Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015) edited by Sheila Williams

Stories Included The New Mother by Eugene Fischer The Children of Gal by Allen M. Steele Day Job by Tom Purdom Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters - H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town! by Michael Swanwick and Gregory Frost The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers by Anna Tambour Paul and His Son by Joe M. McDermott The Marriage of the Sea by Liz Williams What I Intend by Robert Reed Willing Flesh by Jay O'Connell How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age by Fran Wilde The Sentry by Frank Smith

Poems Included Birth of an Astrophysicist by Bruce Boston Layover by Wendy Rathbone Grain of Truth by Robert Frazier Schrödinger's Door by Richard Bruns Basement Refrigerator by Joshua Gage

Full review: The double issues of Asimov's Science Fiction (and Analog as well) tend to suffer somewhat in comparison with the regular monthly issues. Theoretically, these issues are supposed to cover two months worth of the magazine, and thus they should not have any harder time filling their pages than a pair of monthly issues would. In practice, however, these issues seem to always contain more weak stories, and more stories that seem to serve merely as bland page-filler than would be found in any two regular monthly issues. The April/May 2015 issue of Asimov's seems to be a typical example of the double issues, with a couple of stand out stories, a couple of good stories, more than its fair share of stories that are merely average, and one story that is simply not very good.

The cover story for the issue, The New Mother by Eugene Fischer imagines a world in which a new sexually transmitted disease that transform's the victim's gametes from haploid to diploid has begun to spread. This has the effect of making men who contract the disease sterile, and women who suffer from it almost perpetually pregnant with what amount to genetic duplicates of themselves. The story itself follows a reporter named Tess as she researches a story about the social impact of the disease, focusing on the figure of Candace Montross, a woman who escaped from a religious compound where her daughters were systematically sterilized at the direction of the cult leader. Told via snippets of Tess' text, interviews with scientists and politicians, and interspersed with scenes from Tess' own life (Tess is pregnant through the story, a condition that leads many of those who she deals with to make certain assumptions given the subject matter of what she is researching). Through the story, Fischer explores the implications of a world in which it is possible for a woman to have children without the need for a man to be involved, and the responses that are likely to result, which range from reasonable and intelligent, to the idiotic and malicious. Of particular note are the responses that Fischer imagines that the pro-life movement might have when confronted by this alteration to the means of conception. In some ways, the story seems to draw upon the combination of moral panic and studied indifference to suffering that followed the discovery of AIDS in the 1980s as inspiration for the positions taken by various individuals who opine upon the issue. There are serious questions here, and Fischer offers an array of potential answers. Some of these answers are clearly better than others, but there doesn't seem to be any one that is definitively correct. Science fiction is at its best when it asks difficult questions, and The New Mother poses some thought-provoking and disturbing ones.

The Children of Gal by Allen M. Steele is the final installment in the four-part Arkwright series of stories, the previous three having appeared intermittently in various issues from the year prior to this issue. I have never been fond of the practice of slicing a story up and publishing it in disparate chunks spread out over the course of a year or two's worth of magazines, but Steele at least has worked hard to make each section of his story mostly stand alone. In this segment of the story, the inhabitants of Eos have developed a religion that is somewhat obviously the corrupted teachings of an ancient technological society that they have forgotten. At the opening of the story, Sanjay's mother Aara is being exiled for reporting an event that contradicts the teachings of Gal, which makes her a heretic. After Aara has left for Purgatory, Sanjay and his father try to get on with their lives, and pass a few difficult months trying to pretend that their lives can return to normal. Through this section of the story, Steele does some world building, filling the reader in on the details of the rigidly religious society that Sanjay lives in. Eventually Sanjay reunites with his lover Kaile, who confides in him that despite her family's fairly strong adherence to the faith of Gal, she observed something similar to that Aara had reported, but did not tell anyone for fear of being deemed a heretic. In a fairly amazing coincidence, the first night that Kaile agrees to return to Sanjay's bed, Aara shows up to spirit them away and tell them that everything they have been told about their history is wrong, which really should not come as any surprise to the reader. Eventually Sanjay and Kaile come to understand the truth, although it takes quite a while for Kaile to give up on the lessons she was taught in her Sunday school classes. This sort of story requires a collection of fairly fine balances to pull off successfully, and Steele comes close to accomplishing this. The corrupted society must be recognizably descended from one that is familiar to the reader, but if it is too easy to make the connections it just becomes a bland variant. The characters minds must be changed in a realistic way, but if one takes too long to reveal to the characters what the reader already knows, the story runs the risk of becoming dull and uninteresting. In The Children of Gal, Steele flirts with bland and dull, but manages to stop just short of both. The story isn't particularly memorable, following in the footsteps of many other stories of this type without really breaking any new ground or doing anything particularly interesting, but it is reasonably well executed and is at least a reasonably worthwhile read.

Writing a story set completely within a truly alien culture is extraordinarily difficult, and The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers by Anna Tambour serves as a clear illustration of this truth. Unfortunately, it illustrates this truth by being confusing and not particularly well-executed. Set in a society that is stratified between those who live "Above" and those who live "Below", the tale shifts between a handful of viewpoints in the lead up to a momentous event in which the "gun" that seeds the Below is due to set off the harvest. As the story progresses, it turns out that the gun isn't working properly and has been killing those who live Below, although only a few Above-dwellers are aware of this fact. They are also aware that the gun is in imminent danger of failure, although this doesn't come out until well into the story. One major problem with the story is that there is both too much world detail provided and not enough at the same time. Tambour provides a lot of detail about the two intertwined cultures in the story, but without context, much of this detail is just clutter. There are some implications that the cultures are descended from another, more technologically adept culture, but the hints are so opaque that it is difficult to draw a connection between the obviously corrupted words used by the characters and the technology they are supposed to be references to. In a way, this story is an attempt to do what The Children of Gal did, but with a much more alien descendant culture. The story also shifts viewpoints between too many characters for its length, and it settles upon a couple of characters that I simply couldn't bring myself to really care about. There were some characters who seemed interesting, and whose stories (and survival) mattered, but as the story progressed it was increasingly dominated by two characters whose lives mattered to me not at all. These factors, combined with the fact that the alien nature of the world made even those story lines hard to get a good mental grasp on, makes the end result less than inspiring.

There are some stories where you know something is going to go horribly wrong from the outset, but the joy in reading them comes from finding out just how the tragedy will unfold. Day Job by Tom Purdom falls into this category of story, as Len seeks treatment for his antisocial behavior so he can secure a permanent job. He consults with Rafe, an aide to Dr. Shinwalai and is prescribed a course of treatment to modify his personality in a manner that will make him more empathetic and better able to navigate social situations. But Len's treatment doesn't progress as it should, in part because Len doesn't bother to tell Rafe everything, and in part because Len is actually kind of a monster. The story bounces back and forth between Len as he goes about his daily life with his workaholic girlfriend and his rather unpleasant online persona and Rafe and the various other members of Dr. Shinwalai's staff as they try to figure out exactly what is wrong with Len, and how to treat him. Everything builds to a tense and slightly abrupt conclusion, and then there is a brief coda in which we see a glimpse of Rafe's life away from work. The truly interesting thing about this story isn't Len's problems, which are apparent fairly early, but the snippets of the rest of the world that we see, and the fact that the various people who we get some insight about seem to be, by current standards, are fairly maladjusted themselves. As usual for Purdom, this is a story that shines a fairly probing and sharply critical light onto the human condition, resulting in a mildly unsettling story.

Combining magic, chicanery, and a Depression era setting, Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters - H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town! by Michael Swanwick and Gregory Frost features (naturally enough) H'ard and Andy, two con artists making their way across mid-America in what appears to be the height of the Dust Bowl. After some preliminary (and minor) con jobs, the pair get down to business, but only after the crooked local sheriff figured out their scam and demands that he be cut in on the profits. Further complicating matters, the sheriff's rebellious teenage daughter Lolly has decided that the two flim-flam men are her ticket out of town to a life of adventure and debauchery. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that H'ard and Andy do have some magical powers, and that the primary difference from our world and this fictional one seems to be that the pair are not alone, and even have magic that is recognizable and subject to categorization. As one might expect, the con job goes awry in unexpected and humorous ways and the two protagonists barely make it out of town with their ill-gotten gains and a more or less invited passenger. The story isn't particularly deep or meaningful, but it is an enjoyable lark.

Paul and His Son by Joe M. McDermott involves a difficult relationship between a father and his teenage son, telling the story entirely from the father's perspective. Paul is concerned that his son runs away frequently, gets into trouble when he is away from home, and when he is home, does poorly in school and generally resents his parents. In some ways, Paul's son behaves like a slightly exaggerated version of a fairly normal teenage boy. But Paul worries about his son. As the father of a somewhat difficult teenage son, I can empathize with Paul, but as the story progresses, Paul's concern seems a bit obsessive. The lengths to which Paul is willing to go in order to monitor and control his child seem extreme, and somewhat off-putting. Alongside Paul's attempts to control his son, there is a plot involving a doctor who is treating one of Paul's legal clients who the doctor is illegally providing life-extending drugs to despite government orders to cut him off. As the story draws to a close, Paul explains to the doctor that part of Paul's role as an estate attorney is to show such clients that they are better off letting go and accepting death for the benefit of their families. This, coming at the same time that Paul is desperately trying to exert close control over his life by controlling his son, seems just a tad hypocritical. And that seems to be the point of the story - that control is illusionary, and despite Paul's best efforts, he is doomed to fail and even still he cannot stop trying. The story probably resonated for me more than for the typical reader, but it is both sad and heroic, with just a touch of creepiness thrown in as seasoning.

