Friday, September 27, 2013

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2001




A pretty good issue, clearly above the average.

Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's • novella by Adam-Troy Castro
A veteran of the early days of the building of the moon colony returns to the moon, already very urban and nothing like a frontier anymore. He tries to find an old couple the old generation of the works in the moon used to know and spend nice Sunday afternoons with. They had a nice little farm with a beautiful grassy lawn with a friendly dog. There is no record at all anywhere that they ever even existed. Was he out of his mind and imagined it all? A very good story which approaches fantasy. ****
Elsewhere • [Common Universe] • novelette by Pauline Ashwell
A some sort of future operation which is terraforming an alien planet uses time travel not only to speed up the terraforming, but to snatch people from the past to work on the project. A young and bright girl from some sort of Chinese scientific work camp from the 23rd or so century is drafted. After some adjusting, she takes up a project of own. A pretty good and well written story. ***½
A Star in the East • shortstory by Laurence M. Janifer
A man has hidden a bomb at a casino. The bomb will explode an hour after his heart stops beating. When he is dying at the age of 112, he asks a friend that the bomb would be made inactive. And in secret. Not so easy when the bomb is in the casino’s president’s office. A short, fairly simple story without much of a point. I didn’t really get it at all. Was it meant as a parody of something? **
Spaceships • shortstory by Michael A. Burstein
In a far far future humans have evolved beyond matter. One human (or some sort of energy being which used to be human millennia ago) has a collection of authentic space ships from the human history. Another former human comes to visit him – for the first time in eons. A pretty good and well written story. ***+

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