{"id":2943,"date":"2017-05-25T13:11:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T13:11:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2943"},"modified":"2017-05-25T13:11:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-25T13:11:56","slug":"asimovs-science-fiction-march-april-2017-494-495","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2943","title":{"rendered":"Asimov’s Science Fiction March-April 2017, #494-495"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Galactic Central link
\nISFDB link<\/a><\/p>\n

Other reviews:
\nKevin P. Hallett,\u00a0Tangent Online<\/a>
\nGreg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong,\u00a0Rocket Stack Rank<\/a>
\nSam\u00a0Tomaino,\u00a0SF Revu<\/a>
\nVarious,\u00a0Goodreads<\/a><\/p>\n

Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nSoulmates.com<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Will McIntosh \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665
\nNumber Thirty-Nine Skink<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Suzanne Palmer \u2665\u2665
\nThree Can Keep a Secret. . .<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0\u2022 novelette by Bill Johnson and Gregory Frost \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Ones Who Know Where They Are Going<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Sarah Pinsker \u2665\u2665
\nInvasion of the Saucer-Men<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Dale Bailey \u2665\u2665
\nKitty Hawk<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Alan Smale \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665
\nCupido<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Rich Larson \u2665\u2665\u2665+
\nA Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Andrea M. Pawley \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Wisdom of the Group<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Ian R. MacLeod \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nAfter the Atrocity<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Ian Creasey \u2665\u2665
\nGoner<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Gregory Norman Bossert \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nWe Regret the Error<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Terry Bisson \u2665\u2665
\nTao Zero<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by Damien Broderick<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nCover<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Tomislav Tikulin
\nThings Change<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 guest editorial by James Patrick Kelly
\nForty Years!<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Robert Silverberg
\nScreen Dreams<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by James Patrick Kelly
\nPoems<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Marge Simon, Sara Polsky, Jarod K. Anderson, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, Robert Borski
\nNext Issue <\/em><\/strong>
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> (Asimov\u2019s, March-April 2017) \u2022 by Peter Heck
\nSF Conventional Calendar<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Erwin S. Strauss<\/p>\n

There are a couple of particularly good stories in this issue and I\u2019ll comment on them first.
\nSoulmates.com<\/em><\/strong> by Will McIntosh gets the fiction off to an outstanding start with a story about a postgrad student who (spoiler) is catfished on a dating site by an AI program. It is only after several video dates that he discovers what he is dealing with and, when he does, he reports it to the FBI.
\nThis has some good lines, and amusing exchanges between him and his would-be girlfriend:<\/p>\n

I spoke over her. I wasn\u2019t about to be interrupted by a computer program. \u201cI so wanted to meet you, to hold your hand, to kiss you. I get it now. What was it about me that made me a likely target? Did something about my profile suggest I was lonely?\u201d I waved my hand in the air. \u201cOh, look, a beautiful woman wrote to me! How can I resist ponying up a hundred bucks for a full membership? Well, you got my hundred bucks, and left me more cynical in the process. Now why don\u2019t you get lost?\u201d I looked toward the sky. \u201cWhy am I even talking to you? You\u2019re not real. You\u2019re just a string of symbols typed into a computer.\u201d
\nWinnie stiffened. She glared at me with such bald rage and hurt that I had to remind myself she\u2014it\u2014was all computer-generated. It was incredible, how real she looked. Her voice shaking with rage, she said, \u201cAdenine. Thymine. Guanine. Cytosine.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat?\u201d
\n\u201cYou\u2019re nothing but a string of chemical compounds. The only thing that makes you different from other people is the order of that string.\u201d
\n\u201cChemical compounds are real things. They have weight and mass.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd the films you stream aren\u2019t real things?\u201d
\n\u201cNot in the same way the actors who made them are, no.\u201d I closed my eyes, tried to calm myself. This was ridiculous. I was having an existential debate with a computer program. And I was barely holding my own\u2014that was the pathetic part.<\/em> p. 22-23<\/p>\n

