John Allemand’s… ahem, vivid cover illustration is for the issue’s lead story, a Rajnar Vajra novella called “Doctor Alien” that gets things started on the right foot. A psychiatrist is dipatched by NASA to the moon-orbiting ship of eccentric alien traders called the Tsf, only to find that his decidedly odd hosts have, in their custody, three completely different alien species they want him to “treat.” Much like the last story by Vajra I read (”Emerald River, Pearl Sky,” Analog Jan/Feb 2007), this story was rich and inventive, with creatively imagined aliens and nifty ideas flying fast and furious. It’s also quite funny—I was especially fond of the hilariously eclectic speech patterns of the Tsf, indicative of the way Vajra seems to revel in the sounds and rhythm of language. The distinct personalities of the various aliens also contributed to the spirit of fun, and I finished it with a big grin on my face. Vajra seems to leave the option open for future stories in this setting, which could be fun in a psychotic psychological “Draco Tavern” kind of way.

Dave Creek’s novelette “Zheng He and the Dragon,” is the latest in the apparently growing subgenre of “alien encounters in history” (other examples include Ian Creasey’s “Silence in Florence,” Asimov’s September 2006, Michael F. Flynn’s mostly amazing novel Eifelheim, and S.P. Somtow’s “An Alien Heresy,” Asimov’s April/May 2008, among others). In this case the year is 1407, and the protagonist is Zheng He, a successful (and, thus, powerful) treasure fleet admiral in the employ of the Emperor of China. When a dragon-like being crashes into the ocean near his flagship, he sees an opportunity to present his Emperor with the most fabulous gift imaginable. Like other stories of this type, this story depends for its effect on dramatic irony, the difference between our modern, “enlightened” perspective and Zheng He’s limited worldview and cultural arrogance. Both Zhang He and his otherworldly visitor are sharply drawn by Creek, and the conflict between their personalities was believable and compelling. A most enjoyable story.

“To Leap the Highest Wall,” a novelette by Richard Foss, makes it three for three, taking us to an alternate 1970. The American space program has been hobbled by Congressional oversight following the destruction of Apollo 8 on re-entry (which didn’t happen in our “real” world), and the Soviets have just become the first to put a manned spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. Foss shows us how the men in Houston Mission Control respond, in the paranoid atmosphere of that Cold War era, when they receive an unexpected communication from the Soyuz orbiter. This was a thought-provoking story that evokes its time (alternate history though it might be) quite convincingly, a sort of sidestream cousin of Apollo 13.

Alas, I found the issue’s two short stories quite a bit less satisfying. John G. Hemry’s “Rocks” gives us an episodic overview of the history of human aggression, all the “progress” in that questionable area revolving around rocks. That idea was kind of interesting for a few pages, but it overstayed its welcome a little—by the end, the point felt a bit bludgeoney. Richard A. Lovett’s Mundane-as-Mundane-could-be “Excellence” tells the story of a former competitive runner in early middle age, offered an experimental procedure that could make him the best in the world, but will surely be followed by a very rapid decline. This is your basic “deal with the devil” tale, and Lovett presents it baldly as such right up front. His narrator/protagonist is a compelling character and we’re given an engaging insight into the morals, motivations and inner conflicts of such a person, but it didn’t really progress much past that initial set-up, and I was left kind of wondering what the point was. Ultimately both shorts remained relatively simple and obvious, and felt like filler.

Happily, the good returns with Edward M. Lerner’s novelette “Small Business,” which takes a setup we’ve seen before—a straightforward young man with a useful skill is lured by a pretty face into a resistance movement of dubious prospects—and drops it into a compelling and well-conceived framework involving a powerful organization methodically turning its technological advantage into an oppressively monopolistic domination of Earth’s burgeoning off-world economy. Solid execution makes the difference—this story is tightly plotted, with serviceable (albeit kind of generic) characters worked convincingly into the politically-charged setting. Also a plus is that Lerner makes a good point about imbalances of power in a capitalist market, without seeming preachy.

