Adam-Troy Casto opens this issue of Analog with “Among The Tchi”. It’s not as successful as his “Gunfight on Farside” in the previous issue, but not many stories are. It’s still an intruiging novelette that will remind many readers of the type of archly decadent tales that Mathew Hughes excels at writing. Castro’s human characters are deliciously self-centred, arrogant and venal. They are, to a person, successful writers who have been enticed to an alien world to become writers-in-residence for a year. The Tchi hold humans in contempt but they do pay a very good salary. When Carlson arrives on their world he’s less than happy to discover that his arch-rival Finn is there to greet him. The Tchis have been flying in a fresh writer every week and putting them all up in a commune for the duration of their tenure, and all they have to do is give a weekly reading to an audience of Tchi. Unfortunately the Tchi shred everything that is read to them, and this is destroying the mental health of the other writers. Carlson comes up with a plan to turn the tables on them, but it reeks of with-one-mighty-bound-ism and it doesn’t convince, both because it is hard to believe that no other writer tried this before Carlson, and because Castro has already built up the Tchi to be a race that is totally oblivious to the opinions of humanity. It feels as if Castro had written himself into a corner, but was unwilling to abandon all of the good work that got him there.

Alexis Glynn Latner’s “Quickfeathers” is another novelette that plays with literary conventions. It starts off with a reworking of Winston Churchill’s Russian doll of a quote about riddles and enigmas, in which Latner has replaced ‘Russia’ with ‘Planet Green’. She’s so pleased with the effect that she repeats it later on in the story. This doesn’t succeed in drawing attention away from the similarity between her Planet Green and Jeanette Winterson’s Planet Blue in “The Stone Gods”. Both are ecological parables, which makes the similarity in names even more puzzling. The human colonists on Planet Green have found the fossilized remains of birds in caves, and they work out that nearby scratches are examples of the birds’ written language. They soon manage to decode it, which, given that we haven’t been able to decipher the written language of the people of Easter Island (for example), involves a pretty large leap of faith for the reader. The leaders of the colony are also blindly insistent that fossil fuels (the same fuels that wrecked Earth – will the fools never learn?) be used to power the colony. And no fossil fuels can be found. Is there a clue in the story of the birds? Can the tidal barrage be made to work without wiping out the seals? This story is hardly an example of rigorous scientific extrapolation and the ecological message is very heavy-handed, which is annoying even (especially?) when you agree with it. As a story it is entertaining enough, but there seems to be an overwritten chunk of prose that trips up the reader on every other page.

Tom Ligon’s “Rendezvous at Angels Thirty” is annoying as well at times, but for entirely different reasons. His protagonist is a retired multibillionaire, living at the end of this century (or thereabouts), who is obsessed with discovering what exactly happened to one of his ancestors who vanished during a Second World War aerial combat mission. This is a bit like one of us fixating on an ancestor who died during the Crimean War or American Civil War: it’s hardly the mark of a reasonable mind, but it’s far from implausible. Doyle has utilised his free time and free cash to build flight simulators and restore aircraft, and the novelette takes place during Doyle’s time in a new and massively complex simulation. Doyle joins his ancestor’s flight in his own P51 as they head out on a mission over France, and the mystery is disposed of fairly swiftly (regardless of whether it truly could be solved through the fractal mists of time). Doyle’s intervention, however, has saved the lives of the other pilots, and it seems that the simulation is so powerful that they have become sentient. This poses an obvious ethical dilemma at the end of the simulation. I couldn’t quite buy into the SF dimension of this story, but the amount of research that has gone into the war scenario means that it feels much more realistic than the conditions outside the simulator. The reader can feel the jolts and bumps of the aircraft without feeling that he has been info-dumped on. Ligon writes an excellent war story and it would certainly be intriguing to see a straight historical drama from him at some stage.

The fourth novelette in this issue is Robert R. Chase’s “The Sleeping Beauties”. At times it feels like a chick-lit version of the resolution to the “The Forever War”, but there is a bit more going on than just that. The hero manages to get a berth on an expedition that is going to explore Saturn’s system. Since this necessitates cryogenic suspension, his fiancée decides that she will do the same back on Earth in order to stay the same age. Since she is a pop star, her agent goes ballistic. However, could this actually help her career? The hero has problems of a different sort as one of the other explorers has taken a shine to him. As well as all of this, there seems to be a very alien form of life near Saturn. It’s one of those stories that will have different readers wishing that Chase had concentrated more on certain sections of the story. Those sections will vary, however, depending on individual tastes.

The rest of the stories are of regulation short-story length. Shane Tourtellote’s “A Measure of Devotion” is a bit of a mess, structurally, but has its points of interest nevertheless. The humans are stuck at home doing presentations on funding while the AIs are out there in the starships experiencing all of the sensawunda.

Steven Gould’s “A Story, With Beans” is one of the highlights. Set in the same future as his short story, “Shade“, that appears on the Tor website, it shows a youngster surviving in a part of America that has been devastated by insect-like robots that hunt down metal to, presumably, use it to build more robots. Our hero, Kimball, makes a living by taking tourists into this zone, but, of course, people are fools who are seduced by shiny things. Life goes on regardless in this exquisitely evoked world.

The last story is by far the slightest. Philip Edward Kaldon’s “The Brother on the Shelf” coming-of-age tale feels like a Ray Bradbury story from the fifties in its setting, despite the fact that it is set nearly nine centuries in the future. Boys still go down to the store to buy Coca-Cola and foil-wrapped trading cards, even though the trading cards are automatically updated with the latest news on their subjects. Two brothers collect sets of cards featuring Earth’s space battleships, which are involved in a war against aliens. As the years pass, the older boy enlists in the fleet. He sends frequent letters to his young brother who still collects cards. The ending is fairly obvious from then on.

This issue also contains book reviews, an article on Ephraim (misspelled as ‘Ephriam’ throughout) Fischbach’s fringe science, and an untidy but interesting article on “Geology, Geohistory, and ‘Psychohistory’” by Richard A. Lovett that deals with the catastrophic flooding of America at the end of the ice age and the theory’s struggle to find acceptance in the mainstream. Asimov’s pseudo-Marxist plot devise seems to be in the title for no better reason than to hook the passing reader.