{"id":3043,"date":"2017-06-23T12:28:54","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T12:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=3043"},"modified":"2017-06-23T19:41:39","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T19:41:39","slug":"asimovs-science-fiction-496-494-may-june-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=3043","title":{"rendered":"Asimov’s Science Fiction #496-497, May-June 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

ISFDB link<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

Fiction:
\nOn the Ship<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Leah Cypess \u2665
\nCome as You Are<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Dale Bailey \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nGood Show<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by William Preston \u2665\u2665
\nThe Escape of the Adastra: Asha\u2019s Story<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by James E. Gunn \u2665\u2665
\nNight Fever<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Will Ludwigsen \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665
\nTired of the Same Old Quests?<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Peter Wood \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Best Man<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Jay O\u2019Connell \u2665\u2665
\nTriceratops<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Ian McHugh \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nPersephone of the Crows<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Karen Joy Fowler \u2665
\nThe Runabout<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch \u2665<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nThe Runabout <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 cover by Jim Simpson
\nAnniversaries and Milestones<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 editorial by Sheila Williams
\nAdvertisements For Myself<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Robert Silverberg
\nHarry and Dot<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by James Patrick Kelly
\nPoetry<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Tod McCoy, Robert Frazier, Suzanne Palmer, G. O. Clark
\nNext Issue<\/em><\/strong>
\nOn Books: Wolockification<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Norman Spinrad
\nSF Conventional Calendar<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Erwin S. Strauss<\/p>\n

This issue is quite a mixed one so I\u2019ll start with the material I liked best: you can stop reading when you come to the moaning.
\nThe best story is Night Fever<\/em><\/strong> by Will Ludwigsen, which takes the psychopathic cult leader and murderer Charles Manson and places him in a parallel-world New York disco scene (he is released from prison ten years later than he was in this timestream and doesn\u2019t go to California). As one of his female cult-members recalls:<\/p>\n

I took all three of them to Infinity one night, mostly because I was curious how they\u2019d behave. Libby had been dancing before, and she plunged out on the floor like a cop wading into a brawl; she lost her shirt about thirty minutes later and didn\u2019t notice. Samson swayed on the floor with girls and some guys flocked all around, pulling on his arms and belt like they were dancing around a maypole.<\/em>
\nCharlie … he spent the whole night walking backward as though trying to get it all into his eyes at once. He watched DJ Ca$hflow at the booth, fascinated by the dual turntables and all the switches and sliders, probably most fascinated by the power: DJ Ca$hflow could make people move and feel as one.<\/em>
\nLibby lured Charlie onto the dance floor and showed him her own clumsy moves, but he passed her with his own in about ten minutes. He could flow out there like a cobra rising from a basket, and people kind of backed up in wonder at this guy in an old buckskin jacket strutting like he\u2019d grown up on Soul Train.<\/em>
\nAll he kept saying that night\u2014yelling through the music\u2014was, \u201cMan, where have these people been?\u201d<\/em>
\nIt was nice to blow his mind for a change.<\/em> p. 70<\/p>\n

Manson once again forms a cult, this time based on the disco culture of New York; it isn\u2019t long before the craziness starts.
\nI liked this story a lot: it is a gritty, absorbing piece that has an interesting collage structure that includes book extracts, interviews and court transcripts; another reason is possibly age-related, in that I can remember the disco scene from the TV show\u00a0Top of the Pops<\/em>, and also remember checking out a book about Manson from the library when I was 12 or 13, the first inkling I had that there are mad as well as bad people in the world.
\nOne for the awards\u2019 short lists and \u2018Best of the Year\u2019 anthologies.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

The other stories I liked come from Dale Bailey, Peter Wood and Ian McHugh.
\nCome as You Are<\/em><\/strong> by Dale Bailey concerns a college student who drops out and becomes a \u2018headspace\u2019 user:<\/p>\n