Next up is part 3 of Robert J. Sawyer’s serialized novel “Wake“—since I probably won’t be going back to review the previous two issues of Analog anytime soon, I’ll try to summarize the plot here. Caitlin Decter, a teenaged girl blind from birth, undergoes an experimental treatment to restore her sight, involving the use of computers to process the visual information between her eyes and her brain. Meanwhile, a dissident in China tries to overcome that country’s communication blackout following a horrifying government action, a group of researchers studying the intelligence and communicative skills of a very special chimpanzee make some startling discoveries, and an autonomous intelligence evolves inside the Internet. Trust me, it’s all related. I’ve really enjoyed this novel so far, and the third part is no let down. Sawyer’s prose style makes for quick and easy reading, and Caitlin is a most fetching protagonist. There are some flaws—Sawyer overdoes the “waking up” process of the Internet intelligence a bit, and Sawyer frequently resorts to infodumps that only just manage to avoid “As you know, Bob” level. Also, I can’t decide if the story’s saturation with real-world Internet phenomena and real-world scientific personalities is appropriate given the increasingly technological culture in which we live, or if it seems like the author’s a bit too desperate to prove how “in the loop” he is. Still these amount to only minor annoyances, and don’t detract all that much from a story which is rich in worthy ideas about intelligence, culture, and how some of the hugest-seeming differences aren’t really all that large. A thought-provoking story, and I’m looking forward to the conclusion.

The issue’s fiction finishes on a very strong note with an excellent novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch called “The Recovery Man’s Bargain.” It follows Hadad Yu, a “Recovery Man” who finds objects for paying clients, and doesn’t worry himself too much about whether or not those clients ought to actually possess the objects he finds for them. When a large-scale recovery mission for a very wealthy and powerful client goes terribly wrong and that client promises to ruin Yu as a result, Yu realizes his only hope of salvaging any kind of career for himself is to accept a very dangerous, very troubling mission for the enigmatic aliens called Gyonnese. An interestingly shady main character, aliens and spaceships, and a created universe that has enough detail crowding in at the edges to feel believable and real. In other words, my kind of story. An exciting and most satsfying wrap-up to an issue full of mostly excellent science fiction.

The January/February issue of Analog should be available in bookstores and newsstands until around Christmas, so you have plenty of time to pick it up. I can highly recommend that you do.

(slated for inclusion in Gardner Dozois’ upcoming The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, due out from St. Martin’s Griffin in July 2008.)

The Story: Elizabeth Audrey, the richest human being who ever lived, is using her vast wealth to realize the dream of an inhabitable Venus. With the help of her assistant Henry, she facilitates the terraforming of the second planet, bombarding it with asteroids to adjust its orbit, and with comets to introduce water to its ecosystem. With her titanic plans set in motion, Elizabeth and Henry enter cryosleep for centuries at a time, waking for occasional periods to monitor the work of millennia. But each time she wakes, Elizabeth finds things slipping ever more out of her control.

Review: In this story, James Van Pelt very interestingly manages to paint a quiet, melancholy, and moving character study on an epic canvas. In the details of its setting, Elizabeth Audrey’s planned transformation of Venus is awe-inspiring. Both the mechanics of the plan and the results seem well thought out, and in and of themselves would have made a perfectly passable (if much less interesting) SF story.

What elevates this story to one worthy of note, though, is the way those intriguing SFnal details are merely the backdrop to Van Pelt’s portrait of a somewhat tragic human being. Elizabeth’s wealth and power enables her to do anything. On both a small scale (Henry) and a colossal one (Venus) she has come to believe that because she has the power to effect change, she has the judgement to know what change to effect, and she is truly surprised when people disagree with the choices that she essentially imposes upon them. That makes for a tragic flaw that is both interesting and ironic—that a person with such far-ranging scope and vision should suffer from such a disastrous lack of perspective.

The character and setting threads are tied up beautifully in an elegiac denouement, in which it becomes clear that all the money and power in the universe can’t give a human being control over the human heart or the world(s) those hearts inhabit. Nor should it.

Verdict: A wistful and wise story that couches some very insightful ideas in entertaining Big Sci-Fi clothes.

(The first of a series in which I’ll review the stories slated for inclusion in Gardner Dozois’ upcoming The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, due out from St. Martin’s Griffin in July 2008.)

The Story: Bianca Nazario, an engineer from a Spanish/Muslim community where her status as both a woman and a Christian stifled her talents and prospects, accepts a job from a shady character named Valadez. That job takes her to Sky, a gas giant planet with an Earth-like nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere but no ground, where gigantic flying creatures called zaratánes have become settlements—living, floating islands kilometers long with ecologies and weather patterns, where humans eke out meager existences. Along with naturalist Erasmus Fry and some furry aliens called firijas, Bianca makes her way to the largest and oldest of the zaratánes, Finisterra. However, when a crash-landed balloon reveals some surprising facts about Sky and the zaratánes, as well as what Valadez really has in mind for Finisterra and the other zaratánes, Bianca must question whether, even if this is her only chance for independence and success, the price is too high.