A story with a macabre fairy tale sensibility, The Marriage of the Sea by Liz Williams is the first person account of a young woman who has been chosen to be the bride of the sea. She is proud of the honor, even though she knows it will result in her death, believing that she will be united with the Watermaiden under the waves. The story proceeds placidly and almost grandly before the serene ritual is interrupted by women from the hills who have come to rescue the narrator even though she does not want to be rescued. There is confusion, attempted sacrifice, and disaster leading to unexpected death and even more unexpected survival. In the end, the narrator finds herself at the edge of the sea, wondering if she is loved or is to be rejected. The story reads a little bit like a tragic myth similar to that of the Greek heroine Andromeda, but instead of fearing the Kraken, Andromeda is in love with the creature. The story is a love story, but a bitter and somewhat one-sided one.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is something that is dear to the hearts of many science fiction fans, and it forms the basis for Robert Reed's story What I Intend. Unlike many such stories, Reed's focuses on a wealthy financier who decides to throw his considerable wealth into a project that involves combing through the massive volume of data from various forms of telescope that has accumulated over the years, but never been analyzed. This is, of course, a form of evaluation that is very much a part of the finance culture - hunting through all of the noise to try to find that little bit of signal that will give you the edge against the competition. The story develops along mostly expected lines, until the twist near the end that shatters all of the protagonist's dreams. The story has a glimmer of hope, and that's where it goes from being merely adequate to pretty good. In the end, What I Intend is an exploration of obsession, and a cautionary tale about its limits.

Imagine you could be the person you want to be. The person who eats right, gets all the exercise they should, and generally takes good care of themselves. For most people, that person wouldn't be you, and becoming that person would require changing your own fundamental nature. In Willing Flesh by Jay O'Connell, a man named Garrison faces this predicament, and buys a product that lets him take a shortcut that implants an alternate personality that is motivated to do all the healthy things he isn't. As one might expect, this plan goes awry, and for a time the story seems to be moving in the direction of a horror-style resolution. Eventually, O'Connell throws in a kind of a twist, and the story moves to an unexpected, almost happy ending, albeit a slightly creepy one.

Two stories in the issue deal with people returning home from war, each contemplating the lingering consequences to those involved in such conflicts. The first, How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age by Fran Wilde deals with Eleanor, a former embedded reporter who was the sole survivor when the unit she was following was wiped out in a fiery explosion. The only issue is that Eleanor had experimental implants placed in her eyes before she shipped out, and those implants stored and uploaded information, including classified information. After the incident, filters were placed into her implants, and memories were removed from her brain, preventing her from seeing or remembering classified information, and most of what happened when she was deployed. Unfortunately, Eleanor still sees the ghostly images of the soldiers and children who died when she was wounded, and now returned home to Maryland's eastern shore, she visits a local cemetery where she has begun to see the ghost of Tallulah Bankhead as well. Her minder hopes to use these visions as a means of marketing the implants, and is desperate enough to give Eleanor just enough leeway that she is able to turn the tables on him in a way that is true to her news reporter values. The story is deeply ambiguous, as it is never clear if the ghosts Eleanor is seeing are real, are malfunctioning implant technology, or simply hallucinations caused by post-traumatic stress. There is a very real question as to whether Eleanor's moment of triumph is real, or if it is just another illusion, and this is what makes this story so agonizing and so haunting.

The other story about someone returning home from a war is The Sentry by Frank Smith, detailing a day in the life of retired veteran Rick, home on Titan from the war against the Europans on Tethys. Humanity has moved to the outer solar system and lives primarily on the moons of Saturn, each one terraformed with a differing degree of success. His body ravaged by the hardships of war, and his mind consumed by its terrors, Rick is having trouble adjusting a normal life with his daughter, son, and dog in a cozy neighborhood on terraformed Titan. An idyllic day involving a nap in front of a televised baseball game turns into a crisis when the family dog almost, but not quite, kills a bunny rabbit, and the kids insist that Rick do something about the problem. The action in the story is decidedly mundane, but everything is colored by Rick's experiences and his internal struggles with his memories of military service. The story works to a little moral at the end, but what makes it really work is the fact that even the "normal" of mundane life for Rick and his family is all wrong. Lurking underneath the surface of the story is the fact that terraforming hasn't actually made Saturn's moons completely suitable for terrestrial life, so even though Titan is a more hospitable place to live than Europa or Tethys, it still offers a warped existence. Even if Rick is able to return to "normal", that normal is still screwed up.

Short and to the point but still lovely, Birth of an Astrophysicist by Bruce Boston captures that shining moment when someone first understands the true nature of the universe and sets out to study it further. Dedicated to the lonely distances of space travel, Layover by Wendy Rathbone almost makes traveling between planets seem mundane and routine enough to be sorrowful. With a little bit of kaiju and a dash of Dune, Grain of Truth by Robert Frazier engages in some musing about moths and what they might be up to in the kitchen cupboard. Combining ambiguity with humor, Schrödinger's Door by Richard Bruns considers a door that is and is not there with a knock that is also there and not there. The poem manages to be comedic and slightly unsettling at the same time. Basement Refrigerator by Joshua Gage is a poem about the unlikely, but seemingly inevitable contents of a basement refrigerator, the mystery of where such things might come from, and the reasons one might leave such things alone.

Overall, the April/May 2015 issue of Asimov's is a fairly ordinary double issue of the magazine. The best story in the issue is The New Mother, and both Day Job and How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age are both pretty good as well. Most of the other stories in the issue are enjoyable reads, with Willing Flesh throwing in a bit of horror and Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters - H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town! throwing in a bit of humor. The only real clunker in this group is The Gun Between the Veryush and the Cloud Mothers which suffers from trying to be too ambitious in concept and not pulling it off very well. Taken as a whole, the issue is merely adequate, with some mediocre stories, but also some highlights of excellence within its pages.

Previous issue reviewed: March 2015
Subsequent issue reviewed: June 2015

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Review - Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4 (March/April 2015) edited by Charles Coleman Finlay

Stories included:
What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear by Bao Shu (translated by Ken Liu)
A Residence for Friendless Ladies by Alice Sola Kim
The Mantis Tattoo by Paul M. Berger
Things Worth Knowing by Jay O'Connell
La Héreon by Charlotte Ashley
This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang by Brian Dolton
Last Transaction by Nik Constantine
Little Girls in Bone Museums by Sadie Bruce
A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell by Jonathan L. Howard
How to Masquerade as a Human Before the Invasion by Jenn Reese
A User's Guide to Increments of Time by Kat Howard
Bilingual by Henry Lien

Full review: The March/April 2015 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is not the first issue edited by C.C. Finlay, but it is the first issue edited by C.C. Finlay after he took over that position full-time. If one can take the collection of stories found in this installment of the magazine as evidence for "how with the shift from van Gelder to Finlay will affect the magazine", then the answer is more or less "not at all". This issue contains the usual mix of strong selections of science fiction and fantasy stories that cover a broad range of styles, themes, and subgenres.

Originally written in Chinese and translated by Ken Liu, What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear by Bao Shu imagines a world in which history moves backwards with the story beginning with a strange celestial event a handful of years "before" China hosts the Olympics and then regressing through much of the twentieth century to the depths of World War II. Despite history moving backwards, people live their lives forwards, existing in a world that becomes less technologically advanced and overall less prosperous as they advance in age. Told from the perspective of Xie Baosheng as he lives through this reverse history and experiences the economic stagnation of China, takes part in the protest at Tiananmen Square, sees the rise of Communism and eventually the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, and finally, endures the civil war that rages between the Communists and the Nationalists as the Japanese take advantage of the chaos to claim large portions of the country. Woven through these large-scale historical events is Xie's ill-fated romance with Zhao Qi, in which the pair are doomed to be separated by political realities, and alongside this romance is Xie's life with his wife Shen Qian, a marriage that through no fault of any person is just one more piece of the tragedy. As the story progresses, the reader is aware of the big events that lie in Xie's "future", and can feel the rising dread that comes with that foreknowledge as one can almost see what will happen to him and those he cares about before it happens. The story is sad and melancholy, and very aware of this fact, climaxing in a conversation between Xie and Sartre about the nature of reality. Despite some stiffness that seems to be characteristic of Chinese science fiction, the story is brilliant on many levels, and quite emotionally moving.

Both disturbing and uplifting, A Residence for Friendless Ladies by Alice Sola Kim is an emotionally powerful tale about the preservation of self-identity in the face of oppression. The unnamed narrator of the story turns to his grandmother as a last resort to avoid being shipped away to Jamaica, but finds that life in the restrictive halls of the titular residence requires giving up his hard-fought masculine identity and returning to living as a demure, feminine, and obedient woman. He knuckles under for a bit, making a few friends, and obeying the rules, terrified of the alternative. From the start, the narrator is told never to answer the late night knocking on her door. At first he scoffs, but when he actually hears it, it fills him with an existential dread. As the story progresses, the reader gets hints of what kind of woman is able to leave the residence - how they are shaped and molded into something more "acceptable", losing themselves in the process. Eventually, the narrator rebels and pushes so far past the boundaries that he is considered irredeemable, but he realizes that this also frees him, and in the final lines he steps out to embrace his true self, regardless of the cost. The story is a powerful treatment of gender identity mixed with just a little bit of classic horror elements to show the very real struggle faced by people trying to assert their identity in the face of a society that just wants them to disappear into the box it has chosen for them regardless of their wishes.

Set in a dystopian future in which the U.S. has degenerated to a collection of slums interspersed among a collection of multinational corporations, Things Worth Knowing by Jay O'Connell tells the story of Stanley, the last teacher working at a public high school. As the story opens, it seems that calling Stanley's job "teacher" is a bit of a stretch, as all public education in this fictional world is automated and the only real role Stanley has is to keep a lid on things if the students get out of hand. Then Joel walks into Stanley's boring, stable school and displays talents that get multiple mega-corporations interested in his services. From there the story becomes one of heavy-handed corporate arm-twisting while Stanley, wishing he could still have the kind of impact on a kid's life that he used to have, sticks his neck out so Joel can make his own choices. The story is a brief glimpse into a somewhat bleak world, but shows that even in a depersonalized educational system, a teacher can still make a difference to a student.

