Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March-April 2017 by Trevor Quachri

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March-April 2017 Reviews

• 
  John Loyd

  Extra helping of time travel -- 7 of 14 stories feature it.
  
  8 • Nexus • 34 pages by Michael Flynn
  Very Good/Excellent. Flynn introduces us to a time traveler, an immortal, an alien genetically engineered to look human, another alien, an android and a telepath. Throws them into an interlocking romp. Does a good job of making them interesting.
  
  50 • Europa's Survivors • 24 pages by Marianne J. Dyson
  Good. Cassie and Dr. Lee are going to study the [possibly] native bacteria that Cassie's arrival dislodged. This may be the only colony, definitely the only sample they can access. Dr. Lee immediately goes on a recuse operation putting his life in danger.
  
  74 • Eli's Coming • 8 pages by Catherine Wells
  Good. Eli owns a time travel company. There have been some glitches and Tamara warns Eli not to go on this trip.
  
  82 • Time Heals • 6 pages by James C. Glass
  Good. John plans to use a business trip into the past as a way to eliminate his abusive step-father. While stalking him, he learns that Carl was beaten by his father.
  
  88 • Shakesville • 7 pages by Adam-Troy Castro, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
  OK/Good. A man is visited by fifty copies of himself. One is sent back in time to help him avoid a mistake that will make him miserable. The rest are just echoes, part of the future process that allowed this to happen. He must choose which Me is the real one and follow his advice. Not thrilled about the ending.
  
  98 • Host • 12 pages by Eneasz Brodski
  Good+. The colony on Titan has worries about the abomination. Something that turns people from individuals into a part of the host. We follow Julian and his father and his best friend Drew. In between the main storyline are little tales about people trying to help that don't want or appreciate the type of help they are being given.
  
  110 • The Snatchers • 7 pages by Edward McDermott
  Very Good/Good. Max is a snatcher. Today he is offered the chance to retrieve an author just before he dies and bring him back to the present. The hopes are that he and the backer will split the intellectual property rights that the author creates in the future. Time doesn't like people messing around in the past.
  
  117 • Unbearable Burden • 3 pages by Gwendolyn Clare
  Good+. Alexis is an AI describing what's happening. Her day handling the puppet, interacting with other AIs, their motivations or really their lack of motivation.
  
  126 • Grandmaster • 3 pages by Jay O'Connell
  OK. A time traveler goes back to 1945 to show a writer her award. I didn't catch the significance of the ending.
  
  130 • Alexander's Theory of Special Relativity • 4 pages by Shane Halbach
  Very Good+. Alexander sends his girlfriend into the 2070 future and ten minutes later retrieves her from 2081. Quick story with a clever twist.
  
  134 • Concerning the Devastation Wrought by the Nefarious Gray Comma and Its Ilk: a Men in Tie-Die Adventure • 9 pages by Tim McDaniel
  Good. My answer to the guys in tie-die would be "If a butterfly here can cause a hurricane half way across the world, isn't it just as likely that there is one that didn't form because of it?"
  
  143 • Ecuador vs. the Bug-Eyed Monsters • 9 pages by Jay Werkheiser
  OK/G. Aliens come to Earth and get the World Cup final played in their space station. The winner then playing the aliens. A lot of description of the different tactics used when playing in a spinning space station rather than on a planet. The strategy discussed among three players on the Ecuador team.
  
  152 • The Human Way • 15 pages by Tony Ballantyne
  Good/OK. An activist group has kidnapped an S and gone to ground on an AI constructed/terraformed planet. The army is looking for them. Serena finds passengers and a crew member that were on the ship that was hijacked. Really good job with the human characters, I must've been too sleepy to grasp the S.
  
  167 • Plaisir D'amour • 33 pages by John Alfred Taylor
  Very Good/Good. A sociologist gets permission to study the group aboard the mining ship Georgius Agricola. Genetically engineered humans live their lives there in near zero-g. Much of the story is telling us how the ship works, what the residents do, how they interact, how they school their children--life aboard the ship. Along the way Ben falls in love with Ellen. They know it will end when Ben's six month stay is up. Very tender story with no extraneous melodrama.
• 
  Timo Pietilä

  A pretty good double-issue, especially the longer stories were pretty good.
  