Anything that can be turned into a drug will be turned into a drug. Call it Dave\u2019s Law. For example, I once knew some guys who smoked catnip, their thinking being that if it can fuck your cat up, then it can surely do the same for you. They were wrong, of course, but the example is germane, and there are dozens of others. Paint thinner, Wite-Out, nitrous oxide, you name it. Remember that old Ramones cut, \u201cNow I Wanna Sniff Some Glue\u201d? It wasn\u2019t just because he liked the smell.<\/em>
\nAs with any self-respecting proposition, Dave\u2019s Law comes with a couple of corollaries: <\/em>
\nFirst, all drugs are about ditching your core self. It\u2019s good to get away, to take a little vacation from our own neuroses. Think of the language we use to describe getting high: we get obliterated, blasted, annihilated. We get bombed and wasted, ripped, smashed, torn up, you name it. We destroy ourselves to escape ourselves.<\/em>
\nSecond, this makes headspace the perfect drug. You not only nullify your troublesome self\u2014most of it, anyway\u2014you get the added bonus of being someone else. The human condition is pretty goddamn solitary when you think about it. We\u2019re all shackled inside our own heads. That\u2019s what it\u2019s all about, really\u2014stories, paintings, music, language itself, from <\/em>Finnegan\u2019s Wake to prehistoric symbols daubed on cave walls. Attempts to bridge the abyss, to connect.<\/em>
\nOnce you\u2019ve dropped a tab of headspace, you know you\u2019re not alone.<\/em> p. 26<\/p>\n

Later on the group of users\/friends he socialises with disintegrates, and he starts a relationship with a woman called Maggie, who has been supplying them with headspace.
\nFor the most part this is a fairly strong piece but it is let down by an ending that didn\u2019t make any sense to me. (Spoiler: he ends up being thrown out by her after she takes a headspace tablet that is made from his personality scan. Eventually he returns to his parents and enters therapy. After one particular session he thinks about dropping one of his own tablets to see what he is like. I fail to see how that would be any different from just being himself.)
\nTired of the Same Old Quests?<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Wood starts with this:<\/p>\n

Mirk and her friends, the stable boy and the elf, played Suburbs and Cubicles. Mirk wished she wasn\u2019t just pretending to live in an exciting world of surviving by her wits instead of the real world of monotonous magic and never-ending quests.<\/em>
\nThe Suburb Master, the mop-haired stable boy who served Mirk\u2019s father, leaned back on a mound of straw and set the scene for the game. \u201cYou\u2019re watering the lawn. Your neighbor, a class three social status\u2014something called a \u2018software engineer\u2019\u2014asks if you are coming to his barbecue next Saturday.\u201d<\/em>
\nMirk knew her father might find her hiding in the stables and make her prepare for tomorrow\u2019s month-long quest, but right now she was more concerned about the game. She hadn\u2019t allocated enough points to social status. Her character was a male and could bench press two hundred pounds but was a mere insurance salesman.<\/em>
\n\u201cI tell my neighbor that I\u2019ll let him know later.\u201d Mirk hoped the gamble paid off.<\/em>
\nShe rolled the twenty-sided die. \u201cEight.\u201d<\/em>
\nThe Suburb Master unfurled a scroll. \u201cOne point for your sports car, one for the best lawn, minus four for your job. That makes your roll a six. Your neighbor is displeased. Your wives had already discussed this barbecue. Your wife was going to make corn dip.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u201cCorn dip?\u201d The elf frowned. \u201cWhat in the name of the Goddess is corn dip?\u201d<\/em> p. 93<\/p>\n

Mirk gets dragged away from the game by her grumpy father go on a quest to the Mountains of Despair to deal with Zokar the wizard.
\nThis is a charming fantasy that could have equally have appeared in F&SF<\/em>. I only wish it had been longer.
\nTriceratops<\/em><\/strong> by Ian McHugh starts with the narrator viewing a Neanderthal male at a research facility in Japan. After this he goes to a reservation in northern Canada where they have Thalers (another proto-human) and mammoths amongst several other revived species. Like the O\u2019Connell story that follows, this is a future slice-of-life\u2014but quite a good piece for all that: at one point in the story, when the one of the mammoths nuzzles the narrator\u2019s hand, I was completely transported. You sometimes find a sense of wonder in the most unexpected places.<\/p>\n

