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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Other Reviews: Fiction: Non-fiction: The only fiction item that really grabbed me in this issue is Exceptional Forces<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 by\u00a0Sean McMullen,<\/a> which has a clear, direct and driven narrative that some of the other writers in this issue would do well to emulate, in part if not completely. This tells of a Russian astronomy professor (also a \u2018socialised savant\u2019) who is picked up by a female assassin the night before he is supposed to deliver a paper at a conference. They end up back in her hotel room and an intriguing and menacing dialogue begins between them when he tells her he knows that she has been sent to kill him. He also tells her she has been sent\u00a0because he has discovered widespread alien life in the Andromeda Galaxy. This one gets off to a cracking start and manages to keep it up for about three-quarters of the story but ultimately it doesn\u2019t entirely convince for a couple of reasons, the most obvious one (spoiler) being she shoots her husband when he turns up intending to dispose of the professor\u2019s body. A high-wire act that mostly succeeds.<\/p>\n The best of the rest is probably In Equity<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Sarah Gallien. This tells of Cole, a thirteen year old orphan in the near future being taken by his care worker to meet prospective parents. The story mostly takes place at the house and tells of the initial reluctance of the woman who lives there to take him, and her partner\u2019s plan to put him in\u00a0a high-tech private school where he will be a test subject for gene-therapy. This is all told from the child\u2019s viewpoint and is quite good as far as it goes (it is a reworked part\u00a0of a novel in progress). Unfortunately, it is rather too obviously an extract from a longer work and isn\u2019t really a self-contained story.<\/p>\n With a couple of exceptions the rest mostly fall into the OK category. The Grocer\u2019s Wife (Enhanced Transcription)\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>by\u00a0Michael Libling tells of an old couple with a husband who has Alzheimer\u2019s. It also appears that the husband is\u00a0under continual surveillance by a government employee. The parallel development of these two sides of the story is intriguing to start with, but (spoiler) the resolution of the State disguising the downloading of his memories as Alzheimer\u2019s is too odd and paranoid and did not convince me. Hen\u2014Suva Hen, highest rank in the colony, could reach into a person\u2019s body and direct, in broad strokes, the growth of cells, the patterns of immune response, the firing of synapses. Sulai Petra, one rank below as the Su recognized it, could only control the lightning. The story starts with Petra saving an old friend from being excised\u2014executed\u2014by the Su for his separatist activity: a group of outsiders live and plot at the generation spaceship site. Matters develop largely around the relationships between Petra, Ilen (Petra\u2019s ex-partner), Nash (the rescued man) and a fourth man Amad (a separatist). Colony-Separatist relations also complicate matters between these players. The ones that didn\u2019t work for me include Bringing Them Back<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Bruce McAllister which is a short apocalyptic tale about the serial extinction of species on Earth. This comes to an abrupt halt and comes over as a worthy and somewhat pointless lecture. I know the world is going to hell, tell me how we may make matters better, or entertain me as they get worse! The non-fiction is fairly sparse in this issue. Days of Future Past<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Sheila Williams is an editorial about the complaints from late last year that the movie Back to the Future<\/em> didn\u2019t predict the future. Only stupid people would think that a movie was going to, but I suppose editorial topics are thin on the ground. With only the one story of any note, this is quite a lacklustre issue.<\/p>\n This magazine is still being published!<\/b> Subscribe: Kindle UK<\/a>, Kindle USA<\/a>\u00a0or physical & digital copies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other Reviews: Greg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank Robert L. Turner III, Tangent Online Sam\u00a0Tomaino, SF Revu Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming) Fiction: The Grocer\u2019s Wife (Enhanced Transcription) \u2022 short story by Michael Libling \u2665\u2665 Bringing Them Back \u2022 short story by Bruce McAllister \u2665 In Equity \u2022 short story by Sarah Gallien \u2665\u2665 […]<\/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-806","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-d0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","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=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1250,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/1250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGreg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank<\/a>