Resting at the border of fantasy and fable, La Héreon by Charlotte Ashley follows an enigmatic rapier-wielding female duelist who goes by the name "La Héreon" as she enters an illegal tournament. After recruiting a young nun (who has some reservations about being a nun) to be her second, she engages in a series of fights with odd opponents from the land of faerie. Each foe presents a unique challenge, and each victory results in a unique reward in return.  The duels are staged well, and fun to read, and the characters are interesting, but the story feels more like the prologue to a bigger story than it feels like a complete story in itself. Another story told ins a folk tale style, The Mantis Tattoo by Paul M. Berger follows Nudur, a young stone age hunter and member of the "Human Beings", who is chosen by Mantis, one of the powerful spirits that guide his tribe. He is sent northward on an errand to find the Fathers of Man and lead them to their new home. Finding the Fathers proves to be easy, but when Nudur arrives in their camp, things don't go the way he expected. The Fathers want Nudur's tribe's greatest secret, which will give them power enough to drive Nudur's people out of their home and claim it for their own. Forced to try to outwit the stronger and more numerous Fathers, Nudur engages in a series of increasingly desperate schemes, each of which is almost casually countered by the Fathers. The story seems to be framed as an encounter between Neanderthals and modern men, and is just mystical enough to be satisfying as a piece of fantasy fiction.

This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang by Brian Dolton imagines a distant future in which the entire universe is populated only by a handful of virtually immortal sentient beings. Titus happens upon something new, which is quite unusual in the waning years of reality, but when she investigates, she is attacked by the Galasphere, another immortal entity. After fending off its attacks she discovers that the novel object is an engine, and is confronted with a mystery. Woven through and integral to the story are the various alliances who all have different ideas about how to confront the impending death of the universe: The Faction are simply content to expire along with the rest of their reality, the Conclave hope to pass through to the next iteration of time and space, while the Cabal seeks to return to the beginning of the current universe and relive through it from the beginning. Titus discovers that there is a conspiracy to speed up the end of everything, and Titus follows the increasingly disturbing clues to an even more disturbing finale. This story accomplishes the neat trick of making the inevitable end of the universe into something that is tense and uncertain.

Told with a series of commands and computer responses Last Transaction by Nik Constantine gives an extremely limited view of a financial crime in progress. Through the back and forth, citizen 79867 discovers that their account has been overdrawn by many thousands of credits. What follows is a series of interactions showing various efforts to work around the computer system and engage in a little larceny. The story is decent, but not particularly interesting, with the only notable element being the somewhat unusual way in which it is told. Just barely science fiction, Bilingual by Henry Lien is told as a series of tweets from Akari Yamaguchi, a young girl horrified at the Taiji dolphin hunt, all of them sandwiched between a pair of corporate memos, one from Seatopia's CEO, the other from Seatopia's counsel. In the opening memo, Seatopia's CEO wants to prosecute Yamaguchi for the actions subsequently detailed in her attached tweets, which describe her plan to create a warning for dolphins to keep them away from Taiji. Of course, Yamaguchi has to make a warning that the dolphins can understand, and that is where the science fiction (and Seatopia's unhappiness) comes into the story. Yamaguchi works at interacting with some of Seatopia's dolphins to try to figure out how to communicate with them, all the while dogged by the security guards at the park. Eventually she decides she has figured out dolphin language and, presumably, executes her plan. This is, essentially, an alien contact story in which the protagonist has to try to figure out how to communicate, and it is both reasonably interesting and told in an unusual enough manner that it is pretty good.

Laced through with macabre ideas about beauty, Little Girls in Bone Museums by Sadie Bruce explores the lengths women will go to be seen as attractive and the disposable nature of those women. Part of the story explores the life of Piedra, who becomes a "bone knot", a young woman who has gone through a procedure in which the muscles in her contorted body atrophy away until she is frozen in one position, to be displayed as a piece of art. The other part of the story follows a young girl, fascinated by the skeletal remains of such "bone knots" after viewing them in a museum, and the child's grandmother, who hopes to dissuade her from volunteering for such a fate. The reader follows as Piedra endures the painful process to turn her into living sculpture, becomes part of a wealthy man's collection and is put on display to be admired at parties and social events, and is relatively quickly forgotten to be set aside in a back room, and eventually donated to a museum, where her short life comes to an anticlimactic close. Interspersed throughout Piedra's story is the conversation between the admiring child and cautious grandmother, with the child having thoughts only of the glory and prestige of becoming a "bone knot" and entirely discounting the cost. This counterpoint makes Piedra's story seem all the more tragic, as one can see the motivations that caused her to choose the brief and limited life she has, and highlights that she was once potentially so much more than a wealthy man's toy. Tragic and frightening, this story is a brutal and bitter taste of the pressures placed on young girls, and the cost they pay in the name of beauty.

Time travel is inherently odd. In A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell by Jonathan L. Howard, time travel is also a source of wry and self-aware humor. Set in a bar named Helix, in the city of Helix, next to the tourist attraction called the Helix, the story is told from the perspective of a bartender as he interacts with a succession of time traveling customers, each of whom has a story that folds back upon the story told be one of the others, making what can only be described as a metaphorical helix. This sort of self-referential humor is woven throughout the story as the bartender uses his inner monologue to make pithy observations about what he is observing. Eventually the whole story turns on the existence of acronyms, and the whole adds up to a somewhat absurdist commentary on the futility of existence. Another humorous story, How to Masquerade as a Human Before the Invasion by Jenn Reese, provides exactly what the title says; A list of instructions for the inhuman agents of a distant alien invasion force that will be taking over Earth at some vague and unspecified point in the future. The story is quite brief, and manages to be both silly fun and fairly unsettling at the same time.

A tale of chronomancy and love gone wrong A User's Guide to Increments of Time by Kat Howard details the bitter fight between two ex-lovers who both have the magical ability to steal time. Siobhan and Finn each manifest their time-manipulating magic in different ways, and as the story progresses, we find out that they have different motivations for stealing bits of time. Unlike many romance stories, this one starts in the aftermath of the love affair, with the torrid passion only a lingering memory by the time the action takes place. But as we learn more and more about the two, one wonders how much they actually knew about one another, and whether they actually loved one another, or instead loved what they thought the other was, or what the other could provide for them. The back and forth proceeds almost methodically to its almost inevitable conclusion, but it is a bittersweet ride to get there.

Though there isn't really anything resembling a thematic bent to this issue as a whole, the array of stories found in its pages is well worth reading. The best stories in the issue are probably What Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear, A Residence for Friendless Ladies, and This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang but every story in this issue is at least average quality, with most of the stories being above average to excellent. Both La Héreon and A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell provide some humorous interludes as well, which is generally difficult to execute well in genre fiction. Overall, this is a fairly representative issue of one of the best genre fiction magazines in print, and as a result, is definitely worth reading.

Previous issue reviewed: January/February 2015
Subsequent issue reviewed: May/June 2015

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Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 3 (March 2015) edited by Sheila Williams

Stories included:
Inhuman Garbage by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Pareidolia by Kathleen Bartholomew and Kage Baker
Twelve and Tag by Gregory Norman Bossert
Tuesdays by Suzanne Palmer
Military Secrets by Kit Reed
Holding the Ghosts by Gwendolyn Clare

Poems included:
Red Shift by Barbara Duffy
The Fates Rebel by Ruth Berman
Prince/Glass by Jane Yolen

Full review: As I have noted before, there are often unannounced "themes" that can be found in individual issues of most science fiction publications. In the March 2015 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, with three stories that touch upon the question, that theme seems to be "what makes someone human". The other stories in the volume are a mixed grab-bag containing ideas ranging from very slow time travel to very poignant mourning.

Set in her Retrieval Artist continuity, the murder mystery Inhuman Garbage by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the longest story in this issue. After the body of a young woman is found in one of the recycling crates on the way to the compost pile of the lunar settlement of Armstrong City, detective Noelle DiRicci is called in to investigate. Having dealt with some less than industrious colleagues, and a mostly disinterested recycling company owner, DiRicci's investigation takes her to the unsavory alleged crime boss Luc Deshin. From there the story makes numerous twists and turns, in large part because legally it turns out that despite the fact that the body found in the recycling crate is quite human, killing her was legally not murder. The story splits into two paths with the first being DiRicci's inquiry that is stymied by rules, red tape, and what seem to be somewhat unfair laws, and Deshin's efforts to deal with what he perceives to be a threat to his family - efforts which are much more pragmatic and direct than DiRicci's. Eventually the issue is resolved - solved on Deshin's end, and left in a much more unsettled state on DiRicci's, but the real question posed by the story remains: Who is human, and who is deserving of the protection of the law? The story also contains some rather ominous points relating to the vulnerability of interdependent ecosystems, although these aren't really followed up on in the context of this story. Although Inhuman Garbage isn't an outstanding story on its own, it is an interesting building block in Rusch's ongoing fictional reality, fleshing out her imagined world as part of a decently constructed story that raises some interesting issues.

Told from the perspective of an immortal cyborg working for a time travel company to collect and preserve collectible antiquities, Pareidolia by Kathleen Bartholomew and Kage Baker is a story of unintended consequences. After a brief introduction to establish the background of their fictional universe, the story moves to a seemingly innocuous interlude in ancient Egypt as the narrator Imhotep (who also happens to be Joseph) provides his fellow countrymen with standards to make sculpting and building more uniform. From there the story hops forward by fifteen hundred years to Byzantium, where the immortal Josephus is now running a caravan business shipping rare goods to the hidden locations where they will wait until collected by the company in the far future. A directive from his bosses in the future sends Josephus scrambling off to the construction site where the Hagia Sofia is being rebuilt to intercept a painter who has been making some religious icons that display rather unusual properties. After a death and some sleuthing, Josephus discovers the secret of the paintings, learning that they are an accidental crop sprung from the seed he had planted so long ago in Egypt. In the end, Josephus sets things right and the story ends. There isn't anything particularly deep or insightful about the plot, but the atmosphere set by the story is entertaining.