The also-rans include the stories by Leah Cypress, William Preston, James Gunn and Karen Joy Fowler.
\nOn the Ship<\/em><\/strong> by Leah Cypess is about a young girl on a spaceship speaking to her friend when a red-headed woman appears. Only the young girl sees the women. Some time later it becomes apparent that the girl is in a VR program inhabited by passengers who are in cryosleep, and that there are forces which are attempting to prevent these refugees from Earth awakening at a suitable planet.
\nAt one point in the story there is a reference made to the St Louis<\/em>, a WWII Jewish refugee ship which was refused entry in America and Cuba and had to return to Europe. This (spoiler) is the action that the girl bafflingly takes when she eventually manages to wake herself up: she sends them back to Earth. If there is a point to this, I missed it.
\nGood Show<\/em><\/strong> by William Preston involves a film reviewer who is asked to a select screening. When he gets there with a female friend, he finds three oddly dressed and unusual looking people, and also realises that no-one else has been invited.
\nThe film itself is a short and unconventional piece about a town that is destroyed in an avalanche. The reviewer and his friend later discover that this is footage of an actual event, but one that doesn\u2019t happen to the next day. They subsequently view increasingly violent and disastrous films.
\nMy disbelief was not entirely suspended, but I thought this was OK.
\nThe Escape of the Adastra: Asha\u2019s Story<\/em><\/strong> by James E. Gunn is a short story set in the world of his current trilogy (Transcendental<\/em>, 2013, Transgalactic<\/em>, 2016, Transformation<\/em>, 2017)\u2014although ISFDB labels this as the \u2018Riley and Asha\u2019 series.
\nIt tells of the generation starship Adastra<\/em>, and how it and its crew and passengers are captured and taken to Federation Central, the headquarters of an organisation that controls that spiral arm of the galaxy. There they are held as prisoners for many years before (spoiler) they manage to escape.
\nI liked this but it reads too much like a dense and fragmentary sidebar to the trilogy. There are a couple more stories from this series in the next issue.
\nPersephone of the Crows<\/em><\/strong> by Karen Joy Fowler starts with two young girls discussing wishes. The elder of the two leaves to go home with her parents, and her drunken father crashes the car on the way there. When she regains consciousness her parents are gone and the car is surrounded by crows.
\nThe next time she wakes up (there is a perspective shift as she is now relating this to a young man she is hitching a lift with years later) she is in her bed at home but, she later discovers, her parents are different people.
\nPerhaps this is a \u2018be careful what you wish for\u2019 story, but it left me baffled.<\/p>\n

The last group contains two stories that, in part at least, irritated me. Very occasionally I\u2019ll find one story in an issue that does this, but to find two is quite unusual.
\nThe Best Man<\/em><\/strong> by Jay O\u2019Connell is about a man who gets infected in the near future by the IP2 virus that gives him a physical and mental aversion to his own skin (colour, presumably, as he dons green Halloween makeup for most of the rest of the story). Meanwhile, he organises himself to go to his rich brother\u2019s wedding in Italy, where the latter is getting married to a Filipino man called Jericho. Superficially, this is a pleasant enough slice-of-life but there is no real story here (unless you consider a minor voyage of self-discovery and development \u2018a story\u2019).
\nThe problem I had with this one is that the more I thought about it afterwards, the more problematical it seemed (disclaimer on the following comments; I\u2019m reviewing the story, not the writer\u2019s soul). The most troubling aspect is a narrator who hates and\/or is repelled by his own skin.<\/p>\n

My face in the mirror was peach colored and ruddy and mottled looking, like a piece of rotting fruit. There were dozens of different colors in my skin, beneath layers of translucency threaded with branching bluish veins. The overall effect was repulsive. I\u2019d never noticed before how <\/em>ugly my skin was.<\/em> p. 101<\/p>\n

He is a white man so no problem, right? Well, if you think that, change the white man above to a person of colour and watch the resultant Twitter storm. What is good for the goose. . .
\nThere are other irritating details. One of them is what seems like a rant about the recent United Kingdom Brexit vote\u2014this is at the end of the story, by which time the narrator has joined World Corps\u2019 volunteers and is about to travel there:<\/p>\n