  Nexus • novella by Michael F. Flynn
  A male time traveler meets an immortal woman. They had met before, centuries ago. The time traveler is convinced that the woman is another time traveler and the woman is convinced that he is another immortal. Meanwhile, a secret alien society is meeting below the town. Also meanwhile, an alien insectoid creature is repairing its space ship to return to home to summon an invading force, while another scifi trope or two are also happening. All of the plot lines came together, eventually. I expected the story to turn to metafiction at some point, with so many clichés in the same story, but the ending was fairly satisfying, nevertheless. ****
  Europa's Survivors • novelette by Marianne J. Dyson
  A woman who has cancer arrives on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, to study a newly-found bacterial colony. She is pretty frail, but she is planning to spend her last years finding out if the bacteria are really from Europa, or if they are just a contamination from the Earth. There are some problems, and most of the inhabitants of the colony end up getting a fairly heavy dose of radiation. The story is pretty slow moving, with not much happening, and with a not-too-plausible ending. There was another story, with some similarities, just a few issues ago, about a bacterial colony on Europa, and I had to check to see if they were connected. Apparently they were not. ***-
  Eli's Coming • short story by Catherine Wells
  A man goes to the past in order to kill his stepfather, who he hates. He has already tried twice but, at both times, he had failed for unusual reasons. This time he will succeed! He does, but not in the way that he was expecting. A bit on the short side, but a fairly nice story. ***
  Time Heals • short story by James C. Glass
  A man who organizes trips to the past, goes to the past himself, even though there has been problems lately with the accuracy of the time drops. He is stranded decades or centuries away from the time that he was aiming for and is captured by a Jewish tribe that is ambushed by the Romans. He knows, from history, that there will be no survivors. Not bad story, but the background is pretty scanty. Otherwise, the story works fairly well. ***+
  Shakesville • short story by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zino-Amaro
  A man’s house is filled with different versions of himself from different timelines. Some are pretty similar to him, but some of the others have had very different lives. There is some event coming, which will have a profound effect to all of their timelines – what is it? A fairly open ended story, interesting though. ***-
  Host • novelette by Eneasz Brodski
  A school kid, who lives in a colony located on the moon of Jupiter, cuts school with his friend. They enjoy some typical teenage vices, like light shoplifting, while the colony is invaded by zombie-like creatures that spread a “contagion” by touch and bite. The colony is falling down – should they kill themselves? A bit on the short side, the background was a bit superficial, and there wasn’t time to gain a real bond with the protagonists. There were hints about the real meaning of the disease, in the interludes among the main action, but the story ended a bit too soon to really find out what was going on. ***
  The Snatchers • short story by Edward McDermott
  A retrieval team is sent to the past to save Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, before his plane crash. There is more than a little trouble, as the time stream fights to remain intact. A shortish, but very good, story with interesting characters. ***+
  Unbearable Burden • short story by Gwendolyn Clare
  The first AIs have been created. They have some limitations built in and they get bored. But they start to work on their own programming and one of them has a hidden agenda. A short, bittersweet story – perhaps a slightly longer form might have been better, as there really wasn’t an emotional connection to anyone/anything in the story. ***
  Grandmaster • short story by Jay O'Connell
  A female author in Paris gets a strange visitor from the future: a young woman who adores her writing. I thought I knew who the author was, but some details don’t match. She wasn’t writing science fiction at the time. I am bit baffled by the story, I didn’t get the point of it. **½
  Alexander's Theory of Special Relativity • short story by Shane Halbach
  A man sends his wife to the future, while testing his new time machine. There is a slight problem and he isn’t able to return his wife until 10 minutes have passed. However, it was eleven years for her, and she isn’t too happy to return. A pretty good, but short, story. ***+
  Concerning the Devastation Wrought by the Nefarious Gray Comma and Its Ilk: A Men in Tie-Dye Adventure • short story by Tim McDaniel
  Men in tie-dyed shirts attack a well-tended garden. There is a reason, but it's more stupid than anyone could guess. A probability zero story, which is longer than usual and not branded as such. Too stupid for my taste, the humor didn’t work for me. **
  Ecuador vs. the Bug-Eyed Monsters • short story by Jay Werkheiser
  Aliens “invite” the soccer World Cup Final to their space station. As no one has seen them, other than their ships, no one wants to decline the invitation. Since the “gravity” there is caused by rotation, the Coriolis forces cause some surprising effects. For some strange reason, there is a woman player among the men. The description of the game takes far too much space but, otherwise, it's a pretty nice story. ***+
  The Human Way • novelette by Tony Ballantyne
  A soldier is studying an empty planet. It has the entire infrastructure: roads, houses, cars, and even shops filled with merchandise as nanotech has built it to be ready for human habitation. For some reason, the planet has been more or less forgotten. The planet is supposed to have no one there, but the soldier encounters a young woman, with two children in tow. A pretty good story, with a nice high-tech setting. The ending was perhaps slightly hurried, but otherwise a very good and entertaining story. ***½
  Plaisir d'Amour • novella by John Alfred Taylor
  A sociologist moves to an independent space colony/station to do a sociological/anthropological study about the function of the colony. The inhabitants are slightly-modified humans who are adapted to a very low gravity environment. The colony, with its fairly utopian life, is seen through the eyes of the sociologist. He makes friends, and even finds love, but there cannot be any lasting relationship. A very good storyline, there wasn't really much of plot, but the writing was so good, and the characters and the world were so interesting, that it didn't matter. ****
  
