tangent Online
Alastair Reynolds, Approaching Pavonis (forthcoming)
Lois Tilton, Locus Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)

Fiction:
The Baby Eaters • short story by Ian McHugh ♥♥♥
Chasing Ivory • short story by Ted Kosmatka ♥♥
Atheism and Flight • novelette by Dominica Phetteplace ♥♥♥♥
White Dust • short story by Nathan Hillstrom ♥♥
Conscience • short story by Robert R. Chase ♥♥
The Singing Bowl • short story by Genevieve Williams ♥
Einstein’s Shadow • novella by Allen Steele ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Donato Giancola
Interior Artwork
Poetry • Robert Frazier, Wendy Rathbone, Martin Ott, G. O. Clark
All the News that Fits • editorial by Sheila Williams
Fimbulwinter 2015 • essay by Robert Silverberg
The World of Series • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Pushing the World in a Certain Direction and Other Acts of Submission • essay by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Paul Di Filippo
Next Issue
On Books • essay by Paul Di Filippo
Thirtieth Annual Readers’ Awards
Index
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

One of the things I wanted to do this year was get back into reading the current SF magazines: one day you are reading them all religiously, then it’s three decades later. Hopefully I’ll make more progress with this resolution than I did with my plan of reading all of 1940’s SF&F magazines…

If you are at all familiar with the SF magazine field you’ll obviously know about the digest-sized Asimov’s Science Fiction, one of the handful of must-read publications. The January issue has a nice, eye-catching cover by Donato Giancola. Although you could say it takes liberties with what might be the actual scene of White Dust it illustrates, it is a striking image.
If I have a minor criticism of the cover it is not about the artwork it is about the layout: I think I would have probably left justified the title story and moved it to the left, and moved the author block below it down and left, and lost the second lower title. This would have given the central image more room to breathe. I have a certain amount of sympathy with magazine designers though. Decades ago they were forced to put a bar-code (missing on the Kindle cover above) in the lower left hand corner of the magazine which means any cover from that date on is going to be horribly compromised.

The stand-out story in this issue is the novelette by Dominica Phetteplace, Atheism and Flight. The editorial introduction that tells us that the author wrote this story while their grandfather was dying of cancer¹ and this caused some trepidation on my part, but it is an original, strange, hopeful and, in its final scene, you might even say transcendent story.
It starts with a narrator who has lost his arm in a motorcycle accident and who does not have the money to get stem-cell regrowth therapy or a cybernetic arm. Nor can he house himself which is why he is living with his friend Jimeo and partner Cleo. While he stays with them he watches School of Flight videos, which have students of a guru called Wang Lee ‘fly’ across a canyon, although his roommate Jimeo is working on a paper to show it is all a matter of optimum biomechanics. When he is not watching these videos or doing a correspondence course of the School’s, he feels sorry for himself, goes to an amputee support group, tries a yoga class, etc. In the middle of all this his arm starts regrowing…
The rest of the story charts this strange development and his desire to fly across the canyon, which he subsequently attempts in its striking last scene, although only after applying for and being rejected by the School.
The other thing I would note about this story is that its telegraphic, slightly gonzo style suits the story completely:

The yoga class was full of pretty girls. Sometimes Jimeo is smart. The teacher wanted me front and center so she could help me modify. To my surprise, I assented. “Any injuries?” she asked before class. I raised my nub of an arm and everyone laughed. The class was not too challenging for me. Thanks to Wang Lee, I knew my way around a yoga mat. The teacher, Chrys, short for Chrysanthemum, checked up on me every other pose. She wanted to make sure I was doing the mods right. I was pretty sure I was, no need to hold up the whole class. After class, she told me what an inspiration I was. “You don’t know that. I could be a serial killer. Maybe I lost my arm in a chainsaw massacre mishap.”
“You are so funny!” She handed me her card.

One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

There is one other story I liked in this issue, The Baby Eaters by Ian McHugh. This tells of a human on an alien planet looking to negotiate a trade concession and how he has to cope with the badhar-krithkinee’s strange physiology, culture, and attitudes. As well as thinking themselves superior to other spieces the badhar-krithkinee have a prohibition on twin births as they believe that a soul has been separated. The narrator’s perpetual worry of upsetting or offending these creatures permeates the story and an air of faint menace is never far away. If I have a minor criticism of this work it is that it seems to end rather abruptly and I think I would have preferred this as part of a longer and more substantial work.

