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Excellent novella by Vylar Kaftan, set in an alternate Inca empire. I'm impressed with the research and world-building that must have gone into that in order to keep those things from distracting from the story at hand.
“The New Guys Always Work Overtime” by David Erik Nelson has been haunting me ever since.
Overall an average plus issue.Really enjoyed "And Then Some", by Matthew Hughes, an interesting noir-ish tale in space with some interesting twists.The short stories were run of the mill, enjoyable but nothing special. The highlight of the issue was the novella "The Weight of the Sunrise", by Vylar Kaftan. It is a great story of an alternate history Incan Empire ravaged by smallpox but somehow still around. Weaving in colonialism, Incan culture, medicine, language, culture, and giving hints at a...
Novella:The Weight of Sunrise by Vylar Kaftan ***Novelette:And Then Some by Matthew Hughes ****Short Stories:The New Guys Always Work Overtime by David Erik Nelson ***1/2Outbound from Put-In-Bay by M. Bennardo ****The Golden Age of Story by Robert Reed ****Best of All Possible Worlds by John Chu ***1/2
Sheila Williams writes an enjoyable essay on the "Perils of Time Travel." I also really enjoyed Robert Silverberg's essay on "Looking For Atlantis" and the native peoples of the Canary Islands, the "Gaunches." He has me convinced that they are/were likely the last remnants of Cro-magnon man. There are also three poems, other columns, and interesting book reviews.I thought this was a better than average issue, especially with the good non-fiction content this month. For fiction, it has a novella,...
A slightly above average issue with a fascinating 'alternative history of the Inca Empire' story by Vylar Kaftan and a 'story about stories' by the always fun-to-read Robert Reed.- "The Weight of Sunrise" by Vylar Kaftan: an interesting tale set in an alternative Earth where the Inca Empire repelled Pizarro and the Spaniards but at a huge cost: smallpox ravages the Inca Empire and the only known way to stop a smallpox outbreak from spreading is quarantine. This story is told by an Incan interpre...
A little bit of this; a little bit of that. A novella, a novellette, a couples of short stories, some poems. "The Weight of Sunrise" was a surprising alternate history, told from the perspective that the Incas had managed to survive Pizarro and rebuild their society. "The New Guys Always Work Overtime" is a "genie-escapes-the-bottle" short story. "The Golden Age of Story" is about what might happen if we could expand our brain's elasticity back to when we were six. There are more, including Jame...
While this issue had a lot of fantastic stories in it, it was seriously lacking in the "sci-fi" part. Many of the stories were just fiction, with no technology involved or even hinted at. There was even a poem about domestic abuse. It seems that while Asimov's is still setting a high enough bar for the quality of the stories, they have strayed form the sci-fi roots of the magazine.