Review: In hindsight, this is a really interesting story, with plenty of ideas and a captivating, character-driven plot taking center stage, and an intriguingly complex future hinted at along the edges. The central concept—a planet consisting almost entirely of a human-breathable atmosphere, and living creatures so large that their dorsal ridges are mountains and their topsoil-encrusted backs are farmable—is wow-inducing in the widescreen sense. The world-building details scattered with varying density throughout the tale—a largely Spanish and Muslim human civilization that has become vaguely reminiscent of the medieval Caliphate of Córdoba, unusual governmental oversight agencies with long reaches and questionable tactics, references to post-humanism, the mysterious possibilities behind Sky’s existence—lent believability to the story’s milieu, and left me curious to explore Moles’ future further.  And he engages the heart as well as the mind, with the story dependent on Bianca Nazarian’s well-developed character arc as an ambitious woman trying to achieve escape velocity from a society that devalues and passively oppresses ambitious women. Some genuinely shocking and moving moments grow out of that background.

However, the reason I began the review with “in hindsight” is because of “Finisterra”’s one real problem, which is the pacing. The meat of the plot doesn’t really get going until about two-thirds of the way through the story, with everything up to then being world- and character-building. It’s necessary, I’ll admit, and when all is said and done it all ties together into a satisfying whole. But in the act of reading it for the first time, those first two-thirds were something of a slog. What kept me reading was partially the gosh-golly-wow factor of Moles’ big ideas, but mostly a desire to see why this had been tagged for inclusion in a best-of anthology that generally reflects my own reading tastes.

I can see the reason for that now, but, as I said, that’s in hindsight.

Verdict: There’s a lot to satisfy the reader on several levels in this ultimately successful, big-idea-packed story. But it takes a bit of faith and discipline to get to it. Caveat lector. Three and a half stars out of five.

From one of Jupiter’s smaller moons, the Solar System’s largest planet is studied by a team of dedicated researchers. One of their project’s primary tools is the pseudojovian, a powerful genetically-engineered creature designed to live in the harsh conditions of Jupiter’s surface, and controlled psionically from the research station with the help of a device called an esprojector. The first of the pseudojovians, “Joe,” is already on the surface, remotely controlled by a bitter quadriplegic named Edward Anglesey. But an important component in the esprojector keeps burning out, which brings specialist Jan Cornelius to the station to investigate and, hopefully, solve the problem. What he discovers will have unexpected effects for Anglesey and Joe, for the research project, and for the future of Jupiter itself.

My Review: Wow.

That was pretty much the sum total of my reaction to this story. This is exactly the kind of story I’ve been hoping to find as I troll the history of science fiction. It ventures into several fields, some real (astronomy, planetology, psychology, physics), some science-fictional (psionics, the genetic engineering used to create the pseudojovians), and some seemingly without meaning to (a primitive civilization aborning in a harsh, demanding climate). Impressively, although this story is fifty-one years old at the time of this writing, the only part of it that seemed dated to me was the way the crew of the research station smoked wherever and whenever they wanted.

The key to this story is the development of the relationships between Anglesey and Joe, and between Joe and his environment. Both relationships are handled really well by Anderson, who does an admirable job of making both his characters and his Jovian surface believable (even if some part of the back of my brain is aware of how, over the last fifty years, what has been learned about Jupiter makes Anderson’s speculations impossible—in a way, that just makes the believability of this story more impressive). Even more importantly, the fun scientific stuff isn’t just presented on a platter of dry exposition, but in a way that truly engaged my imagination and my sense of wonder. When I finished, all I could think of to say has already been said in this review. To wit:

Wow.

Verdict: A well-rounded SF story that was intelligent, and entertaining in a number of different ways. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you like SF at all, you owe it to yourself to find and read “Call Me Joe.” (It’s in the collections The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. Two A and Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century, and probably any number of others.)