• 
  Benn Allen

  Really don't have much of anything to say about this particular issue. It was a pleasant read overall, nothing especially annoying or terrible, but not really anything particularly great either. Just an entertaining issue that featured quite a few time travel stories.
• 
  Tomislav

  I subscribed to Analog for a while in High School during the 1970s, while Ben Bova was the editor, and every once in a while, I still pick up a copy to find what has become of it. Apparently, it has recently gone bimonthly rather than monthly, and is mostly sold through e-copy. However, some larger bookstores still stock the latest edition in a paper digest format. I read it cover to cover, including all the editorials, science essays, book reviews, and letters to the editor, remembering how it was once my only conduit to the entire universe of living science fiction.
  
  Being what I continue to think of as a double-issue, the contents were extensive including two novellas, three novelettes, and a good number of short stories. Because of the orientation of Analog towards hard-sf, all of the stories were idea-centric (especially time travel in this edition) more than character-centric, and in that regard I enjoyed being stretched in the SFnal way. Unfortunately, a few of the stories were extremely stiff in the character department (Europa's Survivors) or comic-book like in concept (Nexus). Of course, my favorites are those that work in both ways – believable and/or sympathetic characters existing in a creatively imaged, but plausible speculative world. My favorites were…
  
  "Host" by Eneasz Brodski – alien invasion, based on a real and complex parasitic model that does exist on Earth. This is not a story of the end-host, or of the parasite. The boys were believable, even if the adults were not.
  
  "Eli's Coming" by Catherine Wells. Time travel to the Roman assault on Masada, circa 66CE. Even though the unprepared time traveler who gets in over his head is a classic plot, this setting was so fascinating as to make it worth revisiting.
  
  "The Human Way" by Tony Ballantyne – Self-replicating terraforming machines sent out by humans had run ahead of the human expansion needed to fill them. On an unpopulated “human” world, advance units of the now intersteller Second Antarctic Army pursue the kidnappers of aliens.
  
  “Plaisir D’Amour”, by John Alfred Taylor – a detailed tour of a space habitat, and the doomed love between a terrestrial visiting sociologist and his engineered-for-weightlessness guide. A little sappy, and definitely slow paced, but I fell for it anyway.