The September, 2008, issue of Analog is more balanced than the July/August issue was; it’s full of good, insightful stories, even if some of them are predictable and bordering on cliché.

In “The Fourth Thing” by Stephen L. Burns, a woman called Noelle is visited by a presence in her head which urges her to come with it and leave Earth:

Noelle. I wish it were. Time is short, so I will try to be brief. This is the situation. A black hole with the resting mass of your moon is headed toward your planet at very nearly the speed of light. Such phenomena are rare and dangerous. When it hits, your planet will simultaneously explode and ignite. Nothing on it will survive. There is nothing we can do, or you can do, to avert this cataclysm.

Talk about As You Know, Bob. Naturally, Noelle is confused and can’t figure out if the voice is coming from inside her head or not. She tries to communicate with the presence, and the presence not only answers her but also promptly explains everything that’s going on: Earth will be destroyed and they (the presence is apparently a collective) have decided that it’s worthwhile to rescue a few humans. When she asks why, they tell her there isn’t enough time to explain everything adequately, and that she only has five minutes before departing. But she will be allowed to bring three things with her—three things only, and they must be things, not people.

The matter of choosing what to take takes the better part of the story, and it is indeed the more interesting part:

She had to pick which books lived, and which books died. Who was she to make such?

There is a moment, right before the end, in which we are led to believe that it may all be a schizophrenic episode, and that none of it happened. That sort of trope, as well as the “consented-abduction-just-before-the-world-ends” conceit, is a road very much traveled. Even so, the story is well-written and beautifully done.

“Forever Mommy” by David Grace presents a horror story of the worst sort—the kind that features children. In what seems to be the near future, the life of a seven-year-old kid is altered by an implant. The Advisor, as they call it, is the “Forever Mommy,” a kind of über-nanny who keeps telling the boy what he can and can’t do. This proves to be a hindrance in his life, a total drain on Jimmy’s free will. And on his friends’ as well:

The next year most of Jimmy’s friends got their Advisors and Jimmy noticed the changes right away. By the second day Jason Evers had stopped making poop jokes. Twice in the middle of starting a fight Ralph Amicci suddenly lowered his fists and walked away. And Bonnie Blumstein stopped eating everybody’s leftover lunch. She said she wasn’t hungry, but Jimmy figured that it was her Advisor telling her that she’d get fat and ugly and have heart attacks and terrible diseases if she didn’t get control of her diet right away.

Every time he “disobeys” the Advisor (even if his real parents “allow” him to do something and even if its as trivial as eating a chocolate ice cream cone), the device triggers awful sirens, bells, shrieks, and explosions in his brain as punishment. But Jimmy soon finds out that the Advisor can’t read minds, nor read handwritten notes. So, fond of YA spy novels, he creates a “cell” with his friends to communicate with one another. But it is not until his early teens that he finds ways to block the device temporarily, and in the end, he discovers, naturally, that he is not the only one.

It is a terrifying story with a clever ending, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Predictable, but clever.

David W. Goldman’s “Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers” takes place off Earth, in a distant future, where Surgeon-at-Arms Roald Vik of the 3rd Armored Biomedical Brigade, Affiliated Planets Unified Defense Force, wakes up in a hospital prison cell. Approximately two centuries earlier, an Affiliated Planets probe discovered the world of Nieuw Vlaanderen orbiting a star about 15 light-years from Vik’s homeworld, Eiriksson. Vik was “crammed into a coldsleep pod and fired off on a 70-year voyage to Nieuw Vlaanderen.” When he wakes up, he finds that he’s being held in quarantine because of exposure to an alleged infection: Besnoitia speecki. This infection has a strange symptom; the infected subject suddenly can’t recognize certain patterns. Vik is wary of the doctors; he thinks it all might be a well-executed scam, for they show him patterns he can recognize and others he can’t. He is sure that it’s a cultural matter, not a neurological one. Or is it?