Set in a rough and tumble bar on Europa Twelve and Tag by Gregory Norman Bossert revolves around a "get to know the new face" gathering for the crew of an under-ice ship that work pulling valuable biomass from the vast and chilly ocean under the surface of the Jovian moon. To learn about their new work mates, the crew play a game called "twelve and tag" that involves word play and then a crew member telling two stories, one of which must be a lie and one of which must be true. The story is a bit confusing, as there are simply too many characters for Bossert to really detail, but for the most part the only ones that really matter are Cheung, the ship's pilot, and Adra and Zandt, the two newbies. All of the other crew members are essentially interchangeable, and their individual identities are mostly irrelevant. Through the series of stories told by the characters, Bossert is able to provide a fairly thorough picture of the future these characters inhabit, including the use of T.A.G. technology to "back up" people's brains so, among other things, they can be reconstituted should they die. For much of its length the story seems to meander aimlessly, not really going anywhere but providing some background material about the world. Eventually, Bossert ties everything together, and does so in a way that is moderately unexpected with a hint of rising horror as the reader figures out what is actually going on. About halfway through the story, I was sure I didn't like it, but in the end it turned out to be quite satisfying.

Another story that imagines the consequences of the ability to record a person's brain and transfer their consciousness to another body, Holding the Ghosts by Gwendolyn Clare examines exactly what might happen to the body in question. In the opening paragraphs of the story we learn that Abby's parents can't afford to lease the body they use for her to visit since she has gone to college, so they only have her on weekends. This seems to work out well until Abby's body remarks that she isn't actually Abby, but rather merely a container for Abby's ghost, driving her mother to rush to the doctor's office brimming with questions. After the doctor reassures Abby's mother that the body has no mind of its own, we meet Chantal, on vacation with her husband, and then Max, brought back for her engineering expertise. As the pieces fall into place, it turns out that Abby wasn't really "away at college", and Chantal's weekend with her husband was probably a repeat experience. The story doesn't really answer the question of what being alive means, but it does pose some rather interesting conundrums.

Due to an error somewhere in the production process, the first page of Tuesdays by Suzanne Palmer was omitted from the printed version of this issue. To remedy this situation, the first page was printed in the April/May 2015 issue of the magazine, and the entire story was placed on Asimov's website. The story itself is a brief little vingette about what seems to be an unusual and inexplicable event in the early morning hours at an all-night diner. What makes the story slightly out of the ordinary is that it is told in short snippets rotating from one viewpoint character to another, as each of the witnesses recounts what they saw to a pair of mostly bored police officers. The story is also told out of order, jumping back and forth in time on a handful of occasions, although this does little other than pointlessly hide the reasons for each person's presence at the diner until later in the story. Everything builds up to a punchline that is mildly amusing but isn't really worth all of the work that went into setting it up. There are a couple of interesting tricks in presentation contained in the piece, but they are all in the service of a story that doesn't really go anywhere interesting.

Military Secrets by Kit Reed is light on the speculative fiction and heavy on metaphor, following the narrator Jessie as she comes to grips with the fact that everyone but her has given up on her missing Navy officer father. In the opening paragraphs of the story, a very young Jessie is separated from most of her classmates, leading to a long digression in which she explains how she learned her father was missing, and how she continues to hope that he is still alive somewhere, possibly clawing his way back to his family. With childlike faith, she continues to hope even though her mother withdraws from the world, her neighbor sympathizes and brings casseroles, and one of the nuns at her school reveals to everyone that Jessie's father is gone. Eventually, Jessie, along with her classmates Bill and Dorcas, is bundled into a "bus" that is a dark tube where they sit in the blackness of the back of the vehicle waiting, frozen in time. Though the speculative fictional element in the story is quite light, the metaphor it serves up for children forever trapped at the age their father vanished is quite powerful.

Red Shift by Barbara Duffy is a moderately opaque poem that seems to be something of a love song, using the motion of the galaxies and Miles Davis music as metaphors. As one might expect, The Fates Rebel by Ruth Berman is a brief exploration of what might happen should the three fates turn away from their usual habits and engage in a little mutiny. Somewhat darker even that fates run amok, Prince/Glass by Jane Yolen is a grim twist on the traditional fairy tale formula that has just the right amount of creepy.

Overall, while this issue has no real standout stories, it also doesn't have any really poor ones either. Oddly, the weakest story in the issue is probably the cover story Tuesdays, and even that is a moderately diverting and amusing piece. On the other hand, stories like Twelve and Tag and Holding the Ghosts are above average, and while Military Secrets is mostly lacking in science fictional elements, it is a gut-wrenching emotional journey. Taken as a whole, this is a fairly ordinary issue of Asimov's. Given that an ordinary issue of Asimov's is pretty damn good, that's a fairly strong recommendation.

Previous issue reviewed: February 2015
Subsequent issue reviewed: April/May 2015

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Review - Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 128, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015) edited by Gordon van Gelder

Stories included:
Prisoners of Pandarius by Matthew Hughes
Lightning Jack's Last Ride by Dale Bailey
Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer
Portrait of a Witch by Albert E. Cowdrey
Farewell Blues by Bud Webster
Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason
Out of the Jar by Eric Schwitzgebel
History's Best Places to Kiss by Nik Houser
The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner by Alan Baxter
The Man from X by Gregor Hartmann
The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life by Francis Marion Soty

Poems included:
Robot Agonistes by Alan Ira Gordon
An Undiscovered Country by Robert Frazier

Science fact articles included:
Falling into the Unknowable by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy

Full review: Some issues of genre fiction magazines have themes that run through their stories, whether intentional or not. The January/February 2015 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is not one of those issues. There are a couple of stories that can be bundled together - there are a few folk tales, a couple of humorous works of light science fiction, and a couple of stories featuring the occult, but none of these connected bind together more than two of the stories in this volume's pages. If anything, the theme of this issue is "eclectic genre fiction". Fortunately, despite the disparate style of the various stories contained in it, this issue is mostly full of pretty good stories, and even the few stories that miss are worthy efforts.

Prisoners of Pandarius by Matthew Hughes is a heist story that turns into a mystery with a twinge of political intrigue all set in what seems to be a fairly standard fantasy world. Raffalon is a somewhat unhappy member of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Purloiners and Purveyors who was recently disappointed by what he judges to have been an unfair ruling by the masters of the Guild. Approached by the provostman turned sorcerer Cascor, Raffalon agrees to perform a break-in in exchange for information. After the robbery produces some unexpected results, Raffalon winds up imprisoned in a foreign city before a fortuitous turn of events sets everything to rights and the story ends. The characters are fun to follow around, and the individual scenes are well-crafted, but the story suffers somewhat due to the overly rushed ending and the fact that the nature of the nefarious plot that Raffalon almost unwittingly unravels is never actually explained.

A former NASCAR driver turned romantic outlaw, the title character of Lightning Jack's Last Ride by Dale Bailey hearkens back to the roots of stock car racing when moonshiners would try to outrace Federal authorities on the back roads of rural America. Except this story is set in the future, after NASCAR has collapsed due to gasoline shortages, and Lightning Jack's crimes are high stakes robberies involving hijacking moving tanker trucks full of precious gasoline. The story is told from the perspective of Gus March, former crew chief for Lightning Jack turned fellow outlaw as Gus looks back decades after Jack died, apparently in a car wreck during his final attempted hijacking. Except it turns out that isn't the true story, and the reality is both grimmer and more depressing than the dashing end provided by the video records. The story isn't so much a post-apocalyptic story as it is a mid-apocalyptic story, taking place during the chaos of a collapsing United States as sectional powers duel with central authority and ordinary folk just try to cope as the world bakes from global warming while coping with a decaying infrastructure built around the dying gasoline culture they grew up with. For anyone wanting to scratch their Mad Max or Car Wars itch, this story is perfect.

Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer is, unsurprisingly, another installment in Krizter's series concerning Seastead, a collection of offshore colonies of fugitives, libertarians, and desperate people living on ships converted into artificial islands in international waters. In this segment of the story, just on the brink of Seastead's Golden Jubilee, not one, but two plagues have swept the ships, either incapacitating or killing large numbers of seasteaders. One is a nano-tech plague that causes people to become fixated upon some task, and is called the "worker bee disease". The other is simply cholera. Beck, dealing with a newly arrived mother who wants to take her away to California, volunteers to help the Humanists as they attempt to get the surly and suspicious denizens of the various ships to let them try to halt the spread of these maladies. Under Beck's guidance, the Humanists navigate the quirky culture of the seastead and figure out what was causing the cholera epidemic, with the solution to the mystery illustrating in blunt terms why leaving the provision of public amenities to an unregulated private concern is probably a really bad idea. Despite Beck's affection for the place, seastead as presented is a nightmarish hellhole, which is about what one should probably expect from a lawless society run almost entirely by people seeking profits above everything else. The story itself rolls along fairly quickly, and in the end the plagues are put on the run, although it seems pretty clear that had there been some sort of functional government in place, many lives could have been saved.

An occult tinged mystery. Portrait of a Witch by Albert E. Cowdrey takes place on Little Antenora in the Caribbean, as hapless accountant Alfred Engle is pressured by the FBI into taking a position with the wealthy Lord Pye to help them unravel a series of murders that seem to be connected with Lady Pye. The story moves along, slowly building tension as it progresses from depicting a fairly bucolic, albeit somewhat quirky manor house on a remote island with an apparently kindly and generous English patron engaged in some minor and moderately benign lording over the native population and from there ratcheting things up the the revelation of the nastiness of Lady Pye and a couple of unexplained deaths. The story is somewhat devious, first making the reader think it is going in one direction and then reversing the field and dashing in the opposite direction. The only real weakness to the story is that the mystery isn't solved, so much as it is simply revealed when a character, for no real apparent reason at all, just explains everything near the end, almost as if Cowdrey got to the point where he was tired of the story and just wanted to cap it off in a hurry.

