Asimov’s Science Fiction v41n11&12, November/December 2017

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 40th 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! 

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2 thoughts on “Asimov’s Science Fiction v41n11&12, November/December 2017

  1. jameswharris

    Paul, do you get Asimov’s as a digital subscription? You give us so many quotes I wonder if you type them in or copy them. If you get digital copies, how to they come? I’m subscribing to the print copies after several years of going without, but it’s annoying me that they come beat up and have mailing labels right on the artwork. I subscribed because I nostalgically wanted the covers, but the mailing labels make me regret it.

    Reply
    1. paul.fraser@sfmagazines.com Post author

      Hi Jim,
      I’ve got a digital sub via Amazon. Both it and Analog (but not F&SF, alas) offer the ‘enhanced’ (I’ve forgotten what the technical term is) azw/mobi file. What this means is that on my first gen Kindle the magazine reads like any other book (you can set the text size, etc.), but on my Kindle for iPad it also has the option of being read as PDF-like page images. I’m not sure it is exactly the same as the magazine (the ads may be missing) but it looks like it is very close (I’ve always meant to buy a physical copy to compare).
      Hope this helps,
      Paul Fraser

      Reply

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