\nRobert L. Turner III, Tangent Online<\/a>
\nSam\u00a0Tomaino, SF Revu<\/a>
\nMark Watson, Best SF<\/a> (forthcoming)<\/p>\n
\nThe Grocer\u2019s Wife (Enhanced Transcription)<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Michael Libling \u2665\u2665
\nBringing Them Back<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Bruce McAllister \u2665
\nIn Equity<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Sarah Gallien \u2665\u2665
\nPassion Summer<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Nick Wolven \u2665
\nExceptional Forces<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Sean McMullen \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Monster of 1928<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Sandra McDonald \u2665\u2665
\nThe Charge and the Storm<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by An Owomoyela \u2665\u2665<\/p>\n
\nThe Charge and the Storm<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 cover by Alejandro Colucci
\nPoetry<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Robert Borski, G.O. Clark
\nDays of Future Past<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 editorial\u00a0by Sheila Williams
\nA Famous Fantastic Mystery<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Robert Silverberg
\nNext Issue <\/em><\/strong>
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Peter Heck
\nSF Conventional Calendar<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Erwin S. Strauss<\/p>\n
\nThe Monster of 1928<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Sandra McDonald is a Cthulhu story in the 1928 Florida Everglades and has the natives coping with monsters and floods, sometimes both together. Interesting idea and background but the writer doesn\u2019t really progress much beyond introducing these elements.
\nThe Charge and the Storm<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0An Owomoyela is initially quite a promising story about Petra, a human \u2018Maker\u2019 in an alien-human colony. The humans are the descendants of a generation starship, and the planetary hosts are the hierarchical alien Su. These aliens have largely destroyed their planet and huge lightning storms occur outside the shared habitat. Some of the humans have been altered over the generations by the Su and have special powers:<\/p>\n
\nA strong skill, a Maker skill, when it came to directing the responsive material of the habitats, feeding the biomat infrastructure with power. The Suva, Su Fathers, could create new Su life, but the Makers could control the colony.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nUnfortunately, in the latter stages of the story the emotional storm engulfing Petra and all her relationships rather overwhelms the developing physical storm outside. I was more interested in the science fictional content of this story rather than these relationship matters, so I thought it faded towards the end. If this was a movie, I think I would say \u2018chick-flick\u2019.<\/p>\n
\nPassion Summer<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Nick Wolven didn\u2019t even start to convince me about its premise. Jeff, a fourteen year old, gets his first \u2018Passion\u2019\u2014an artificial short-term love for something of his choice. This all plays out against a society where this kind of thing is prevalent, and where jobs seem to be menial and involve long hours. Jeff also has to cope with a dysfunctional mother. After getting his Passion the problem is that it doesn\u2019t wear off after a month or so like it is supposed to. Apart from a failure to suspend disbelief, none of this coheres, and it it takes its time in not doing so.<\/p>\n
\nA Famous Fantastic Mystery<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0by\u00a0Robert Silverberg is an reminiscence about the teenage Silverberg seeing the new design of the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries<\/em> (January, 1951) in a subway newspaper booth on the way home from a late-night party. He spends the next few days wondering if he has had a hallucination. It materialises that he hasn\u2019t, but the intensity of his concern about whether he did, and his all-consuming involvement in the minutiae of the field will strike a chord with anyone reading this kind of website.
\nThere are a couple of poems. The Robert Borski one, Murmuration<\/em><\/strong>, isn\u2019t bad. It starts with the introduction of starlings to the USA and leaps forward a century and a half to the introduction other mythical creatures from Shakespeare\u2019s plays.
\nIn On Books<\/em><\/strong>, Peter Heck reviews several promising books by half a dozen authors. I had to steel myself not to go onto Amazon and start ordering.<\/p>\n![\"rss\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sfmagazines.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/social-media-feather\/synved-social\/image\/social\/regular\/16x16\/rss.png?resize=16%2C16&ssl=1\" "\\"Subscribe")
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