Due to the serialization of Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, Wake, the December 2008 issue of Analog carries a more limited selection of short fiction than usual: one short story, two novelettes, and a two-page “Probability Zero” piece.

David Bartell’s “Misquoting the Star” continues the story he began in “Misquoting the Moon,” which appeared in the March 2007 issue of the magazine. In that story, Hendrik Izaaks, a Namibian “Baster,” hunts the last remaining elephants in the world as a giant asteroid bears down on the Earth. The efforts to divert it having all failed (despite, we are told, the expenditure of 50 trillion dollars on space tugs and nukes), humanity is left waiting for death, save for the handful who are to be relocated to a colony on the Moon. Given the chance to go, Hendrik instead sends his AIDS-infected son, Oscar, in his place.

“Misquoting the Star” picks up well after that event, beginning with the spectacle of the asteroid’s impact, as seen from one of those Moon colonies (or “pods”). The focus switches not to Oscar himself, but to the implausibly named Antoinette “Netty” Washington, former mayor of Washington D.C., who becomes increasingly involved with the young “Hendrik” (as Oscar is forced to call himself to board the flight out).

By comparison with the first story, the drama in “Star” falls a bit flat. In “Moon,” the setting, the foreboding, and the desperation and dilemmas that Hendrik faces are compelling in a way that they are not in “Star,” partly because the characters’ actions mattered there in a way they do not here. This piece by comparison seemed like just a snapshot of the constrained existence of the Moon colonists.

The closer focus on life in the Moon colonies also raised a problem for me, namely that this scheme struck me as a futile gesture, rather than a genuine attempt to salvage the species. There are just seven bases, containing a few hundred people each. Moreover, despite their small numbers, they can only hold out for a year in their lunar home before having to go back to an Earth that is bound to still be extremely inhospitable to human life, let alone the rebuilding of civilization. Of course, this may plausibly be all humanity can accomplish in such a context should space development proceed as slowly as it has in recent decades, but it is far, far short of the real hope the characters seem to take for granted here, as I argued last year in the Space Review. Bartell’s story may have had more impact if it explored that side of the issue.

Jason Sanford’s “Where Away You Fall” is set a “hundred years after Sputnik,” in a time when the “space junk” problem has got so out of hand as to give the major spacefaring powers an excuse to control who does and does not have permission to engage in spaceflight. One result is that extremely high-altitude aerostats now perform many of the functions that satellites were formerly used for.

It is this backdrop against which Dusty’s story takes place. An Air Force veteran and aspiring astronaut, she was booted out of the program because of her religious background—Dusty having been raised a Seeker, a member of a religious sect hostile to space expansion. Following her expulsion, she ends up piloting an aerostat for a private space firm owned by a coreligionist, in the course of which she finds herself swept up in a terrorist plot.

On the whole, the concept struck me as well thought-out. (In fact, I noted the possibility that space debris will be used as a basis for greater national sovereignty over space myself in an article for the policy journal Astropolitics five years ago.) This extends to the portrayal of the terrorist scheme, which makes far more sense than the hyped-up speculations given so much time by the major news media, as in the recent Defense Intelligence Agency claim that by 2020 we may see “satellite strikes” by terrorists. Sanford also deserves some credit for trying to picture the surely different forms of fanaticism of a half century from now, rather than just dragging today’s (usually profoundly misunderstood) terrorist concerns a half century into the future, or overlooking the possibility that the danger can grow up in one’s own backyard as well as abroad.

It is on the narrative level that the story falters a bit, in particular the lengthy retelling of Dusty’s life story sandwiched in the middle of her flight (and it must be admitted, the one-dimensionality of characters who really needed to be more). While the story is lucid enough and engaging enough, what should have felt climactic instead feels like just a detail.

Joe Schembrie’s “Moby Digital” tells the story of an information technology consultant called in to help when a university’s virtual reality simulation of the climax of Herman Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick, goes haywire, trapping a professor and his students inside of it, with potentially fatal consequences. (And here I was just wondering what ever happened to virtual reality!)

I have to admit that I am doubtful about the educational value of a VR simulation like the one Schembrie describes, but I also know that this never stopped a college department from laying out big bucks for technology, just as it never stops anyone else. (Those interested in that issue might want to check out Gene I. Rochlin’s aging but still useful study of the issue, Trapped in the Net.) And in any case, it wouldn’t do to linger for too long on the matter, since really this is just an excuse to get inside a VR sim of that sequence. Especially given that Schembrie resorts to the common device of rendering crucial bits of code into visual metaphors that can be engaged in such a space (as writers have been doing since at least William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome”), with problem bits battled with virtual versions of real-world weapons, the effect is to offer us the clichéd “real people stuck inside a video game” scenario.

Still, this approach has the virtue of being more entertaining than watching a programmer scan lines of code, and Schembrie does invest some imagination in the tale. Among other things, he gives due to the problem of visually rendering instances of literary license in a convincing way, clearly embracing the essential absurdity of the situation (which is really the only way to go with this premise). And to his credit, I never found myself overwhelmed with the impulse to yell out “That doesn’t make any sense!”

This issue’s “Probability Zero” piece, Rick Norwood’s “Aliens,” concerns a conference of upper-class “gentlemen” who have decided that something has to be done about the “aliens” immigrating to Earth, who, horror of horrors, even have the audacity to aspire to citizenship. The analogy is a familiar one, of course, but the issue has unfortunately become timely again, and I found this retelling of it appealing enough, save for one aspect: its acceptance of the common line that society’s menial work will be done by an imported underclass, or no one at all. That view has done the dialogue more harm than good, and struck me as especially inappropriate in a magazine so identified with technological imagination and rigorous extrapolation.