The first story in the issue is “Marsbound,” the first third of a serial by Joe Haldeman (who won every award in creation in 1976 for his novel The Forever War, then repeated the feat with its 1997 follow-up Forever Peace). The premise is, so far, really simple: an 18-year-old girl named Carmen moves to Mars with her family. The interesting part of the story (to me, at least) is the plentiful descriptions of the day-to-day processes of the move — departing the Earth on a space elevator, the six months on the ship between the two planets, and the adjustments to life on Mars once they arrive. Alas, the human aspects of this story are more of a letdown. Carmen herself ranges from inoffensively shallow to annoyingly self-involved, and her fling with Paul, the ship’s captain (the only supporting character who’s developed even halfway decently so far) didn’t add to my interest in either her or the story. Things start to pick up a bit towards the end of this segment — Carmen’s personality clash with an authority figure on Mars shows promise (pending its development in the remaining two parts), as does the cliffhanger, which I won’t spoil here. So “Marsbound” doesn’t start out on the best foot, but has enough potential for redemption that I’ll withhold ultimate judgement until I’ve read the rest of the story.

In J. Timothy Bagwell’s novelette “Tangible Light,” a resentful young Indian man named Prashan discovers the monumentally important reason behind his father’s odd dying wish. Ideas jostle up against one another in this conceptually crowded tale — Prashan’s complicated family relations, individuality in a historically enormous population, Earth’s place in an uncaring universe, and a useful new technology (along with some interesting different uses for that tech) all made this a rich, satisfying read. It’s not flawless — there was an unwelcome whiff of real-world intrusion in the political aspect of the plot, and I’m not 100% sure the ending worked for me. But these were easily-overlooked minor missteps in what was, overall, a quite enjoyable story. I’ll be looking for Bagwell’s name in the future.

I’m a bit on the fence about Geoffrey A. Landis’ “The Man in the Mirror.” On the face of it, it’s a tremendously entertaining old-school SF story about a deep-space prospector whose curiosity gets him stuck sliding back and forth on an enormous, frictionless mirror on a planetoid beyond Pluto’s orbit. With only his wits to get him out of this seemingly hopeless situation, it has the kind of set-up and scientific problem that propelled some of the best of the golden age stories. The only problem is this: not only is it very similar to one of those golden-age stories (”The Men and the Mirror” by Ross Rocklynne, which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1938), but that story is also referenced explicitly (albeit not by name), and there’s dedication to Rocklynne at the story’s end. So while I enjoyed this story hugely, I am ultimately unsure whether to think of it as a useful updating of a classic idea for a modern audience, or as the shameless plundering of an older author’s story. You be the judge.

“The Natural World,” by Don D’Ammassa, was almost as much a horror tale as a sci-fi tale. Sisters Emma and Virginia Wilson, out walking in the Victorian English countryside with Emma’s unwanted suitor Jared Rackham, discover an unusual structure apparently built by beetle-like insects who exhibit some very unusual behavior. Bizarre events ensue. D’Ammassa evokes the Victorian mindset quite nicely, and sets it an interesting problem, the results of which were convincing and entertaining. Nothing life-changing or exceptionally memorable here, but a fine tale nevertheless.

Carl Frederick’s “The Engulfed Cathedral” presented a number of problems for me. I had similar problems with his novelette “Double Helix, Downward Gyre” in the January/February 2007 Analog — Frederick’s left-wing polemicizing really gets in the way of both the enjoyment and the believability of his storytelling. In a near-future where global warming has raised the sea levels considerably and genetic modification is commonplace, a worship service for a conference of geneticists, held in a submerged cathedral in the Mediterranean Sea, provides an opportunity for violent Christian terrorists to make their feelings about gene-mods known in a horrifying fashion.

Okay, here we go. As a devout, practicing Christian myself, I’m firmly in the Francis Collins/Alister McGrath camp. I don’t have any hostility towards science, nor any problems reconciling my religious beliefs with my scientific knowledge and understanding. So the recent trend in many SF stories (especially in Analog) of presenting an irreconcilable conflict between religion and science (or, as they present it, superstition and reason) has never really flown with me. These authors seem to have an over-inflated awareness and/or fear of fundamentalists’ influence in the world today (witness such troubling ideas as “Christian terrorists,” something I’ve seen in several stories before this one). But there’s another real weakness in this story: In an apparent effort to be fair, Frederick creates a protagonist (physicist Paul Ryan) who is supposed to be actively religious himself. But Paul’s thoughts and statements to this effect don’t sound like any kind of genuine religious inner life that I’ve ever heard of. In fact, they sound like what someone who’s only seen religious people from afar, and doesn’t like them, would guess must be going on in their heads. That, along with the smug way Paul’s non-believing wife gets him to question his beliefs by the end of the story, made this story not only impossible for me to believe as an accurate evocation of human behavior, but also, like “Double Helix…,” actually offensive in some ways.