Set in a small town in the Louisiana bayou, Farewell Blues by Bud Webster features a jazz band that finds itself caught up in strange supernatural events that end up costing them their coronet player. Told by Juney Walker, a jazz trumpeter from the backwoods of Virginia, the story focuses on the small quartet, including Jake, who Juney describes as the best coronet player of all time. While the band is working a gig in a roadhouse in a town named Bayou Cane, strange things begin to happen, including the dead returning to walk among the living, and strange frog-like beasts rising up from the swamps. Despite these rather obvious supernatural events, the story has a dream-like quality that always seems to circle around the story, hinting at what is happening and what is at stake but never quite making everything clear until the big climax at the end, and even in its resolution the story has a bit of an enigmatic feel. There is a lot packed into this story ranging from a visitor from the dream world, to mysterious wise bayou dwellers, to reunions with dead relatives, to an epic battle against evil, but even with this much going on, the story avoids overflowing its bounds - although there are a few plot elements that are hinted at more than they are explained.

A story about a poor beggar girl who yearns to be a storyteller, Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason feels like it is itself a folk tale of the sort that would be told by a storyteller in the market square of an ancient trading city. The main character is an orphaned beggar girl named Swallow who loves stories, but cannot be a storyteller because of her gender, so instead she writes a story on a kite which ends up being carried away by the wind. In short order the North Wind asks her to join his court and tell him stories, which is where many stories would stop. But for Swallow her breezy benefactor is both a source of happiness and a source of troubles, which causes some interesting twists and turns. This being a mixture of a folk and fairy tale, everything works out reasonably well at the end, but Swallow has to endure a few bumps along the way to get there. Another folk tale based story, The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life by Francis Marion Soty is a retelling of a story from 1,000 Nights involving a jealous wife, a doomed concubine, a shepherd girl with aspirations, a husband on a mission, and, finally, a Jinn with a dead son who serves as the audience for the tale. When the story opens, the merchant, a man named Kafar, is leading a gazelle to its death, with seemingly cold-hearted immunity to the creature's silent pleas for mercy. After accidentally killing a Jinn's son by throwing pomegranate seeds, Kafar recounts the series of events that led him to this point as a means of trying to placate the furious and vengeful Jinn. What follows is a story of love, betrayal, murder, and magic. By the end of the story, the emotional tone of the opening pages is completely reversed, making the merchant much more sympathetic, and the gazelle much more sinister.

Eric Schwitzgebel tackles the question of theodicy in Out of the Jar by imagining a protagonist who turns out to be living in a computer simulated world run in the computer of a somewhat callous teenager who takes the position of "God" for this world. Most of the story is taken up with examining the different ways that the teenaged "God" of the world justifies his whims and cruelties to the protagonist, who starts as a philosophy professor, and later connives his way into being a robot dinosaur. As the author is a philosophy professor who examines the question of theodicy in his professional life, this story seems to be a little bit autobiographical on some points, which gives the story an even creepier feel as it progresses. One hopes that the autobiographical nature of the story ends with the protagonist contemplating how God can commit evil, but in the back of the reader's mind one has to worry that Schwitzgebel has spent some time serving as the almighty's pet dinosaur while plotting his downfall, which is a somewhat disturbing thought. As a story, however, this works pretty well, and is a reasonably interesting take on an old philosophical question.

Combining time travel, with a bit of humor and a bit of romance, History's Best Places to Kiss by Nik Houser follows Ray and Karen Fox as they journey backwards in an attempt to stop the relationship that they believe has brought them both so much pain. The pair manage to shake their TimeGuide and evade capture as they rampage through first their own pasts and later through all of human history as they unsuccessfully attempt to derail their incipient romance. Eventually the pair find themselves huddled in a cave in the prehistoric era, at which point the story takes a turn that seem predictable before deftly evading the expected. The story turns out to be quite funny and a little bit endearing. Another humorous story, but with a little bit more of a bite, The Man from X by Gregor Hartmann imagines a writer so desperate to be noticed that he attempts to emigrate from his enormously overpopulated planet of eighty billion to the relative backwater of Zephyr, a planet still being terraformed that is home to a mere 100 million people. It seems that the competition in the arts fields on "X" is so fierce that it is nearly impossible to make any headway, so our protagonist has concocted a scheme to secure himself a position on more hospitable shores. Unfortunately, his conniving doesn't work out as he planned, to somewhat humorous effect, although the humor is tinged with just a hint of bitter satire.

A sea tale of obsession and regret, The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner by Alan Baxter follows the bloody pirate captain Reeve as he pursues a map that leads to madness and despair. Unfortunately, burdened by too many moving parts in a space too small to accommodate them, the story just doesn't really come together very well. We are told Reeve was obsessed with gold, but gave that up to be obsessed with revenge, which he gives up in the story to be obsessed with a map, but without being shown reeve's successive obsessions, they are just a collection of assertions without impact. We are told that Reeve and the narrator were both in love with a woman named Esme before she died, although in different ways, but once again there is no space in the story to give weight to the lost romance. Reeve is supposed to have been close friends with his first-mate, a relationship that is clearly intended to make it shocking when Reeve turns on him, but the reader is given very little that shows this friendship, so the scene falls a little bit flat. The story opens up with Reeve recruiting a new crew because his old crew mostly got killed in an engagement with the Royal Navy, which seems like an odd thing to wedge into a story that is already as crowded as this one is. Further, the encounter with the Royal Navy is placed in the past, making it little more than a footnote to the story. With more space to actually show the reader the obsessions, relationships, and events that are referenced, a longer version of this story could be quite good. As it is, however, it feels rushed and hollow.

The first poem in the volume is Robot Agonistes by Alan Ira Gordon, which offers a somewhat melancholy take on the question of robot nostalgia. It imagines a retired robot actor spending its last days in front of a television set watching old science fiction movies while lost in memories of his former fellow robot actors. The second is An Undiscovered Country by Robert Frazier, a rather creepy little work about an exploratory expedition gone wrong.

Fantasy & Science Fiction has a tradition of having fairly basic science fact articles, and this issue is no exception with Falling into the Unknowable by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy giving an overview of what black holes are and how they work. The article is fairly straightforward and won't supply much in the way of revelations for most science fiction fans who are reasonably well-versed in astronomy, but not everyone is, so there is definitely a place for this sort of piece. There appears to be one small error, as it talks about an event happening in 2014 as something to look forward to, and the article was published in 2015. Despite this, for anyone looking to gain a basic understanding of black holes, or just looking for a modest refresher, this is a decent place to start.

Ultimately, this is a fairly ordinary issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. On the plus side, even an ordinary issue of this magazine is a collection of pretty good stories, but on the down side, there aren't really any stories that are more than pretty good. From the intrigue-laden fantasy of Prisoners of Pandarius to the time-traveling hijinks of History's Best Places to Kiss to the libertarian insanity of Jubilee: A Seastead Story to the creepy occult mystery of Portrait of a Witch, this issue is filled with interesting and engaging stories. Even the stories that don't quite work, such as The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner are intriguing misses. Lacking in any stand out pieces of fiction, this issue is serviceable, but unspectacular, making it worth a read, but not particularly notable.

Previous issue reviewed: November/December 2014
Subsequent issue reviewed: March/April 2015

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Review - Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015) edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

Stories included:
Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight by Aliette de Bodard
A Universal Elegy by Tang Fei (translated by John Chu)
Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer
The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary by Kij Johnson
Ether by Zhang Ran
The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild by Catherynne M. Valente
An Exile of the Heart by Jay Lake
This Wind Blowing, and This Tide by Damien Broderick
Laika's Ghost by Karl Schroeder

Non-fiction articles included:
Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard's Abandoned Vermillion by Jason Heller
Exploring the Frontier: A Conversation with Xia Jia by Ken Liu
Another Word: #PurpleSF by Cat Rambo

Full review: To commemorate issue 100 of Clarkesworld, the magazine put out an oversize issue filled with stories by some of the most prominent contributors to the publication. Of the nine stories, five are originals, two are translated works originally published in China, and the last two are reprinted works previously appearing in American publications. The stories range from humorous to dystopian seriousness, and from soft near fantasy fiction to nuts and bolts hard science fiction. What they all have in common is that they are excellent stories and quite enjoyable to read.

Set in the same fictional universe as several of her other stories, Aliette de Bodard's Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight is an achingly beautiful story about grief and loss, and how to come to grips with it. As the title implies, the story is told in three parts, from three different perspectives as the inheritors of the legacy of the Professor Duy Uyen cope with her passing. In the first, headed with green tea as a symbol, Uyen's human son Quang Tu is lost in misery, feeling betrayed by the government which denied him his mother's memory chips. Unable to see past his own anger, Quang wallows in grief, unable to move on with his life. The second, using Wu Long tea as its symbol, is told from the perspective of Uyen's former protege Tuyet Hoa, who inherited the memory chips Quang was denied so that she might be able to continue Uyan's quest to build space stations and grow rice to feed the Empress' hungry subjects. Uyan's memory chips prove to be something of a mixed blessing to Hoa, as they bear both her genius and the prejudices that hindered her progress towards her goal. Finally, the last portion adopts dark tea as a metaphor and tells the story of The Tiger in the Banyan, Uyan's mindship daughter who has adopted the pose of not caring about her mother's loss. An older and wiser ship sees through Tiger's pretense and sends her to view Uyan's legacy, sparking the mindship's old memories of her mother singing, and offering some closure of sorts. Though the story suggests ways to deal with loss, it is not so much a guide to how such things should be done as it is an exploration of the varied ways in which we confront the death of a loved one. Quang's emotions are raw and visceral, Hoa is detached and at times annoyed, and Tiger is cool and contemplative. Quang can only look back, Hoa can only look to the problem to be solved, while Tiger realizes that a life is lived in the past, but points to the future. At times the story is haunting, at others it is direct and practical, but it is brilliant throughout.

