Genetically modified children created by a bioactivist movement become the flashpoint of social controversy. In her frozen, dying hometown, a young woman searches for her friend. A virtual reality patch sparks war between the United States and an ascendant China. Artificial intelligences give dubious advice. In the swamps between large cities, a young brigand schemes to take power in his village. At the end of time, a transdimensional EMT builds heaven. The March 2009 Asimov’s is uneven, with no real standouts, but it is never boring.

Nancy Kress manages to pack a lot of interesting moral quandaries into “Act One.” Barry Tenler, who made his start as a political aide, is the agent of a has-been movie star, Jane Snow, whose new project seems poised to propel her back into the limelight. The Group, a semi-legal entity that she contacts in the course of her research, was founded by a frustrated rogue biologist and has made a business of engineering expensive, highly empathic designer children whose uncanny ability to read other people arouses as much controversy as their origins. Barry is as sensitive to the nature of the Group’s work as Jane because genetic modification troubled his relationship with his ex-wife and estranged son. His personal life is Kress’s venue for addressing disability politics within the context of bioethics, although I must reserve judgment as to how successful her investigation is, as it seems to say more about Barry and his ex, Leila, in particular (and their great gulf in age) than about parents who have disabilities in general. She also ponders the nature of altruism and whether it counts as such if it is involuntary.

Even the most serious events in the life of R. Neube’s hapless, gullible, yet indestructible protagonist, Aaron, in “Intelligence,” on the other hand, have an air of the ridiculous. His best friend, Bob, who happens to be a top-secret A.I., leads him merrily into financial ruin and gross bodily harm, although judging from what we learn of his poor choices in the past, he’s no stranger to mishaps of all sorts. It’s a nice touch that Bob isn’t allowed to connect directly to the Internet because his handlers fear hackers or (because, of course, all A.I.s want to get out into the wild) escape. If what you’re looking for is a light, readable, uncomplicated, over-the-top comedy that blows a raspberry at Hal and Wintermute, you’ll enjoy this one.

Holly Phillips does some interesting worldbuilding in her atmospheric but hard to follow “The Long, Cold Goodbye,” which draws on a postapocalyptic setting to explore its protagonist’s emotional entanglement with a perpetually absent man about whom she has conflicted feelings. A deathly cold has come to the northern town where Berd grew up, forcing many to flee, although some must stay to die. She has gathered her things and is preparing to leave, haunted by the ghosts of her friends and relatives, living or dead, especially Sele. In many ways, this reads like a less whimsical sibling of Keith Miller’s The Book of Flying, particularly the section set in a mountain town. The background Phillips puts together is vague and atmospheric, but in a lazy rather than a carefully guarded way; her prose is often purple, and the plot itself comes across as melodramatic rather than powerful.

In contrast with her previous impressive and freestanding stories (including “Prayers for an Egg” in the October/November 2008 issue of Asimov’s) Sara Genge’s “Slow Stampede” feels unfinished and predictable. Her protagonist is an aspiring chief in a stereotypical and earthy tribe of swamp brigands that harries merchant caravan traffic passing through their territory, and although he and his fellow characters are generally rather unoriginal, the strange carnivorous mermaids with whom he must parley and share his spoils are intriguing. Genge is uniquely skillful when handling characters whose biology, and to some extent whose psychology, are at least somewhat alien, but her humans (or close equivalents thereof) are at this point uninspiring, which is a pity.

Benjamin Crowell’s brief story of a human and dog caught in the collapse of reality, “Whatness,” is a bit predictable but nonetheless entertaining. He seems to be strongly inspired by Rudy Rucker, and engages in the same sort of table turning that made R. Neube’s crackpot A.I. story work.

“Getting Real” must be Harry Turtledove at his worst. I’ve heard good things about a number of his novels, but this particular outing is over the top and woefully unengaging, with a predictable plot, flat, unsympathetic characters, and a future built from rather simplistic, shortsighted extrapolations. More memorable than any of the plot elements or people walking around in this story is the pervasive atmosphere of helplessness and barely contained rage, wrapped up in a cartoonishly satiric tone.
In this future California, the Chinese government is the world’s dominant political and economic power, and the U.S. has disintegrated to the point that the entire country is, according to his exposition, an overpopulated inner-city slum. The Chinese keep the U.S. under control from their military outposts on islands off the Pacific coast which were once part of American territory, dealing virtual reality “drugs” to control the population and cripple the country’s defensive capabilities, in a way which is doubtless (based on the closing) intended to parallel British involvement in nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese history. Turtledove’s clumsy exposition is troublesome in a number of ways:

He almost tripped on the cracked concrete. Nobody’d fixed these sidewalks for a long, long time. A line of shopfronts were boarded up. The ones that weren’t had signs in Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Korean…

You could still find anybody from anywhere in Los Angeles. Anybody who was poor and didn’t have the sense to go someplace else, anyhow. No, Los Angeles wasn’t much different from anywhere else in the United States these days.

Swarms of bicycles and pedicabs executed intricate dances on the streets. The asphalt between the sidewalks was in crappy shape, too. A few hydrogen- and electric-powered cars tried to pick their way through the people-powered traffic.

Apparently widespread cultural diversity and the adoption of inexpensive and carbon-neutral methods of transportation indicate, as much as failing infrastructure, low police salaries (addressed later on), and insufficient attention to traffic calming, that the United States has ceased to be a world power. I’m aware that this is broad satire, but on some level, it seems as if Turtledove were holding up a stereotypical portrayal of some city streets in parts of the developing world as a template for the future of a declining United States, as if economic change would simply result in nations switching places (one becoming what the other was). There are a few whimsically amusing moments, however, like an avatar that appears in the police station: “a woman with bright blue hair and bright red eyes, wearing a hot-pink Victorian-era dress, complete with bustle.”