I hefted my pack and walked down the gangway. I\u2019d be arriving in Liverpool in three hours. The former U.K. had been in tatters for decades, its economy devastated by waves of misplaced xenophobia, sectarian strife, and useless protectionism. Whatever one thought of their leadership, their children deserved better. Parts of the U.K. now combined the world\u2019s third highest infant mortality rate with the second lowest literacy rate. The two numbers were always inversely related. Huge swaths of the population were hostile to modern teaching techniques, infected with a resurgent Luddism.<\/em>2<\/sup> p. 11<\/p>\n

Not only is this unconvincing but it is tonally darker than the rest of a generally upbeat piece.
\nThe Runabout<\/em><\/strong> by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is described as a short novel (Kindle says 42,677 words, Word says 45,000-ish) and is from the writer\u2019s \u2018Diving Universe\u2019 series. Initially, this gets off to a good start with the narrator, \u2018Boss,\u2019 diving as part of a team in a spaceship graveyard called the Boneyard when she hears strange music\u2014this is how she experiences the waves coming from spaceship anacapa<\/em> drives. These drives and their odd temporal effects are strange black-box technology that no-one completely understands. There is some chatter and tension amongst the team when she reports this, but they continue the dive.
\nThe next chapter gives us a data dump about the anacapa<\/em> drives\u2019 temporal effects, a genetic marker that the Boss has which gives her a certain resistance, her Lost Souls Corporation, which specialises in recovering ships, her mother\u2019s death on a dive, a Fleet spaceship that arrived in their time from five thousand years ago, the Empire\u2019s threat to the Nine Planets Alliance, etc., etc. This is all a bit kitchen sink but is well enough done.
\nBack at the dive the Boss gets more twitched as the music is now much louder and stranger than she expects. She tries to work out where the music is coming from but aborts the dive when she can\u2019t.
\nUp until this point I was engaged with the story but from there on it goes rapidly downhill. This is mostly due to endless dull detail about what they are going to do, what the Boss is thinking, the slight friction between the crew, the meetings they have, endless chatter about the Fleet and the displaced crew of the Ivoire<\/em>, etc. The only highlights are the second and third dives that they undertake to a small runaround spaceship where they eventually locate the anomalous drive.
\nAnother problem is that there is also a huge amount of redundant wordage that contributes absolutely nothing to the story. Take this passage when the Boss goes to visit a diver called Elaine who is in the sick bay:<\/p>\n

Elaine\u2019s room is the only one with a closed door and a medical alert blinking to the side. If there were other medical personnel here, they could tap on that alert and see exactly what\u2019s wrong with the patient inside the room. Unfortunately, she\u2019s on her own, as I was. I didn\u2019t mind. I hope she doesn\u2019t either.<\/u>
\nI slip through the door. The room smells faintly of antiseptic and sweat. Elaine lies in the middle of a large bed, curled on her side, blankets swirled around her as if she\u2019s been sleeping restlessly. There are three alert buttons near her, and another not too far from her left hand.
\nI stare at the alert for a moment, vaguely remembering that I had had that many as well. Someone had explained it to me, and I had forgotten until now. I wonder how much of my life and memories from the past few days are just gone because of what happened. Then I set that thought aside. I\u2019ll worry about it later.<\/u> <\/em>
\nA chair sits close to the bed. It\u2019s not a diagnostic chair. It must be one of the chairs Jaylene has been using. She hasn\u2019t been in my room as much these past two days. She\u2019s probably been here, worrying about Elaine.<\/u><\/em>
\nI sit down. \u201cElaine?\u201d I say softly.<\/em> p. 177<\/p>\n

If you deleted everything that is underlined, how much useful information would you have lost? And there are passages that are much worse than this. Here they are watching a video of the spaceship and Elaine sees something that the others have missed:<\/p>\n