The rest of the stories are solid enough also-rans. Chasing Ivory by Ted Kosmatka is a brief piece about a scientist dropped by helicopter in British Columbia near a mammoth herd, which she proceeds to stalk.
White Dust by Nathan Hillstrom is a clever story about alien technology being used to send a copy of a special ops soldier to the ‘far remote’ to repair shielding damage in a heavy radiation environment. Once the copy gets there they only last a few minutes and the woman running the project is beginning to have problems with them. She eventually decides to send herself to see if she can solve the problem, but the copy that comes to consciousness in the remote is furious with her.
There are one or two other points of information about how the transfer process works (spoiler) that make it quite a clever biter-bit story, but if it has a failure it is that it just doesn’t quite convince and I found myself at the end of this thinking I should have liked it more than I did.
Conscience by Robert R. Chase tells of Constanza Hernandez, who is a conscript in a US-Russian war against a future Caliphate. She is the pilot of a VTOL stealth aircraft (a future-helicopter analogue) who is given repeated missions to covertly insert or retrieve an operative into the battle space. She eventually becomes curious about who or what the operative is and starts making enquiries. I didn’t really buy this part, or her actions subsequent to that, even though similar events have happened in the real world. Further, the entire story is a too thinly veiled version of current conflicts, so as you read the story you have the distraction of wondering what kind of axe-grinding is going on.
The last short story is The Singing Bowl by Genevieve Williams. This story tells of aliens called ‘gis’ whose singing has become popular across the galaxy and tells of the events that unfold when an ethnomusicologist and group of tourists gather to listen to them sing. Similar to the McHugh story, this sets up the rules of alien behaviour and then an incident occurs that invokes said behaviour. Unlike that story though, I didn’t think this one succeeded, probably because there is no additional depth to the story: it is just a one scene play. I’d have to add that two stories predicated on specific alien behaviours in a single issue of a magazine seems like an editorial mistake to me, regardless of whether you think the stories are any good or not.

The final piece of fiction is a novella by Allen Steele, Einstein’s Shadow. This is an OK potboiler set in a parallel world 1933 where Hitler has died but the Nazi party is intact. In this world Albert Einstien has decided to seek sanctuary in America and an American private investigator is recruited by a Scotland Yard detective to be his bodyguard on the way over the Atlantic. They are to fly the 33 hour trip on a massive German-operated 20-engine machine that is more like a flying ocean liner than an aircraft.
The story has a superficial level of verisimilitude² but nothing of any depth that really convinces. Also, the characters are all pretty much two-dimensional, though they are put through the motions well enough, I guess.

There is quite a bit of non-fiction in this issue. Some of it is almost administrative stuff: the SF Conventional Calendar and Thirtieth Annual Readers’ Awards—the accompanying Index to the last piece is useful.³
The editorial, All the News that Fits, is about the Annual Reader’s Award, the possibility of the finalists being posted online, and the brand-new Asimovs.com website with author blogs, podcasts, etc.
Robert Silverberg’s Fimbulwinter 2015, is an essay about the severe winter in Boston in 2015, Fimbulwinter and climate variation over the centuries. I’m not quite sure what this has to do with SF but he has been doing the column for so long now I suspect he writes about what he wants to.
The World of Series by James Patrick Kelly is an internet column about author series in fantasy and science fiction and some of the realities behind their publication.
Pushing the World in a Certain Direction and Other Acts of Submission by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Paul Di Filippo is an article that perhaps takes longer than it needs to rebut the idea that all novels are political novels (I think—at one point I may have started skimming). I’m not sure that this needing rebutting, but there you go. Paul di Filippo also contributes a book review column which reviews a couple of big novels by Liu and Smale, a Strugatsky brother’s translation and an anthology by Mike Ashley.
There are also several poems in this issue, none of which I cared for bar Wendy Rathbone’s piece about building rocket ship models, which I thought was OK.

So, what did I think of this modern SF magazine? Well, overall, the fiction is solid enough material with a couple of notable contributions, but I would have to say that I found the non-fiction quite dull and I am curious to see if this interests me more in future issues.

1. Rather than raising the grandfather in the introduction which is a bit of a bum steer for the story, I think it would have been better to have had a dedication at the end of the piece.
2. Apart from poor verisimilitude there are parts where you don’t even get that. At one point a British detective pulls out his gold shield rather than a warrant card. And I could get started on this huge aircraft probably taking off downwind but won’t.
3. I was struck by how few of last year’s fiction contributors have more than one piece listed. I think I counted three or so that have two stories or more.

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