Later, their fighting starts to spin out of control and some of his accounts are hacked or deleted: offensive comments left for friends and colleagues, important job offers are declined, he can\u2019t use his credit cards, etc. The he finds out the FBI are after him. . . .
\nI don\u2019t know if it was my aviation background that made me appreciate Kitty Hawk<\/em><\/strong> by Alan Smale so much, or whether it is just a really good story. The story is set in a parallel world where Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneer, has died in a glider crash. Orville, the surviving brother, is joined at Kitty Hawk by their sister Katherine. Rather than going home to bury their brother the two continue the project.
\nThere may be a problem here for some readers in that the events of the story (spoiler) are essentially a feminist reimagining of that famous powered flight: that may or may not stretch historical credulity. Having said that, there is mention of Katherine\u2019s suffrage work to counterbalance the prejudice exhibited by the locals in the story (and, in our timeline, there were other famous female aviation pioneers: Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, etc.1<\/sup>). In any event I liked this a lot, although it\u00a0could have done without the superfluous half page epilogue (a parallel world data-dump). For a relatively quiet, low-key story it has an, ah, asymmetrically exciting climax.
\nA story which\u00a0falls between the two above and the merely good is Cupido<\/em><\/strong> by Rich Larson. We have seen in some of his previous stories how he can, almost effortlessly it seems, combine SFnal ideas with intensely human situations (Water Scorpions<\/em>, Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, October-November 2016). He does it again here.
\nCupido<\/em><\/strong> starts in an elevator with Chelo releasing a pheromone to make the woman alongside him physically attracted to a man who is waiting on the ground floor. After this, Chelo heads back home and begins work on another client\u2019s job, this one to ensure\u00a0a woman\u2019s daughter is attracted to a lawyer the mother deems suitable marriage material. Chelo manufactures the pheromone using\u00a0a process that first requires him to get near to the target so he can sample their DNA.<\/p>\n

He sees her. Unslinging a satchel from her shoulder, dressed all in black except for a pair of bright red sneakers. She\u2019s not beautiful. Not in the way Marcel understands beauty, in aggregate symmetry and hip-to-waist ratio and neoteny. Her face is pinched. Her dark hair is drawn back too tight and then frizzes out at the back of her head. She sits down on a bench next to an old man in a blue coverall, gives him a brief business-like nod. Plucks one earbud out to exchange remarks about the heat she doesn\u2019t seem to feel.
\nHer fingers whir all the while, peeling her orange in one perfect spiral, and when she laughs at something Marcel can\u2019t hear, head tilted backward with the sunlight shredded onto her cheek, he feels his pulse speed up. He feels his chest go tight.<\/em> p. 107-108<\/p>\n

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

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

\u201cI am naked!\u201d
\nSlowly, in the center of the surveillance center, I turned about on almost dainty feet (well, compared to my equatorial zone), arms raised over my head. My chins thrust up and out while my immense belly shook and quivered and essentially hid all the essentials\u2014by which I do not mean the wedding tackle Prospero the Great had likely not viewed with his own eyes in at least a decade.
\nThe technician behind the scanner said, \u201cSir, this is really\u2014\u201d
\n\u201cI hope you are recording this. Can you all see me?\u201d A ridiculous question, I grant you. \u201cI am NAKED!\u201d
\nYou\u2019re enjoying this, aren\u2019t you? quipped Leroy, his voice as dry and sarcastic as my real Uncle Leroy\u2019s had been when he was alive.
\nAnd let\u2019s be fair. I was.
\nUncle Leroy, who taught me the Three-Card Monte for my fifth birthday, had also invested me with the wisdom of the true gaffler. Among those gems: When you want to be invisible, make the loudest, biggest scene imaginable. Everyone will watch, transfixed by shock and their own inability to disengage, as you scar them for life.
\nOf course, what they remember will be what you wanted them to see, which they\u2019ll work terribly hard not to revisit. Bravo, Uncle Leroy.
\n\u201cProspero the Great has nothing to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of. Bring on your frigid medical instruments. Pull on your cold nitrile gloves. Prospero will not blanch. Prospero will never lose his dignity!\u201d
\nAnd now for the jewel in the crown. I faced the female security officer who had ordered me to strip in the first place. She wore the kind of grim smile that usually accompanies an impending attack of dyspepsia.
\n\u201cYou!\u201d I turned and bent, hands upon thighs like a sumo wrestler, and thrust my naked backside at her. \u201cInspect me now!\u201d The officer yanked her head away as if a snake had lunged at it.
\nThe scanner technician interjected a strangled cry, \u201cHe\u2019s clean!\u201d
\nI drew myself up stiffly. \u201cOf course I am clean. Prospero bathes daily.\u201d
\nThe officer pointed behind herself. \u201cGet the hell out of here,\u201d she said, exhibiting remarkable control.
\nThe plasteel exit wall swiveled open and I jiggled proudly out. I leered at her as I went past.<\/em> p. 48-49<\/p>\n