Elaine sees their surprise, and something in her face changes. She thinks they don\u2019t believe her because of her injuries.
\n\u201cCan you pan?\u201d she asks.
\n\u201cWe have what we have,\u201d Yash says.
\n\u201cThen re … re … <\/u>reverse,\u201d Elaine says. \u201cI\u2019ll show you.\u201d
\nShe struggles against the chair.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t want you to stand,\u201d Jaylene says, but Elaine ignores her. Elaine rises, slowly, her head brace moving with her.
\nThe chair changes shape, almost like it\u2019s reaching for her. She uses one arm of the chair to brace her left side. Her right side shuffles.
\nJaylene and Mikk have stood as well, moving just close enough to Elaine to support her if she falls. She looks determined not to.
\nShe uses her chair, then another, and then another to step herself to the edge of the table where Yash is. Yash takes a step closer to Elaine, but Elaine says, \u201cPlease move … back.\u201d
\nFor a moment, Yash doesn\u2019t move at all. She doesn\u2019t seem to understand what Elaine wants, but I do.
\n\u2018Yash,\u201d I say. \u201cYou\u2019re in her way.\u201d
\n\u201cOh,\u201d Yash says, and scrambles aside.
\nI get up as well, and Jaylene shoots me a glare that would have made me stop moving yesterday. But I\u2019m all right. I\u2019m healing, probably thanks to those nanobits.
\nBesides, if Elaine can move, I can too.
\nI walk down the other side of the table. Now Elaine and I are flanking Yash. <\/u>\u201cWhat
\ndo you want me to reverse to?\u201d I ask Elaine.
\n\u201cI got it,\u201d Yash says.
\nI ignore her, keeping my hand on the controls. I have a hunch I know where Elaine is going with this.
\n\u201cThe first.. . gli. .. gla .. . when we first see the cockpit,\u201d Elaine says.<\/em> p. 173-174<\/p>\n

Again, how much useful information would be lost excising the material that is underlined? OK, the part about the chair changing shape is interesting but this has been mentioned previously. All of this makes it read like a bloated first or second draft.
\nWhat really kills this, though, is the ending. Having spent the entire story setting up the anomalous drive problem and searching for its location, what happens on the third dive (spoiler) is that the drive, having switched off previously, comes back on and activates, which causes the runaround to vanish into fold-space. So, having set up a problem, it is \u2018solved\u2019 in the last act (40,000 words later!) by having it vanish\u2014what kind of ending is that?<\/p>\n

There is the usual non-fiction. Anniversaries and Milestones<\/em><\/strong> by Sheila Williams uses her editorial to list some of her personal anniversaries as well as those of the magazine: 2017 is not only the 40th<\/sup> anniversary of the magazine but her 35th<\/sup> as a member of staff. It is also her 30th<\/sup> year of wedlock.
\nAdvertisements For Myself<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Silverberg is a plug for three of his books, two collections of his columns and a book of interviews with him, Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg<\/em> by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (I bought the ebook but haven\u2019t yet read). In the preamble to these notifications there is commentary on Norman Mailer and Isaac Asimov, which contains this information:<\/p>\n

Asimov, unable to get into Columbia because of the anti-Jewish quotas of the era, went to Seth Low, a college established by Columbia to accommodate deserving students excluded by quota from Columbia itself).<\/em> p. 6<\/p>\n

I never knew about these quotas. Nor that the practice continued long after WWII.3<\/sup>
\nHarry and Dot<\/em><\/strong> by James Patrick Kelly is an interesting column about the Wizard of Oz<\/em> books and films (as well as other related material such as Harry Potter<\/em>).
\nThe Poetry<\/em><\/strong> in this issue is by Tod McCoy (about standing outside a bookstore with a chemistry colleague looking at the rain, which I liked), Robert Frazier, Suzanne Palmer, and G. O. Clark
\nOn Books: Wolockification<\/em><\/strong> is another excellent essay by Norman Spinrad, who starts by explaining his invention of Wolocks:<\/p>\n

Wolocks.
\nYes, Wolocks are a nonexistent ethnic identity I once invented to be the butt of all the ethnic jokes that can\u2019t be told in public\u2014they won\u2019t be offended, because they don\u2019t exist.
\n<\/em>Wolockification.
\n<\/em>Why is such wolockification necessary and indeed perhaps even inevitable?<\/em> p. 200<\/p>\n