This story offers us a very intriguing game of subtlety, even if the ending (though clever) is predictable, in an Asimovian way. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to see another culture and other languages employed in American SF. “Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers” reminded my briefly of Gene Wolfe’s “Silhouette,” a story about life inside a German generation starship.

“Once in a Blue Moon” by William Gleason is a story for VR/games/mechas fans. Here, a man called Jack arrives at a colony on the Moon to meet Brody Bridges, a former VR player seven years ago. Now, after a last game-playing stint that has gone wrong, Brody becomes a kind of “cyborgized” Daredevil (a la the comic book superhero):

They couldn’t repair the optic nerves, but I have bionic implants. I only see in black and white now—more like grainy blue and white, to be honest. Plus, they’re linked to this sonic cane.

It turns out that Jack wants to be Brody’s partner, even though Brody doesn’t want him, for all the obvious reasons. But Jack has a wildcard up on his sleeve: Dr. Rostov, a clumsy-but-genius Russian scientist who, in his own (awful) words:

I have invent whole new system: new neural interface, new matrix medium, even whole new hologram projector. Making use of zero-point energy. You hear of?

Come on, don’t they have any fast-learning language implants by then?

After some convincing (but not too much), Brody finally accepts Jack’s proposition. But the first experimental game between them turns into a battle of life and death, as apparently someone else has accessed the until-then inexpugnable matrix, and Brody’s body goes into a coma while his mind is still playing in the virtual environment and trying to figure it all out.

In the end, this wasn’t a very good story, as it’s too reminiscent of the old-fashioned VR stories of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and, unfortunately, not the good ones.

H. G. Stratmann’s “The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya” takes us to Mars, where an American man and a Russian woman are the only two people on a combined mission of exploration. A little bit on the clichéd side, perhaps, as the exaggerated dialogue, even if it’s on purpose, can sometimes be boring. The man is an all-American type from Missouri who loves country music and is very pragmatic, while the woman is a very religious type from Mother Russia who listens only to classical music (Mozart, but her favorite is Holst, because of his orchestral suite The Planets, naturally).

This story reminded me of an old Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin flick (that I can’t seem to remember the title of) which took place on the Moon, but the rest of which is nearly the same—if it weren’t for the aliens, of course.

The aliens never appear in the story, but the couple (who, among other strange things for a story written in the 21st century, never have sex because of the religious upbringing of Katerina, even though they’re committed and they intend to marry when they get back to Earth) gets messages and artifacts from them, and something else, as the guy, Martin, explains:

It still irks me that all the alien did was make a deal that the two of us could stay on Mars if no other humans came here. Our “landlords” spent ten years moving Mars closer to the Sun, giving it a breathable atmosphere, and increasing its gravity to nearly one g. So why couldn’t our visitor spare us a few more minutes to answer your questions about where they come from and what we have to do to “buy” the planet from them?

It becomes clear later that the couple doesn’t get along very well. They don’t seem to “speak the same language.” Katerina seems to identify more with the aliens than with her own fiancé. When Martin, almost always upset even though he strives to appear to be a nice guy, voices his discontentment over the fact that, in spite of all the terraforming efforts of the Martians, he wishes they could give them “a cure for cancer” or “a cheap nonpolluting source of unlimited energy, or a warp engine,” she answers, “I don’t know. Perhaps they think we’d misuse them.”

When they stumble upon the ultimate Martian artifact, a giant metallic pyramid,
Martin and Katerina try to communicate their discovery to Earth, but to no avail. So they take what they believe to be the most logical course; they enter the pyramid. Soon, they become separated by the aliens, who want to know Katerina better. They try to make Katerina undergo a test that will turn her into a superhuman—which, due to her sense of morality, she doesn’t want to become. They then put her under severe stress conditions—even deadly ones—not so much to convince her as to force her. She manages to get free and find Martin, but they will still have to pass a last test, this time involving Martin as well. The ending is an either-or; you can easily figure what happens if one of them doesn’t accept the gift.

All in all, an issue with some fine stories, but all of them too predictable.