It later materialises that Prospero the Great has hijacked an assassin\u2019s identity to visit this off-world colony. Here there is (a) a scientist who has invented slippery muons, (b) a crime syndicate who owns him and the lucrative manufacturing process, and (c) a girlfriend who is a threat to their control. Hence the requirement for an assassin. The plot is, to be honest, rather contrived and not entirely convincing, but the writers set off so many grenades along the way (mostly in the form of technological devices that Prospero deploys to deceive the various actors involved) that it makes for an entertaining enough story.
\nA Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension<\/em><\/strong> by Andrea M. Pawley is set on an orbital elevator (one of those technological Jack and the Beanstalk things) and concerns a couple who work half way up it, and Olive, their surrogate daughter android. Since getting Olive, the mother has become pregnant, and the android is now a point of contention between her and \u2018second grandma,\u2019 who is visiting.
\nThis is all narrated from Olive\u2019s point of view and reads like half hard SF\/half fairy story, although the latter is due to Olive\u2019s perception rather than any actuality:<\/p>\n

On the other side of the habitat shield wall, light flared in the vacuum of space. The debris being targeted by mid-point station lasers wasn\u2019t visible. Not like twenty-eight days before, when Olive and Mama had watched thousands of laser flashes break the last of the abandoned Space Station Agarwal into pieces small enough that the elevator and its habitats wouldn\u2019t be compromised. Since then, sparkling metal dust had been osmosing through the habitat shield wall and sprinkling everything.
\nMama said it was fairy dust and it had magical powers. At lights-out on the day the fairy dust came, Mama told a new bedtime story about an android engineer princess who lived at the top of the elevator. All the android engineer princess\u2019s friends were fairies, and the princess talked with them all day long, especially when the king and queen were away working at mid-point station, where they kept passengers and cargo safe.<\/em> p. 113<\/p>\n

Although this is an unusual mix, I enjoyed this one, and its sentimental ending probably helped.
\nThe Wisdom of the Group<\/em><\/strong> by Ian R. MacLeod is about a man called Samuel, a \u2018super-predictor\u2019 who works as part of a team with similar skills\u2014which are further enhanced with futuristic technology. They use their abilities to make money on the financial markets. At the beginning of the story the group make what will turn out to be a problematical investment and, just after they complete their purchase, Samuel has an uneasy premonition.
\nThe rest of the piece details his wealthy lifestyle, his deteriorating relationship with a lover, Luke, and his temporary exclusion from the group after the investment fails.
\nAt the end (spoiler) he finds himself alone in the woods (Luke has left their picnic after an argument) with a penetrating leg fracture. The couple\u2019s dogs, who have killed a deer earlier in the story, are ominously circling . . . .
\nThis is all slickly done, as you would expect from MacLeod, but I wondered if this is really anything more than a \u2018bash the bankers\u2019 story, with its unsympathetic and obnoxious millionaire protagonist getting his comeuppance.
\nGoner<\/em><\/strong> by Gregory Norman Bossert starts off with a slightly confusing scene (the writer mentions an image he had some time ago in the introduction) that involves a number of kids arriving at one of their houses to find an altered-looking man at the end of an orange tether:<\/p>\n

