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

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads

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Editor, Gardner Dozois; Executive Editor, Sheila Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∗ (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

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

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