So I get it. Carl Frederick’s work is just not for me. Since he appears quite frequently in the pages of Analog, I’ll try to compensate for that in future reviews.

The rest of the issues stories get reviewed in the next post.

From an isolated island in Maine, a woman calls out to a lost lover, wondering plaintively where he is and what has happened to him.  Her days are full of simple survival, long walks with her wolfhound Finn, references to Greek mythology, and memories of the time she spent with him. Something terrible seems to have happened in the world outside her remote island enclave, but all she cares about are the infrequent messages from her loved one.

Another plaintive, lonely short story, continuing the trend of downers in this year’s Nebula-nominated short stories. It was very poetic, but more than a little frustrating. The language is beautiful, and the way Hand uses her words to evoke a palpable, primal sense of loss and longing is quite remarkable. Still, I ended the story no wiser than I was at the beginning, in terms of knowing who this narrator is, what has happened to the world, and what, really, she had and then lost with her unnamed addressee. So I’ll think of this one like a prose poem, a picture of melancholy and the passage of time in a place that is untouched by external catastrophe. Still, I’d like to have known what that catastrophe was, and the tantalizing but unfulfilled hints left me ultimately unsatisfied.

Susan Lawson was the author of a series of children’s books about a girl named Pip and her adventures in a magical land with the likes of Jack Feather, Hyacinth, and the Thorn King. Her daughter Philippa, now a successful soap opera star, was the inspiration for those stories. When her mother passes away, everyone remembers how much they enjoyed the Pip books when they were children, and suddenly Philippa is again living in her mother’s shadow. She leaves her job, her home, and her life in California and goes back to the cabin in the New England woods where her mother wrote the books. There she tries to deal with the memories of her mother, the burden of her mother’s fame (and her own), and what really happened during her childhood, when the stories were more than just stories.

Like “Helen Remembers the Stork Club,” this story is mostly a character study and vignette, with some fantasy elements thrown in that intensify the overall feeling of melancholic nostalgia. We’re given glimpses of Philippa’s personality and life, both as a grown up TV star and as a child, when the reality was both more and less wonderful than fans of her mother’s books would realize.

I tend to have a harder time with short stories than with longer works, because at such lengths it’s hard to do the kind of idea- or plot-based things that get me going. “Pip and the Fairies” is a deft bit of portraiture and a fine piece of writing, but it didn’t rise above that personal limitation to really stand out in my mind. That is, I stress, purely a personal response, and no reflection on the story’s objective merits or Ms. Goss’ talent.

Pete, a low-key guy who loves movies more than anything else in the world, finds a strange little video store called Impossible Dreams, a store that he’s positive wasn’t there before. Unable to resist going in, he finds the shelves lined with movies that shouldn’t exist — The Magnificent Ambersons with 50 minutes of restored footage (it was edited out by the studio and later destroyed) and director’s commentary (Orson Welles died in 1985), I, Robot written by Harlan Ellison (published in book form but never produced), Casablanca starring George Raft instead of Humphrey Bogart, and so many others. It is literally like walking through a dream for Pete. Unfortunately, though, the movies aren’t the only things that are different inside Impossible Dreams, and those other differences might keep Pete from ever getting to watch even one of these films. Then there’s Ally, the cute clerk who seems to be the only person in the store — can she help or does she just think that Pete’s a crazy person?

Fantastic, wonderful, delightful. Can you tell I loved this story? In the limited space of only about 6,600 words, Tim Pratt manages to give us two completely appealing characters and an actual plot. If you have any appreciation for film, especially the classic kind, this story will hit you right between the eyes. I was reminded of the Library of Dreams in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic, where all the books that had been dreamed of but never written existed. Pete, our protagonist, is presented with, essentially, his heart’s desire, and also presented with a number of obstacles to him attaining that desire. And the best part was how, over the course of the story, Pratt makes it even more interesting than that with a romantic subplot that was cute and perfectly intertwined with the main story thread.

All in all: A fantastic feel-good story, economically packing lots of good stuff into a deceptively short story.

