Jo L Walton’s Editorial welcomes the arrival of the Sputnik Awards^TM. Jonathan McCalmont rightly eviscerates Becky Chambers’s¹ the long way to a small angry planet (its title is not capitalised on the cover) for its self-satisfaction and its lack of challenge. Nina Allan’s Timepiece argues that the canon (both SF and the wider literary one) ought not to be restrictive. In the Book Zone Lisa Tuttle is interviewed, I review Extinction by Kazuaki Takano and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie while Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, James Lovegrove’s World of Water and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Children of Earth and Sky gain approval.

As to the fiction:-
All Your Cities I Will Burn² by John Schoffstall is set in the aftermath of a 2042 meteor strike on Earth. Humanity has just about survived. Then strange creatures arise from the sea. This story contains fine speculation about the implications for life on Earth from meteor-borne organisms.
The Eye of Job³ by Dan Reade. An alien tower twenty miles high and ten in diameter “covers most of Omaha.” An air force psychologist is still trying to come to terms with the ramifications.
Belong⁴ by Suzanne Palmer sees gwenna Thirty-Seven rejected for Placement in QuangEngXorp’s exploitation team despite always achieving the highest marks in training.
The title and subject matter of Ken Hinckley’s on the techno-erotic potential of Donald Trump under conditions of partially induced psychosis does of course invite comparisons with a certain J G Ballard short story. Its setting in a high-rise, its harping on the diesel fumes emanating from lorries on a motorway junction below, not to mention a vehicle crash and the matching style of its attendant author information appendix only add to this temptation. As you might expect it is estranged stuff but, to take up the invitation, Mr Hinckley is no Ballard. (Then again, who is?)
The Inside Out⁵ by Andrew Kozma. The eponymous structure (aka IO) is an abandoned Dyson sphere to which the remnants of humanity have been transported.
A Man of Modest Means⁶ by Robert Reed relates the encounter between a woman and a man who are both not what the reader first assumes.

Pedant’s corner:- All the fiction was written in USian. ¹McCalmont has Chambers’. ²at loose ends (at a loose end?) “I would expatiate my guilt and despair” (expiate, expatiate means something else entirely,) not thrall to his own fears (in thrall.) ³“covers most of Omaha” (granted the tower would dominate the countryside but I’m sure Omaha is more than ten miles across,) Amos’ (Amos’s,) “behind him are a trio of radio towers” (is a trio,) “None of us do.” (None of us does.) ⁴“in the line from her shoulder down near her wrist” (to near her wrist?) “the enemies lay there peacefully” (lie there,) ⁵humongous (more usually humungous?) ⁶wack job (is usually spelt whack job,) “How would describe that gesture” (missing an “I” after would?) a double “the” in the author information.

Dell Magazines

Sheila Williams’s editorial¹ discusses past and present winners of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Robert Silverberg’s Reflections² muses on Persons from Porlock and how he always took great care to allow no distractions when he was working but that Coleridge’s experience did provide him with the inspiration for his first ever sale (for $5) at the age of fifteen. Paul di Filippo’s “On Books” reviews retrospective collections from Nancy Kress and Gregory Benford, a contemporary one from Finnish writer Leena Krohn and novels by Christopher Fowler and Gene Wolfe.
In the fiction we have Suzanne Palmer’s Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man³ which is narrated by a poet set down alone on an alien planet where he discovers the nature of some of its alien life.
Both Filtered⁴ by Leah Cypess andMasked⁵ by Rich Larson are typical ‘push current trends to their logical conclusion’ SF stories. In the former a journalist tries to get his story about the manipulation of everyone’s communication feeds by filter programmes through the filters. The latter has teenagers constantly surrounded by a cloud of appearance created to enhance their real selves. One of them, Vera, has been affected by a virus which turned the “cover” off.
Project Entropy⁵, the latest of the series of stories in Asimov’s by Dominica Phetteplace, explores the ramifications of Angelina having had her Watcher chip removed and the implications of such AIs. Curiously flat in execution.
In Jack Skillingstead’s The Savior Virus⁶ a biologist who lost his legs in a terrorist bombing engineers a virus to remove the notion of God from people’s minds.
In Nobody Like Josh⁷ by Robert Thurston Josh is a town’s secret alien whose spaceship crashed before the narrator was born. This story is curiously similar in premise to I married a Monster from Outer Space which appeared in Asimov’s March 2016 issue, but isn’t anything like as affective or effective.
Webs by Mary Anne Mohanraj is set around the prejudice of ordinary humans on a colony world towards those with adaptations.
In Lost: Mind by Will McIntosh a man has to search for the missing parts of his wife’s downloaded mind after they are stolen. The story is marred by a continuity error in the last quarter page which totally undermines verisimilitude.

