The October (& November) issue of Asimov's (ISSN 1065 2698, 192pp) is a Double Issue, filled with returning regulars and a couple of assured debuts.
Ted Kosmatka
'Blood Dauber' marks Ted Kosmatka's fifth appearance, and the first by his collaborator Michael Poore. Bell is a man whose life is gradually going down the toilet -- he loves his job as a zoo-keeper but it doesn't pay enough for him and his girlfriend to live, and their relationship is gradually unraveling. He's put in charge of the convicts who are working off their community sentences when he finds a mysterious insect amongst a batch of fruit. The authors highlight how much human behaviour reflects that of the animal kingdom in an outstanding story.
Heather Lindsley's debut 'Where the Time Goes' deftly crosses the plot of John Varley's 'Air Raid' with Ursula K. le Guin's 1979 'Where Does the Time Go?' Two itinerant temporal salvagers travel back to 1983 to recover wasted time by snipping it out of people's lives. But the salvagers find that one of their victims isn't frozen as she should be. Highly Recommended.
'Wife-Stealing Time' sees R. Garcia y Robertson return to Barsoom. This time SinBad gets involved with an adulterous young bride hiding out in the bush, while beneath Barsoom's twin moons the slavers hunt for prey. Robertson does a fine job of meshing a Golden-Age pulp setting with advanced mores and sympathetic characters.
Damien Broderick
Damien Broderick's 'Flowers of Asphodel' pays open homage to Roger Zelazny, but he isn't the Master, and for a long time clarity is obscured by metaphor, until finally, belatedly, the reader is allowed to see the story clearly. Broderick, like Vernor Vinge in the 1990s in an 'overnight success' whose career goes back to the 1960s, and like Vinge he has coined terminology that has anonymously entered the SF lexicon. For all the initial difficulty making sense of the narrative it's a fine story and is Highly Recommended.
In Ian Creasey's 'Erosion,' a man about to head off to a colony world walks along what's left of the North Yorkshire coast and finds the augmentations designed to allow his survival on the colony tested to the limit. The plot is slight, and what tension there is undermined by the first-person narrative.
If Creasey's story is cool almost to bloodlessness, Elissa Malcohn returns after a twenty-three year absence with the fizzing 'Flotsam,' which is all Latino passion and idealism. Mercedes has been haunted by her failure to rescue a suffering mer-child for over thirty years when she is finally allowed a chance of redemption. The intensity of the writing makes the story punch above its weight.
Robert Reed
Robert Reed's 'Before My Last Breath' tells of the story of a fossil find that rewrites humanity's view of its place in the cosmos. By writing from multiple points of view, culminating in the alien's burial scene, Reed not only far surpasses his usual standard, but also provides a plausible answer to Fermi's Paradox. Outstanding.
In 'The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter' by Christopher Barzak, Sylvie can not only see ghosts, but she can make them visible so that others, such as her father, can capture them with a photograph. Highly Recommended.
Nancy Kress
'Deadly Sins' marks the fourth appearance of the year by Nancy Kress, whose contributions alternate between major novella (this is the third year in succession that she's placed one with the magazine -- the previous two won Nebula and Hugo Awards respectively, so editor Sheila Williams clearly has her finger on the pulse of what readers want) or short-short story. In this brief piece a woman confesses to murder to her AI interrogator - but the question she won't answer is why she's done it.
Concluding the issue is William Barton's 'The Sea of Dreams,' which marks the return of lizard-skinnd quasi-immortal Mister Zed and his AI paramour Ylva, who last appeared in 'Age of the Quiet Sun.' A stranded spacecraft provides the gateway to the first of a series of alternate universes. Like Robertson, Barton is intent on retro-fitting his pulp childhood with adult sensibilities, but he doesn't have quite the lightness of touch to carry it off.
The issue isn't a classic, but is full of solid, enjoyable stories scattered with two or three outstanding contributions.
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