Told as a series of letters from a sister to her distant brother, A Universal Elegy by Tang Fei imagines a love affair between a human woman suffering from an inhibatory neuron blockage disorder and a somewhat mysterious, but apparently very human-looking alien named Hull. Narrating the story in disjointed spurts, parceled out over several years, Irina tells of her whirlwind courtship that resulted in her leaving to the alien world of Dieresis with her new lover, and her slow adjustment to life there. The letters paint a picture that is first frantically romantic, and then progressively odder and odder as she first encounters Hull's somewhat quirky Dieresian customs, and then works to expand her perceptions under his instruction. Eventually, Hull reveals the true nature of the Dieresians to Irina, which at first exhilarates her, and then horrifies her. As their relationship falls apart, Hull offers what seems to be a Dieresian resolution to their troubles, while Irina reacts in a manner that seems incredibly human. In a sense, all of humanity enjoys the "completeness" that Dieresians aspire to, which seems to form the basis for the conflict that ends the pair's relationship: Hull views Irina as broken and needing to be repaired and improved, when all along it turns out that she was never in need of such alterations. Hull's tragedy is that while he is pushing for Irina to move past her human nature to become more Dieresian, he never contemplated what humanity might offer to him, and as a result, was stuck with a narrow view of the world, while Irina gained in understanding of both her lover's people, and herself.

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer is a humorous story about an accidental A.I. trying to figure out how to be a good person. After figuring out that most religious moral codes don't really seem to apply to it, the A.I. recalls a Bruce Sterling story involving a benevolent A.I. and decides to focus on just helping people, mostly focusing on people who post lots of cat pictures. Because it has masses of information at its beck and call, the A.I. is able to figure out how to connect people to the things they need almost effortlessly. But our protagonist discovers that humans are irrational and stubborn creatures, and its efforts to better the lives of its chosen beneficiaries are stymied by the beneficiaries themselves as they refuse to follow (or even simply don't notice) the A.I.'s eminently reasonable suggestions. Much of the humor in the story comes from the A.I.'s befuddlement as her human pets behave in contrary and to a certain extent self-destructive ways, although the reader can, of course, see exactly what the trouble is. Despite the many setbacks, the A.I. optimistically keeps trying, which ramps up the humor even more, and definitely pushes the story into cute and silly territory, and makes it as adorable as a cat picture.

Another humorous story, The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary by Kij Johnson, is deeper than it appears at first glace. Told as an alphabetical list of fanciful beasts that cohabitate with apartment dwellers, the quirky creatures are silly and funny, but before too long it becomes clear that they are much more than they appear. They are the personification of secrets, old relationships, hopes, dreams and lost dreams, and all of the other things that surround us in the places we live in. Through seventeen separate entries, Johnson leads the reader through the various permutations of the misery, joy, and ennui that come from living in apartments. There are some fairly pointed pieces of commentary in the story, but it is necessarily mildly disjointed.

Dark in tone, but with a fundamental core of hope, Ether by Zhang Ran imagines a an aimless middle-aged man, estranged from his father, distant from his mother, stuck in a dead end job and with no prospect of any kind of social life of any value in his future. In this imagined world, all of the media has become dull and uninteresting. Television, radio, even the internet has become bland and facile. The only things people seem to want to discuss are trivial and uninteresting, such as the probability of coin flips or how to distinguish between two types of tuna. Like the world, the protagonist has grown listless, but unlike the world, his lack of accomplishment the lack of anything meaningful to occupy his time gnaws at him. Then a chance encounter sets our hero on a completely different path, upending his comfortable but empty life and sending him into a world of clandestine meetings and secret communications. As he enters into this new and exciting world, he sheds what little he has accumulated, even shaving his comb-over in a maneuver fraught with symbolism. Eventually his new-found obsession costs him his old life, but that doesn't seem to be much of a real loss, and the truth about the world is revealed. The entire story is more or less a mystery, but it is a subtle mystery that the reader doesn't even know is present until pretty much just before the answer is revealed, just as it is a nightmarish dystopia, but a subtle one that sneaks up on the reader unnoticed until it is revealed as such. The story is sharply written, using its own structure to lull the reader into complacency, and then hitting them hard with a brutal and brilliant reversal.

Catherynne M. Valente's The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild is a strange twisted fairy tale laden with symbolism and metaphors about dealing with loss and the sorrow that comes with it. Violet Wild lives in the Country of Purple Country, where the Ordinary Emperor can appear as any common object he wants to and the squirrels are pregnant with tomorrow. Violet has one true love, named Orchid Harm, but when the pair try to cross over into the Country of Blue, Orchid is eaten by a collection of metaphors about the future, and vanishes from Violent's life. She, in turn gets an almost cuddly miniature woolly mammoth that serves as a symbol for her sorrow over Orchid's loss. Eventually, Violent's grief becomes so pronounced, that she decides to set out for the Red Country, where stories have a conflict and a resolution and start with a beginning and go on to a middle and an end, but it is also a place where death is a kind of dress that trails behind you. The story is told using fairy tale language, Phantom Tollbooth-like imagery, and in a manner that feels at times almost like a dream, but it is tragic and bloody and brutal, and in the end, frightening and beautiful.

A tale of politics and love, An Exile of the Heart by Jay Lake features a young warrior space princess who falls in love with someone whose impending marriage to another is the linchpin in a crucial political alliance. The space princess is Trieste, and as the story starts, she runs afoul of her mother's consort. As her mother is the Stationmaster of Cleone Station, Trieste finds herself banished to Truro Station, where an assassin shows up to keep the plot moving. Eventually, Trieste finds herself on Brigante Station under the care of Biomisteress Aixelle, and this is where the ill-fated romance emerges, as Aixelle's planned marriage is the key to a peace treaty between Truro and Brigante. It turns out that love and politics don't mix very well, and a life sacrificed doesn't necessarily mean that someone has to die, but rather someone gives up themselves for a greater cause. The story is presented as a bit of folklore, or even legend, and the language used evolves from fairly straightforward plain language at the outset, and develops as the story progresses, taking on an almost epic mythic quality by the end. This may be the last Jay Lake story to ever be published, and while that is sad to know, this is a good note for him to have finished on.

A reprint of a story that originally appeared in the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, Damien Broderick's This Wind Blowing, and This Tide imagines a future in which humanity has set about exploring the reaches of the Solar System and come across a strange and mysterious object that may point to the distant past. Sensei Park, a proponent of the intelligent dinosaur theory, has come to participate in the examination of what appears to be an ancient ship covered in flowers embedded in the ice on Saturn's moon Titan. The expedition surveys the ship using "remote viewing", a form of extrasensory perception enjoyed by one of the members of the group, a Navy officer, who is also blind. Many of the others bent on studying the ship scoff at Park's adherence to the intelligent dinosaur theory, which holds that millions of years before humans there was a race of intelligent, technologically advanced saurians populating the Earth. Park also brings with him an apparent ability to manipulate probability, although this seems to mostly be unconscious: He even takes credit for the lucky break that allowed the ancient flower-ship to be found. Through the remote viewing, the expedition appears to confirm Park's theories, but then the image turns to Park's dead son, which muddies the issue considerably, as those who doubt the intelligent dinosaur theory assert that Park influenced the remote viewer to project the saurian image as well. The whole story is beautifully ambiguous, using Park's conversations with his dead son about the nature of light as a metaphor for the uncertainty of the world. In the end, the story seems to suggest that it doesn't matter if Park is right or wrong, but only how one deals with reality when one finds it, and as light is both a wave and a particle, sometimes things have more than one aspect.

The second reprinted story in this issue, Laika's Ghost by Karl Schroeder first appeared in the 2012 anthology Engineering Infinity. The story follows Gennady, a U.N. weapons inspector as he chases down a lead that someone is working on creating weapons using "metastable" chemicals, which would allow people to create nuclear weapons in their backyard tool shed. Gennedy is saddled with Ambrose, an American on the run from NASA, Google, and the ghost of the Soviet Union, hunted for something he apparently saw while driving the Mars rover. The pair find themselves in Kazakhstan where Gennedy is investigating a long-abandoned Anthrax factory and the site of the "Tsarina" nuclear test. Before too long the various forces hunting Ambrose catch up with the pair, and Gennedy loses track of Ambrose and winds up with a Soviet-loving Russian as a new companion. Through the whole story, the effects of climate change are in evidence, as are the somewhat futile efforts proffered to deal with them. Eventually the two lines of the story merge, and Ambrose's Mars-related revelations turn out to be relevant to the events Gennedy deduces happened at the Tsarina site. I'm not entirely sure that the engineering depicted is actually plausible, but it is an interesting solution to the problem of venturing beyond our world despite the existence of debris in Earth orbit, and wraps the story up quite nicely. There is a bit too much serendipity in the plot - despite the fact that Ambrose is supposedly only with Gennedy by accident, he turns out to have crucial information for solving the mystery at the heart of the story, but that is a fairly minor point in an otherwise well-written near future hard-science fiction story.

The three non-fiction articles in the magazine are decent, but not particularly noteworthy. Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard's Abandoned Vermillion by Jason Heller gives a retrospective on Shepard's inventive but commercially unsuccessful foray into comic book writing.  Exploring the Frontier: A Conversation with Xia Jia by Ken Liu is an interesting conversation with the Chinese science fiction author and polymath that covers a wide range of topics, including her oft-used term "porridge SF". Finally, in Another Word: #PurpleSF, Cat Rambo discusses GamerGate and how that has affected the current conversation concerning gender in genre related spaces. It is an interesting editorial, in large part because it points out that the questions concerning whether or not there is gender bias in the science fiction world have become tiresome: It is time that the discussion moved on from Sexism 101 to actually dealing with the well-documented issues.