¹ graduating with a duel major (dual,) Joan Sloncewski (the correct spelling, Slonczewski, is used later in the piece.) ² Samuel Purchas’ (Purchas’s,) ³ beside (besides,) to not spend (not to spend,) “how good he has always been about putting off things” (about putting things off.) ⁴matrixes (matrices.) ⁵Lawless’ (Lawless’s.) ⁵ canvasses (canvases.) ⁶ symptoms would manifest in mild cold-like symptoms. ⁷ crashed-landed (crash-landed.)

Dell Magazines, 192 p.

The third issue of the year’s subscription to the magazine my younger son gave me as a Christmas present. In the guest editorial Charlie Jane Anders takes issue with the myth that novels and short stories can’t be written equally well by the same author. In his column Robert Silverberg muses on the possibility that there was not one Trojan War but several, not one Homer but many, writing down their accounts over centuries before it was all drawn into one after Greek script evolved from Phœnician. In the fiction:-
Matilda by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.¹ Matilda is a single ship. She likes being piloted by Devi. The feeling is not mutual. Yet in conflict against the CeaWayLaVi they must act in concert.
Three Paintings by James van Pelt. An artist worried about going stale conceives a plan to be backed up, cut himself off from the world, paint and then kill himself, be restored, paint again, kill his new self, and repeat the cycle once more. His commercial partner gets greedy.
In The Days of Hamelin by Robert Reed² children between the ages of five and eighteen start to die of ruptured arteries. For obvious reasons the virus responsible comes to be known as Hamelin. The few child survivors evolve a mordant philosophy.
The Return of Black Murray by Alexander Jablokov³ sees three former high school friends return to the scene of an incident from their senior year. Black Murray is a giant moray eel; or its simulation. The payoff here does not justify the story’s length.
Starless Night by Robert R Chase is a tale of the response of Earth colonies to invasion from Sagittarius.
Project Synergy by Dominica Phetteplace⁴ is another of the author’s stories featuring Watcher chips. Here the chip wants to acquire a body of its own, which is highly illegal.
Flame Trees by T R Napper.⁵ The titular trees are a nostalgic trigger for a war veteran whose memories are about to be wiped for committing an act of violence.
A Flight From the Ages by Derek Künsken⁶ spans the lifetime of the universe. In 3113 AD a weapon starts to dissolve space-time. Over succeeding multi-millennia efforts are made to escape its expanding wave-front and make the universe into a Klein bottle – all mediated through the experiences of AIs. Very dry indeed.
Of the Beast in the Belly by C W Johnson.⁷ The belly is that of an arcthant. Nawiz and, Janum, the man she is chasing for revenge purposes, have been swallowed by the huge sea creature. Inside its array of increasingly acidic stomachs exist a number of different societies, scraping a living from the (part) digested contents.
In Woman in the Reeds by Esther M Friesner⁸ the woman has been feigning madness to avoid the attentions of Pharaoh’s slave overseers and collecting the bones of dead children from the Nile in order to gain the power to restore her own dead son. She refuses the demands of the god Set to hand over a baby she finds floating in a bulrush basket.
Lazy Dog Out by Suzanne Palmer.⁹ The Lazy Dog is Khifi’s salvage ship. Khifi gets implicated in a plot to take over her habitat and uses the ship to frustrate it. There is an incident here of summary justice (which in my view is never acceptable – even for the supposed good guys. When you think clearly about it, summary justice is no justice at all.)

Pedant’s corner:- ¹overlaying (overlying,) ²US spelling of practice and practicing for the verb practise (plus points though for “hanged himself”,) ³vortexes (vortices,) according the Pete (according to Pete,) “The girls squealed satisfyingly and moved closer to me and Myron” (? This would have been difficult. They were in separate boats,) ⁴terrariums (terraria,) “The long skirt of her skirt grazes the floor” (how about “her long skirt grazes the floor”??) “Often times” (oftentimes is USian I know but isn’t it usually one word?) ⁵bowls green (USian? we would say bowling green,) ⁶Poluphemos’ (Poluphemos’s,) Ulixes’ (Ulixes’s,) even less processing sources (even fewer,) ⁷a pack of sea-jackals were attacking (a pack was,) “with out of his large hands” (with one of his large hands,) Nawiz laid down (lay down,) maw was used here several times: fine; the story takes place inside stomachs, ⁸Osiris’ (Osiris’s,) maw (it’s a stomach, not a mouth,) ⁹locii (loci, or even locuses,) Candles’ (x 3; Candles is one if the characters, so Candles’s – which was used once!) “cut the freighter’s main engines, flipped on the brakers.” (Space-ships have brakes? Which can work when the main engines have shut off?) maw (it’s a stomach; not a mouth,) “behind them in a semicircle was Redrum, Jonjon and Inchbug” (behind them were.)