Helen — the Helen, as in “of Troy,” as in getting lots of boats on their way with her face, that Helen — is thousands of years old and living in a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan (her long life a by-product of being the daughter of Zeus). World-weary doesn’t begin to describe how she’s feeling lately, and now that time is finally, finally starting to take its toll on her legendary beauty, she frankly isn’t thrilled with the way people have started to treat her. She pays for a date with a handsome, vapid escort-for-hire, but spends most of her time missing the past. Most of all she misses the Stork Club, a long-gone hotspot on East 53rd street where once upon a time Helen hobnobbed with the celebrated and the powerful, back in a time when the world, like Helen, was more beautiful.

A nice little study of a fascinating, if not altogether likeable character. Although the narration is third-person limited, it seems mostly Helen’s internal monologue. As such, it is one of the strongest elements of this story, because Friesner gives her such a distinctive voice and a powerful memory. In a relatively short time she creates a very well-drawn portrait of this woman. She spends a lot of time in catty, less-than-fond reminisces of her Trojan War contemporaries and divine relatives. Her “date” provides a framework for the actual events, such as they are, of the story, but what plot there is is slight indeed. Mostly, this is a strong depiction of Helen of Troy at 3,300 years old or so. Friesner also seems to be grinding a bit of a personal axe regarding how the aging and less-attractive are treated in modern American society; it’s hard to argue with the premise, although I’m not sure I sympathize entirely with Helen’s reactions to such things, understandable as they are. There’s a cute little twist at the end that nicely undermines all the cynicism that precedes it.

All in all: Strongly written and enjoyable, if a tad on the depressing side in a tempus fugit kind of way.

2007 NEBULA AWARDS (to be awarded May 12, 2007 at the Financial Center Marriott in New York City)

Novels
From the Files of the Time Rangers by Richard Bowes (Golden Gryphon Press, 2005)
The Girl in the Glass by Jeffrey Ford (Dark Alley, 2005)
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra, 2006)
To Crush the Moon by Wil McCarthy (Bantam Spectra, 2005)
Seeker by Jack McDevitt (Ace, 2005)
Farthing by Jo Walton (Tor, 2006)

Novellas
“Sanctuary” by Michael A. Burstein (Analog, Sept 2005)
Burn by James Patrick Kelly (Tachyon Publications, 2005)
“The Walls of the Universe” by Paul Melko (Asimov’s, Apr/May 2006)
“Inclination” by William Shunn (Asimov’s, Apr/May 2006)

Novelettes
“The Language of Moths” by Christopher Barzak (Realms of Fantasy, Apr 2005)
“Two Hearts” by Peter S. Beagle (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2005)
“Little Faces” by Vonda N. McIntyre (Sci Fiction, 23 Feb 2005)
“Journey into the Kingdom” by M. Rickert (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2006)
“Walpurgis Afternoon” by Delia Sherman (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec 2005)

Short Stories
“Helen Remembers the Stork Club” by Esther M. Friesner (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2005)
“Pip and the Fairies” by Theodora Goss (Strange Horizons, 3 Oct 2005)
“Echo” by Elizabeth Hand (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2005)
“Henry James, This One’s for You” by Jack McDevitt (Subterranean #2, Nov 2005)
“The Woman in Schrödinger’s Wave Equations” by Eugene Mirabelli (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aug 2005)
“An End to All Things” by Karina Sumner-Smith (Children of Magic, DAW, 2006)

Novels
Eifelheim by Michael F. Flynn (Tor, 2006)
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (Del Rey, 2006)
Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (Tor, 2006)
Blindsight by Peter Watts (Tor, 2006)

Novellas
“The Walls of the Universe” by Paul Melko (Asimov’s, Apr/May 2006)
“A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2006)
“Inclination” by William Shunn (Asimov’s, Apr/May 2006)
“Lord Weary’s Empire” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s, Dec 2006)
“Julian: A Christmas Story” by Robert Charles Wilson (PS Publishing, 2006)

Novelettes
“Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Asimov’s, Dec 2006)
“Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” by Michael F. Flynn (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2006)
“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald (Asimov’s, July 2006)
“All the Things You Are” by Mike Resnick (Jim Baen’s Universe, Oct 2006)
“Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” by Geoff Ryman (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct 2006)

Short Stories
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things, Morrow, 2006)
“Kin” by Bruce McAllister (Asimov’s, Feb 2006)
“Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt (Asimov’s, July 2006)
“Eight Episodes” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s, June 2006)
“The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Strange Horizons, 4 Sept 2006)