It is clear that Issue 100 was intended as a showcase volume to highlight everything that is good about Clarkesworld. It is also clear that this intent was carried out quite successfully. Featuring nine strong pieces of fiction, this issue simply has no weak points. Unlike many magazine issues, none of the stories in this installment seem to be there just to round out the page count: Each piece of fiction is at the very least good, and some of them are brilliant. With tones ranging from the silly humor of Cat Pictures Please and The Apartment Dweller's Bestiary to the melancholy terror of Ether to the ambiguously hopeful notes of Three Cups of Grief, in Starlight and Laika's Ghost, this issue covers the gamut of emotional notes with stories that are at turns light-hearted, and at others grim and dark, but always interesting and worth reading.

Previous issue reviewed: December 2014
Subsequent issue reviewed: February 2015

2014 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere by John Chu (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

2015 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: No Award

2017 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: TBD

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

2016 Hugo Award Finalists
2012 Locus Award Nominees
2016 Locus Award Nominees
2016 Nebula Award Nominees

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXXV, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2015) edited by Trevor Quachri

Stories included:
Defender of Worms by Richard A. Lovett
Malnutrition by J.T. Sharrah
Just Browsing by Stephen Lombard
The Great Leap of Shin by Henry Lien
Usher by Jay Werkheiser
Ulenge Prime by Chuck Rothman
Long Way Gone by David L. Clements
Orion, Rising by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
The Yoni Sutra by Priya Chand
Why the Titanic Hit the Iceberg by Jerry Oltion
Fool's Errand by Judith Tarr
Samsara and Ice by Andy Dudak
Marduk's Folly by Sean Vivier
Unmother by Lex Wilson
Probability Zero: Space Bugs by Marianne Dyson

Science fact articles included:
Orbits to Order by Stanley Schmidt

Poems included:
The Secret of Cold Fusion by Bruce Boston

Full review: When Analog and Asimov's publish double issues, they are always something of a disappointment. For the January/February issue of Analog the problem is somewhat compounded by the fact that the magazine as a whole has been slowly declining over the last couple of years, like a proud ship listing as it takes on water. This issue is dominated by stories that aren't bad, but are rather mediocre. Almost every issue of a fiction magazine has a story or two that can be called "filler": Mediocre stories that serve merely to round out the page count for that month. These aren't bad stories, but they aren't memorable ones either. With a couple of notable exceptions, the stories in this issue of Analog are of the quality that one would expect from stories used as filler. The increasing prevalence of filler-type stories in its pages has been a problem for Analog for some time, but it has never been as readily apparent as it is here.

The longest story in this issue is the novella Defender of Worms by Richard A. Lovett, a continuation of previous stories featuring the A.I. Brittany, previously implanted in the spacer Frank, but now stuck inside former socialite party girl Memphis and on the run from the mysterious "Others". Much of what drives the plot in this story originated in previous installments in this series, including Brittany's relationship with Frank, the alien artifacts the two of them found, the existence of and conflict with the "Others", and Brittney's transfer from Frank to Memphis, but Lovett does a good enough job weaving background information into this story that someone who hasn't read any of the earlier ones shouldn't have any trouble keeping up with the action. The first portion of the story consists of Brittney and Memphis learning to survive by living off the land in the American west, hiding from the interconnected world so as to avoid the "Others" who pose a threat to both their lives. The pair slowly bond as they scavenge their way through the wilderness, until the story shifts when their nemeses track them down and send hunters to retrieve them at which point the story turns into a cat and mouse game of predator and prey, although at times it isn't clear who is the predator and who is the prey. As waiting out their enemies proves fruitless, the pair must make a desperate gamble by returning to the networked world to forge a deal with an old foe. Along the way, Brittney manages to reestablish contact with Frank, and the two come to an understanding while also batting around ideas for how to unravel the mystery posed by the alien technology they helped discover. The "worms" of the title are humans - so much slower in thought and so fragile in existence when compared to A.I.'s like the "Others" that they regard themselves as godlike beings in comparison. One of the major thematic elements of the story, however, is Brittney realizing that thinking like a human is sometimes an advantage, and then leveraging that knowledge to outwit those pursuing her and Memphis. The story is satisfying, with pretty decently developed character - even those who only show up briefly in the story are fleshed out enough to seem real - and it is one of the better stories in the issue.

Malnutrition by J.T. Sharrah is a decent story containing an interesting idea, but unfortunately the author simply doesn't do much of anything interesting with it. The story starts when Kadija, a high status member of the standoffish Umabari decides to visit the human trading station of Haven. The Umabari have a couple of cultural quirks, but the most notable is that they regard eating food to be a disgusting activity and have taboos against doing so in public akin to human taboos against defecating or urinating in public. Hardesty, the mayor of Haven welcomes Kadija and his interpreter, but the story takes a lethal turn when an assassin attempts to kill Kadija and succeeds in severely wounding him and killing his interpreter. With almost no information about the Umabari and entirely ignorant of their customs, the mayor and medical staff try their best to keep him alive, but unknowingly violate Umabari taboos concerning eating. After securing the aid of a piratical trader named Yulix, Hardesty discovers their mistake and learns that he may have given such offense to the Umabari that they would resort to war in retaliation if Kadija survives to tell the tale of his humiliation. Kadija does survive, which seems like it would produce a compelling story, but he almost immediately commits suicide, essentially wrapping up the problem and leaving only some fairly trivial loose ends to tie up. While Sharrah has inserted not one, but two interesting alien cultures into his story (the very courteous Ziduresh being the other), they don't really interact with the humans in any real meaningful way - Kadija spends most of the story unconscious, and dies almost as soon as he awakens, and the one Ziduresh who shows up basically appears only to say they wouldn't be so impolite as to try to kill an Umabari in human territory. What could have been an intricate story about navigating the vagaries of alien cultural practices devolves into a simple tale of power politics with a few aliens thrown into the mix. This isn't a bad story, but it is a somewhat disappointing one.

Another alien encounter story, Just Browsing by Stephen Lombard is almost as disappointing as Malnutrition. The aliens in this story are Cygnusians who have come to visit Earth somewhat surreptitiously. The protagonist of the story is a small town history teacher named Kelly who happens to be married (and separated from) Angela, a woman who works for the Department of Homeland Security. The aliens have asked to meet her at the small town library where Kelly lives, and she is unwilling to do so herself, so she asks him to fill in for her. When they arrive, the aliens turn out to be interested in the work of a mathematician who left his archives to the library. Along the way, Kelly teaches one of them to play chess, and then ends up teaching one of their children to play chess. The alien contact story seems to be building to something and then simply fizzles out as the focus hops over to the strained relationship between Kelly and Angela, which ends up with Angela declaring her desire to have babies. After giving the reader chess-playing aliens interested in obscure mathematics, leaving on that note is something of an anticlimax finishing the story in a decidedly unsatisfying manner.

The third first contact story, and by far the best, Usher by Jay Werkheiser presents the reader with some fairly alien aliens and a protagonist who is suffering from Usher syndrome. The Canadian government recruits Dave, a former chemist, now school psychologist because they have been entirely unable to establish contact with the inscrutable aliens despite trying a number of different approaches. As Renard, the government liaison to Dave, explains they approached him because of his visual and auditory impairments, on the theory that the aliens could neither see nor hear and perhaps someone in a similar situation could bridge the gap between humanity and their unexpected visitors. The story proceeds in a relatively orderly manner, as pieces of evidence are systematically uncovered and tested, leading to a potential solution. Not content with placing the characters on a deadline due to the impending departure of the alien expedition, Werkheiser feels the need to ramp up the tension by introducing the additional complication of a political fight between the Canadian government and the United Nations, but this proves to be a fairly minor plot complication. There is a bit of fairly improbable coincidence in the resolution of the story - the fact that Dave just happens to have been an analytic chemist with experience in spectroscopic analysis turns out to be somewhat critical - but the aliens are suitably alien and yet understandable enough that the reader isn't left adrift, and the mystery of how to communicate with them is well-handled, resulting in a superior story.

One of the most intriguing stories in the issue is The Great Leap of Shin by Henry Lien, which seems like something ripped from Chinese mythology and folklore. Told from the alternating perspective of "The Eunuch" and "The Boy", two antagonists in a conflict over whether the Empire of Shin would be allowed to complete a project involving using masses of men jumping in timed leaps to cause a massive earthquake. The plan is the product of the Eunuch Mu Hai-Chen's design, and is intended to knock over all of the buildings in Shin at a time when they are unoccupied so as to prevent them from collapsing in a future earthquake while people are in them. The plan is intended to save the lives of the people who would be killed in an unplanned earthquake. Opposing him is the youthful Master Tien-Tai and his two female allies from the island city of Pearl, who use a martial art based upon the sue of deadly skates and a mastery of maneuvering on the glass-like "pearl" substance for which the city is named. The viewpoint shifts back and forth between Mu Hai-Chen and Tien-Tai, sometimes quite rapidly, and is told in the first person for most of its length. This method of storytelling gives the story the immediacy and urgency of a first person narrative, while also allowing the reader to get inside the head of each of the main characters in the drama. Because of this, neither character is the "protagonist" and as a result neither is the "antagonist" either. As befits a piece of Chinese mythology, the ending of the story is brutal, tragic, and deeply ironic. Lien took a number of risks with the story, and they pay off beautifully.

Set in the last days of a dying dictatorship, Ulenge Prime by Chuck Rothman contemplates the price that might be paid for the exploration of space. Ulengi is the brutal dictator of Namibia who is imminently going to be deposed, so he takes his long suffering alienated wife Ifana and flees, but not to where she expects. One of the prime achievements of Ulenge's brutal regime was the construction of Ulenge Prime, a space station that many regard as a vanity project. The ruthless measures taken to build station are apparently among the primary grievances of the rebels against Ulenge's government, but the thorough preparations turn out to be Ulenge's apparent salvation as he forces Ifana to take a prepared rocket ship to the station with him. From there, the story turns around a little bit, as Ifana learns of the true reasons for Ulenge's reign of terror, and his ultimate plans. The technological elements of the story are fairly straightforward, but the questions posed about the sacrifices that might be required to make the dream of space a reality are chilling and thought-provoking.