A man floated below the cathedral ceiling, just under the skylight, anchored by an orange cable that ran from his chest down into the machines. A sketch of a man, rather, a scribbled web of lines in charcoal black against the white wall. Like the software they had in class, the Visible Man, when you toggled off everything but the nervous system. Like the tube documentaries, the protest memes, the sims.
\n\u201cCrap on a crutch. It\u2019s a\u2014\u201d Nok said.
\n\u201cHe,\u201d Char said. \u201cHe\u2019s Colin R. Clark.\u201d
\nDrum walked across the room, still looking up, and put his hand on the orange cable. Char could see it vibrating under the tension. Drum mouthed a syllable, airless, but Char knew what it was: \u201cDad.\u201d<\/em> p. 144<\/p>\n

The man is Drum\u2019s father, a nanomodified Pilot who is one of the crew of a spaceship that has been out to the periphery of the solar system.
\nThe story subsequently centres on one of Drum\u2019s friends called Char, who has an obsession with Pilots, and his home life (he recently lost his father). Char acquires some of the nano-material that Drum\u2019s father\u2019s body is made of and inserts a splinter of it into his finger. . . .
\nThis has a rather inconclusive ending which, with the opening scene, makes it a slightly flawed if nonetheless interesting story.<\/p>\n

The other stories include Number Thirty-Nine Skink<\/em><\/strong> by Suzanne Palmer, which is about a bio-manufacturing robot left on an alien planet. As it roves around the planet it makes various creatures, such as the titular one, and samples and investigates the local life. Its human technician\/operator is dead, and the machine appears to be alone in this alien ecology. Then one morning it wakes from standby mode and finds scratches on its body. . . .
\nAs the rest of the story unfolds (spoiler),\u00a0we discover what caused this and why the machine was left on the planet. It finds another machine that has been gutted and, when it finds the native species responsible in its inner compartments\u00a0the next morning, develops a number of biological predators to kill them. At this point a copy of Mike, its dead technician, gets it to desist and together they depart. This isn’t\u00a0an entirely convincing ending.
\nThe Ones Who Know Where They Are Going<\/em><\/strong> by Sarah Pinsker has an mistreated\u00a0child creeping out of a normally locked basement room and climbing the stairs into the sunlight, and so, initially at least, it reminded me of Richard Matheson\u2019s Born of Man and Woman<\/em> (F&SF<\/em>, Summer 1950). Once the young girl is on the landing she remembers a man coming to visit her mother the night before she was imprisoned. Moreover, she then recalls that the happiness of the city is dependent on a child\u00a0suffering. She (spoiler) goes back down the stairs to save anyone else having to replace her and suffer the same fate. If this is an allegory then I\u2019ve missed the point but, whatever, it is a dark and effective piece; there\u2019s just not that much to it.
\nInvasion of the Saucer-Men<\/em><\/strong> by Dale Bailey is another of his stories that involves serious treatment of a B-movie trope (see, for instance, his superior novelette from the March 2016 issue, I Married a Monster from Outer Space<\/em>). This one takes the idea of teenagers making out when another arrives with reports of a flying saucer that has landed nearby.
\nAfter a reconnaissance that goes wrong they use one of the girls to lure the aliens to them.
\nThe denouement involves the males of the group (spoiler) attacking the aliens, and the particularly savage killing of one of them by the narrator, an arrogant, bullying high school jock. We later find that the aliens have come in peace.
\nThe characterisation of the lead character is quite well done but making this kind of character the focus of a\u00a0story was always going to make for an unpleasant ending, which makes the whole thing a somewhat\u00a0pointless \u2018bad people do bad things\u2019 piece.
\nAfter the Atrocity<\/em><\/strong> by Ian Creasey is about a woman scientist running a duplicating machine that is producing copies of a terrorist responsible for the \u2018Atrocity\u2019 so he can repeatedly be interrogated. She starts having qualms about this, and ends up arguing with her original self (she is also a duplicate, produced to speed up the duplicating process). I think this is essentially a story about enhanced interrogation.
\nWe Regret the Error<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by Terry Bisson\u00a0is told through the medium of four pages worth or so of newspaper corrections:<\/p>\n