He then goes on to discuss this practice is in SF:<\/p>\n

Why has so much science fiction and fantasy been written and continues to be written about wars by humans against wolockified enemies? Aliens. Robots. Demons. Ghouls. Zombies. The Living Dead.
\nLiterarily and <\/em>literally non-human.
\n<\/em>Perfectly wolockified enemies.
\nThis has been a dominant plot structure of science fiction and fantasy as long as there has been genre fiction, and indeed of much fiction time out of mind.<\/em>
\n[. . .]<\/em>
\nAnd science fiction and genre fantasy can and do perfect the wolockification of the enemy for story purposes, with fictional wolockified enemies who <\/em>really are not human and therefore can be guiltlessly slaughtered. Fictional \u201cheroes\u201d do the killing without feeling guilt, and guiltless readers or viewers get their rocks off on the fictional carnage.<\/em> p. 201<\/p>\n

He then develops this theme by looking at the anti-wolockification of StarTrek<\/em> versus the opposite in Star Wars<\/em>, Verne versus Wells, etc., before going on to review an anthology called Deserts of Fire: Speculative Fiction and the Modern War<\/em> by Douglas Lain.
\nThe latter part of the essay reviews China Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s new novel, The Last Days of New Paris<\/em>. I\u2019ve never read anything by this writer but Spinrad\u2019s enthusiastic review made me order this one (parallel-world Nazi-occupied France with manifestations that are apparently surrealistic monsters). He adds this about the ending:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about as far as I think I should go with these interlocking time lines, alternate time lines, and slowly coalescing plot lines, except to assure the reader that it <\/em>does all come together satisfyingly at the end. If that <\/em>is the end, for in another afterword that\u2019s hard to believe really is an afterword, Mieville purports to tell us that the novel was dictated to him verbatim and nonstop by a mystery man in a hotel room for thirty or so hours during which Mieville drank wine from the mini-bar but never took a piss. Don\u2019t try this at home.<\/em> p. 206<\/p>\n

Finally, there are once again short biographical notes from the writers. I found a few of these quite interesting (Leah Cypess, Jay O\u2019Connell, Ian McHugh, Kristine Kathryn Rusch).<\/p>\n

Quite a mixed issue this one, with the material I disliked almost cancelling out the benefit of the good.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Will Ludwigsen has compiled a Spotify playlist (search on his name in the app) as \u2018you might need a little music to get in the mood.\u2019 What, to get in the mood for a killing spree? Apart from, Rod Stewart, Blondie and the Bay City Rollers on a disco playlist? I wouldn\u2019t call them, or a few of the others, disco. And where is the 12-inch mix of Donna Summer\u2019s I Feel Love<\/em>?<\/li>\n
  2. I can see how you might, from a distance, extrapolate from Brexit to \u2018misplaced xenophobia,\u2019 and \u2018sectarian strife\u2019 but \u2018misplaced protectionism\u2019? That is the complete antithesis of what anyone wants. Also, how does a country go from being an advanced Western nation to having \u2018the world\u2019s<\/em> third highest infant mortality rate\u2019 (italics mine) and \u2018the second lowest literacy rate\u2019? And as for \u2018resurgent Luddism,\u2019 I\u2019d be interested to know how they managed to prise everyone\u2019s smartphone from their hands.<\/li>\n
  3. Numerus Clausus<\/em> at Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    ISFDB link Other reviews: Greg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong,\u00a0Rocket Stack Rank Eric Kimminau,\u00a0Tangent Online Sam\u00a0Tomaino,\u00a0SF Revu Various,\u00a0Goodreads Editor, Sheila Williams; Assistant Editor, Emily Hockaday Fiction: On the Ship \u2022 short story by Leah Cypess \u2665 Come as You Are \u2022 novelette by Dale Bailey \u2665\u2665\u2665 Good Show \u2022 short story by William Preston \u2665\u2665 The Escape […]<\/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-3043","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-N5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043","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=3043"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3052,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions\/3052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}