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

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

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

_____________________

1. My review of Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick.

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

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

Niall sipped from his coffee cup.  p. 163

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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