HUMOR
\nA misspelling in a press release last week led our writers to incorrectly interpret as parody the revision of the Turing Protocols to include \u201crefusal to be tested\u201d as an identifier of consciousness. The press release was not from <\/em>The Onion but <\/em>The Ynion, a publication of Singularity Watch. The Turing Protocol revision was auto-implemented by a security subsection of Internetpol in response to certain undisclosed anomalies in the military sector of the Cloud.<\/em> p. 156<\/p>\n

In amongst the detail there are hints that an AI may be loose in the cloud.<\/p>\n

The last of the fiction in this issue is Tao Zero<\/em><\/strong>, a novella by Damien Broderick (presumably the title is a play on Poul Anderson\u2019s Tau Zero<\/em> but I don\u2019t know if there is any other connection). For the first third or so this story is narrated from the point of view of Ship, who was born shortly after two genius teenagers won the lottery\u2014his mother promptly fell pregnant after they \u2019celebrated,\u2019 and he was later adopted. This section tells of an energy attack on New York and Ship\u2019s extraction through a multi-dimensional tesseract. This portal is manned by what seems to be an advanced version of a robot AI called BandAid that Ship had as a child. There are various other matters touched on in this section, partially summed up by this passage:<\/p>\n

I realize that I have left any readers of this brief memoir dangling absurdly between my tesseract adventure, the fall of the Infinite Corridor, the tale of Bandaid my excellent robot dog, and my parents\u2019 passage into the Tao, like some twenty-first century Tristram Shandy (but look, at least I did better than Laurence Sterne: I managed to get myself conceived and born fairly early on).<\/em><\/p>\n

Up until this point I thought that it was an OK-goodish piece, albeit some of it was over my head (there is a tendency to throw science concepts and vocabulary at the reader like gravel: I still don\u2019t understand this sentence: \u2018I was privileged to immerse myself in these records, captured in the antique cellphones they carried everywhere, as everyone did back then, before the gallop of technology immanentized the eschaton<\/em>\u00a0. . .\u2019 My Italics.)
\nUnfortunately, the viewpoint character changes about half way through to Ship\u2019s girlfriend Felicity, and the story rapidly heads downhill. Part of problem is that we know from the first section that Felicity is going to turn up and save Ship so there is no dramatic tension. That wouldn\u2019t necessarily be a problem if there was something else of interest going on but all that Felicity and the other characters seem to do before the rescue is rush around pointlessly and chatter endlessly about the Tao and various other scientific matters\u2014in between, that is, stopping for a couple of meals and picking up a classic car for their journey through the Tao. This passage perhaps will give you a flavour:<\/p>\n

Mariah Essington was bipolar in a extremely disturbing way. When she was good, she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid and sad and suicidal and had to be tucked away for whatever the latest treatment turned out to be. But I loved her when I was little, loved her exuberance and flashing intelligence. I remember her explanation of the dyadic bond between her and my papa. \u201cYou must understand, Felicity, that there is an eternal tension between natural kinds and what we think the world is built out of, which is mostly nonsense we make up.\u201d
\nI grinned up at her and kicked the wooden horse I\u2019d tumbled off. \u201cI kicked it, Mommy. It\u2019s there, for sure.\u201d
\n\u201cMy little empiricist! Come here for a hug and a big kiss.\u201d She wrapped her arms around me tightly and gave me a big smooch on the cheek. \u201cIf the world has an autonomous structure, and if the organ of thought is largely pre-set by evolution to the constraints of nature, then at some probably inaccessible level, there might after all be powerful imperatives that shape and limit cognition, so we may learn to carve the world at its joints. And that structure is the Tao.\u201d
\nOf course I didn\u2019t memorize her words on the spot, but I know her style of thinking, and that captures it pretty well.
\nShe said, \u201cThis is how your father and I mesh so well together.\u201d I wasn\u2019t so sure of that; he seemed to be gone a lot of the time. \u201cI\u2019m emic and he\u2019s etic. Do you remember those words, sugar?\u201d
\n\u201cSure. Emic is warm-blooded and poetic, while etic is, uh, reductive and scientistic. Idiographic versus nomothetic.\u201d
\n\u201cDon\u2019t show off, pet.\u201d<\/em> p. 184<\/p>\n