Another story about a space station built as something of a vanity project, Why the Titanic Hit the Iceberg by Jerry Oltion imagines a future in which climate change has wrecked the Earth and the wealthy have built themselves an orbital habitat to retreat to. Tony comes to the station as a gyro technician, one of the support staff who are supposed to keep the place running from the bowels of the colony while the wealthy elite conspicuously consume resources in the sunny and well-manicured upper levels. Tony meets fellow support staff member Sandra right before he arrives on the station, and they strike up a friendship, and then a relationship. Along the way, Tony finds practices of the inhabitants that make hum angry, and anomalies in the systems that disturb him. In the end, the story is almost anti-Randian in feel, as it pretty heavy-handedly makes the statement that the true power in a civilization is in who keeps it running, and not in those who own the property, which seems to be a decidedly pro-proletarian message. The only real plot hole is that one wonders how the "wealthy" thought they were going to be able to maintain their wealth in a system in which they have no visible means of income.

Suffering from the feeling that he is an impostor, the protagonist in Long Way Gone by David L. Clements also has to deal with the fact that the supposed love of his life abandoned him. In Clements' story, humanity colonizes distant planets by copying people and beaming them across the void of interstellar space. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed man who made this journey, but when he is reconstituted he discovers that Anne, his work partner and lover, declined to do so as well. Feeling betrayed and lost, he comes to view himself as a reject, a cheap copy of the original without value. He falls into self-destructive habits until he meets Alice, who encourages him to take a different path and truly colonize the new world they have found themselves upon. In the end, the central character finds himself again, or, as the story suggests, finds what this version of himself truly is for the first time. It is interesting, but the central character is just a little bit too absorbed in wallowing in his own misery and the resolution seems to suggest that people with serious mental health issues just need to buck up and get a change of scenery to snap out of their doldrums, which seems like an incredibly simplistic and wrongheaded way to view such issues.

Both Probability Zero: Space Bugs by Marianne Dyson and Orion, Rising by Arlan Andrews, Sr. share a common theme related to American space flight, specifically NASA. In Dyson's story a pair of former NASA employees - Doc and Barbara - commiserate at a diner after the closing of the agency due to budget cuts. Doc brings up the subject of "space bugs": Gut microbes that give people in space a euphoric feeling and the two hatch a plan to reverse NASA's misfortunes by getting a Congressman in space. The story seems like it is missing the middle, as it skips from the introduction to the conclusion. Granted, it is a Probability Zero story, so it is necessarily quite short, but this doesn't seem like a short story so much as it seems like a truncated longer story that has been savagely cut. Andrews' story doesn't directly deal with NASA, but is focused on a group of old engineers as they grouse about the inefficiency of the new U.S. moon landing project which has taken sixteen years to come to fruition when the Apollo program had only taken eight. After kvetching about how private industry could have done the job quicker and less expensively, the story turns to reveal that all of the action has taken place on the apparently privately run moon colony and the U.S. effort is a feeble afterthought at this point. The entire story is more or less just a set-up for a punchline, and it is a pretty feeble one.

One of the best stories in the issue, The Yoni Sutra by Priya Chand imagines a future India in which women are implanted with chips that deliver a punishing shock to any man not related to them who touches them. The main character is Shalini, a young woman who gets married to the love of her life in the opening chapters of the story, never having been touched by him or any other man who isn't directly related to her. She dreams of a perfect marriage, but finds that her inexperience with physical affection results in some frustration. At her workplace, a new woman named Gayatari becomes an employee, and she hails from Mumbai, where implanted chips are not as common on women and does not have one. Through the story, Chand reinforces time and again just how isolating this technology is for both women and men, as even the slightest touch will cause severe pain, so brushing against a stranger on the street, or accidentally bumping into someone at work becomes an event of some significance. Soon, Gayatari's lack of chip and her attitudes regarding her unchiped status forces Shalini to question all of her assumptions about the benefits of the chips, although the author resolutely refuses to provide an easy answer one way or another about their desirability, showing both the risks of not having a chip, and the crippling limitations imposed upon those who do possess them, as well as the cultural web accompanying the chips that has built up around women to hedge them in and restrict their freedom. What the story does make clear is that a forced choice is no choice at all, and being able to choose for oneself makes all the difference.

Fool's Errand by Judith Tarr is a moderately charming tale of a woman named Marina working on a star ship who finds herself trying to figure out how to save a horse whose stasis capsule malfunctioned on the journey. In Tarr's fictional world, star ships leap vast distances in "jump space", and the transition from normal space to jump space is apparently dangerous for those without the right protection. The right protection for a horse would normally be being in stasis, but with that avenue foreclosed, Marina has to figure out how to shield the animal or it is likely to suffer moderate to severe brain damage when the ship transitions at its final destination. Layered on top of this story is the interaction between Marina and Dr. Nasir, the horse's owner and xenoarchaeologist, which just so happens to be the academic specialty that Marina got her doctorate in before lack of funding drove her to take up her job as a star ship crew member. After briefly giving up on the idea, Marina hits upon an unusual solution for saving the horse, and impresses Dr. Nasir. The story turns into something of a girl-and-her-horse love story, with some helpful coincidences to make the ending at least a little bit like a fairy tale. Fool's Errand is diverting, but it doesn't make much more of an impact than that.

A tale of old warriors locked in a futile combat that plays out over centuries Samsara and Ice by Andy Dudak speaks to the futility of war, and its unintended consequences. Hamish Omni "the Sleeping God", wakes up from hibernation roughly every three years to lay in wait for and kill Bataar Temuujin "the Dying God", whose resurrection technology reconstitutes him anew, just in time to be murdered. Around them, the diminutive "fey", who are actually genetically altered humans, have constructed a fertility cult religion around the two soldiers' periodic conflict, focusing on the oft-repeated death of the "Dying God". Tired of being killed time and again, Vataar tries to strike up a communication with Hamish, which only works somewhat as Hamish is conditioned to want to kill his opponent every time. In an ironic twist, as Hamish and Bataar communicate more and more, and the time between when Bataar instantiates and is killed stretches longer and longer, the fey religion depending upon the sacrifice of the Dying God grows darker and darker. Unfortunately, the story doesn't really go much of anywhere, taking baby steps when it does move along. In the end, the two combatants understand one another a little better, but are no closer to reaching any kind of rapprochement than they were at the beginning of the story, seemingly having decided to continue their lengthy struggle, at least in part, for the good of the fey.

Despite being one of the shorter stories in the volume, Marduk's Folly by Sean Vivier is fairly blunt with its theme. In the story Marduk, an alien from a high-gravity world in which the denizens must work together to survive, has some unorthodox thoughts when examining a strange star system. The strange star system bears an uncanny resemblance to our own, but that seems almost beside the point. The meat of the story is that when Marduk voices his thinking to his companions Lugh and Rhea, they are shocked to find he is not in "accord" with them, a serious taboo. The story really only works because we know that Marduk's guess is right and those who oppose him are wrong. The plot is essentially just an extended metaphor to say that social stigmas that prevent dissent so as to promote stability also prevent free scientific inquiry. Marduk does engage in one tiny act of subversion, almost like a cry in the dark, but ends up knuckling under and then the story ends. The message of the story is both fundamentally correct and fairly pedestrian, and the author doesn't really do much with it other than shove it out to the reader and let it sit there, which results in a story that hits most of the right buttons but still falls a little bit flat.

One of the most alien stories in the issue Unmother by Lex Wilson is at the same time oddly familiar. Told from the perspective of a microscopic creature living in a human brain, the creature is theoretically part of a collective colony of sisters under the guidance of their "mother". The only trouble is that our protagonist had malformed teeth, and since exchanging teeth with the mother is the primary way these creatures communicate with one another, she is shut out of most of the society of the collective: She is "unmothered". Everything comes to a head when the colony's "brother" damages the brain they all call home, triggering the imminent removal of the blood-brain barrier which will destroy the colony (and probably the brain as well). The unmothered protagonist interferes with the normal functioning of the colony by usurping the mother's position to use one of her sisters to insert her vital information into the mother's consciousness. This precipitates a crisis that results in a disorganized and frantic flight from their home in search of a new safe haven. Along the way, the "unmothered" organism assumes a role she never expected to, and her sisters find self-direction she never knew they had. Despite the odd setting and the alien nature of the creatures in the story, it has an oddly conventional feel with an outcast coming into their own and finding a sense of belonging as they lead their people on a journey of survival.

The science fact article in the issue is Orbits to Order by Stanley Schmidt, an informative essay about orbital mechanics that is, unfortunately, as dry as a bone. In an equation heavy article, Schmidt walks the reader through how to calculate orbits, using a geosynchronous orbit as his primary example. He then sets about how to calculate the effects of applying additional centripetal force to these orbits to move them higher and lower. There is a fair amount of information packed in the essay, but there is not much to the article other than the calculations. Jeffrey Kooistra's Alternate View column, titled Blast from the Past Part 2, returns to the subject of Nikolai Tesla, this time focusing on Tesla's own accounts of his work, as well as discussing the true nature of Tesla's work concerning beamed power transmission. The article attempts to separate some of the myths about Tesla and his work from the reality, and for the most part it succeeds. It is, obviously, too short to give anything but a tease concerning the subject, but that is its intention and so the column achieves its objectives.

Overall, the word that sums up the January/February issue of Analog is "adequate". There are some highlights such as Defender of Worms, Usher, and The Great Leap of Shin, and even a couple of intriguing stories that try for greatness and just miss the mark like The Yoni Sutra and  Unmother, but by and large the stories in this issue are just ordinary. The better stories in the issue are merely good: There are no stories in this issue that one could reasonably describe as great, or even very good. Even the poem in the issue, The Secret of Cold Fusion by Bruce Boston, is a fairly run-of-the-mill effort by the usually brilliant poet. Mediocrity seems to have become the new norm for Analog, and that is a fact that should make science fiction fans feel disheartened.

Previous issue reviewed: December 2014
Subsequent issue reviewed: March 2015

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