Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2019

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Rating: 3/5 Stars

A special memorial issue celebrating the recently departed Gardner Dozois, this issue contains some interesting stories, including a memorable one by Gardner Dozois and others by Greg Egan, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Zhao Haihong, Kofi Nyameye and Allen M. Steele.

• “The Peacemaker” by Gardner Dozois: a thoughtful and disturbing tale set in a future where the seas have risen relentlessly and fast. On a farm run by a cultist religious leader, a boy who saw the seas start to rise is shown preparing for a task throughout the story. This task is apparently deeply contentious and opposed by the wider community. Yet, with the world apparently going to end and a desire to return to the ‘old ways’, the boy has agreed to the task and believes, up to the end of the story, that it is the way to make peace with the rising seas.
• “Instantiation” by Greg Egan: an interesting tale about a group of software entities who are apparently sentient and are hiding their existence in the servers of a company who serves up virtual reality games. When the entities learn that the company is to shut down, they have to migrate to other servers to survive. This can only be done in a discreet way by hacking the virtual reality system of a guest in a game, so they can upload themselves. But as they perform the task, they learn why the guest is playing the game and raises questions about whether, in a future where our personalities can simulated by computer systems, companies ‘own’ such personalities.
• “Tourists” by Rammel Chan: an alien tourist on Earth apparently meets another tourist. But the rules laid out say that they should stay away from each other to prevent incidents. But as she is introduced to a group of fellow alien tourist who have apparently broken the rules, the tourist learns the reason why she has been lured into the group and why her translation technology is the reason she does not learn the truth until it may be too late.
• “Eighteen Songs” by Michael Swanwick: a fantasy-like tale of meetings between boys and girls and others on a musical night where bodies can get switched.
• “How I Found Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” by Lawrence Watt-Evans: an entertaining sequel to his early story, “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers”, this one has a Private Investigator who is tasked by a person to find the source of an unusual object. The source turns out to have dropped off the object via Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers. And now the PI is obsessed with finding the object.
• “Terrible Trudy on the Lam” by Eileen Gunn: a tale of a tapir who leaves a zoo, does a comedy routine on stage to make a living and then starts hanging out with a Private Investigator to finally escape from the zoo. Apparently based on a true story but with fantasy elements.
• “January March” by Tom Purdom: in a future where robots and AI have taken over most of the work, humanity mainly parties and travels. This tale concerns a troop who is taking part in a competitive parade and hopes to take the top prize with an audacious manoeuvre during the parade.
• “The Starry Sky over the Southern Isle” by Zhao Haihong: in a future where smog is covering the earth and people compete to stay inside clean environmental towns, an astronomer has to consider divorce from his family to give them a better chance to enter the towns. But in the midst of contemplating his future in a time when people can no longer see the stars, his daughter shows him how his family still loves him.
• “Transport” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: the mysterious disappearance of a boy on a space cruise liner leads to a discovery about the secret history of the ship itself, which was involved in the transportation of children fleeing a conflict, only those children never made it safely to their destination.
• “Isla Tiburón” by Alex Irvine: a group of soldiers is tasked with finding apparent terrorists who have bombed a water facility. Only the soldiers may have got trigger-happy upon meeting a group of natives, who may have been the bombers, and end up paying a price of their actions.
• “The Lights Go out, One by One” by Kofi Nyameye: on a desperate mission to save humanity in a distant solar system, a life-changing discovery is made. But now the crew have to decide whether to continue with the mission, possibly saving humanity or not, in light of the discovery.
• “Mr. Death Goes to the Beach” by Jack Dann: a young boy has a talk on a beach with an unusual man. The outcome of the conversation would change the boy’s life.
• “The Lost Testament” by Allen M. Steele: set on a world where humans live on an isolated island set aside by the world’s alien inhabitants, the story tells a tale of a mysterious artefact, an attempt to steal it and what it actually tells about how the humans actually came to be on that world.

Magazine read from 2019/04/01 to 2019/04/26