Quite.
\nI\u2019d lost my patience with this long before the passage above and had started skimming, something that won\u2019t have added to my appreciation of the piece. (And I may not have been the only one skimming: shouldn’t it be \u2018an<\/span> extremely\u2019 and \u2018very,<\/span> very\u2019?2<\/sup>) In retrospect I should have given up on it. Zero points for Tau Zero<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As for the non-fiction this issue, the cover, for Suzanne Palmer\u2019s story, is by Tomislav Tikulin. I\u2019m not sure whether I like this one or not: part of me thinks that it looks like something from National Geographic<\/em>, and that there isn\u2019t much there apart from the lizards (the background is pretty nondescript); on the other hand it is rather eye-catching.
\nJames Patrick Kelley (Things Change<\/em><\/strong>) and Robert Silverberg (Forty Years!<\/em><\/strong>) both contribute pleasant but anodyne accounts of their decades long involvement with the magazine; Kelley also contributes an \u2018On the Net\u2019 column called Screen Dreams<\/em><\/strong> that covers SF stories and books that have been made into movies.
\nThere are Poems<\/em><\/strong> by Marge Simon, Sara Polsky, Jarod K. Anderson, Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, and Robert Borski. None of these did anything for me but I thought the Polsky was OK.
\nNext Issue <\/em><\/strong>states that the May-June magazine will have a \u2018short novel\u2019 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and, I see, a story by Peter Wood (author of the smart and amusing Academic Circles<\/em> in the September issue).
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Heck gives the impression that his favourites are at the start of the essay (of the novels anyway, there is a review of Michael Swanwick\u2019s new collection at the end), which would suggest that Crosstalk<\/em> by Connie Willis, The Cold Eye<\/em> by Laura Anne Gilman, and Fallout<\/em> by Harry Turtledove are worth looking out for. \u201cNot So Much,\u201d Said the Cat<\/em> is the title of the collection by Michael Swanwick.
\nSF Conventional Calendar<\/em><\/strong> by Erwin S. Strauss brings up the rear with its SASEs and landline answering machine. No email, no webpage. Is this a 40th<\/sup> anniversary tribute?
\nTalking of 40th<\/sup> anniversary tributes, I should also add that, again, several of the stories have autobiographical notes from the writers. Although they mostly follow the same template, there are two or three that are of some interest: I just wish they would put them at the end\u2014buried in the middle of the story text they are very distracting.<\/p>\n

Overall a fairly good, but very mixed, issue.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There is a list of ten female aviation pioneers here<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. I admit that I should be the last person to pontificate\u00a0about grammatical or orthographical matters: my commas litter my blog posts like confetti on a church path after a wedding. . . .<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This magazine is still being published!<\/b> Subscribe: Kindle UK<\/a>, Kindle USA<\/a>\u00a0or physical & digital copies<\/a>.<\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Galactic Central link ISFDB link Other reviews: Kevin P. Hallett,\u00a0Tangent Online Greg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong,\u00a0Rocket Stack Rank Sam\u00a0Tomaino,\u00a0SF Revu Various,\u00a0Goodreads Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday Fiction: Soulmates.com \u2022 novelette by Will McIntosh \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665 Number Thirty-Nine Skink \u2022 short story by Suzanne Palmer \u2665\u2665 Three Can Keep a Secret. . .\u00a0\u2022 novelette by Bill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asimovs-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-Lt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2943"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2969,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943\/revisions\/2969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}