REVIEW SUMMARY:  One strong short story and two fair novelettes stand out in comparison to a novella and short stories that never fully reach their potential.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:   Time travel, the afterlife of nanotech, tactical warfare on a moon orbiting Mars, and an intimate look at two space-inspired young people and more await readers in the pages of the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: One highly creative, thought-provoking short story; two novellettes that are fair; entertaining reflection on year’s best anthologies and their history by Robert Silverberg; nice editorial honoring early female astronauts.
CONS: A novella and short stories which felt like they could go somewhere interesting but never arrived.
BOTTOM LINE:  The March 2013 issue sits at the mediocre end of the spectrum in considering it against some of Asimov’s better offerings.  This is disappointing given the past quality of some of the included authors’ stories and the potential that almost every story appeared to have at the start.  Fans of the authors included should seek out the issue.  Those considering trying Asimov’s for the first time would be best served tracking down the January 2013 issue which set the standard impossibly high for the rest of the year.

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Here are my impressions of five of the six Hugo award Novella Nominees for 2011. Although there are normally only five nominees in any given Hugo category, this year the Novella category had six nominees due to a tie in the nominations. However, since I have not read the novel that it follows (and spoils), I did not read the sixth nominee, Deadline by Mira Grant.

Interestingly, all five of these stories were also 2011 Nebula Award Nominees as well, with a sixth story also nominated due to a tie.

Impressions, comparisons and thoughts on the five nominees reviewed follow.

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Welcome to the debut episode of SF Crossing the Gulf with Karen Burnham and Karen Lord.

We’ll be discussing contemporary hard sf and Caribbean speculative fiction over the course of our new, twice-monthly podcast. We spend most of this first episode discussing “Exhalation” and the collection Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.

Other books we’ll be discussing in the future:

• My Bones and My Flute by Edgar Mittelholzer
• A selection of short stories by Greg Egan
• and The Rainmaker’s Mistake by Erna Broadber
• More titles to be announced when we’re sure we can actually lay our hands on them ourselves.

We look at these stories from our perspectives as readers, writers, critics, scientists, sociologists, women, etc.
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Oleg Kazantsev had the opportunity to do an in-depth interview with John Joseph Adams for SF Signal.

John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. John is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, and his books have been lauded as some of the best anthologies of all time. In addition to his anthology work, John is also the editor and publisher of the magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and he is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. For more information, visit his website at johnjosephadams.com, and you can find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Oleg Kazantsev: Your personal bio says that The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester was a turning point in your reading experience, after which “your reading life became all about finding other books like that one.” Does your early reading experience, and this book in particular, still affect your editor’s taste? If so, to what extent?

John Joseph Adams: I’m sure it does, but it’s hard to say how. I mean, I do still very much enjoy deeply damaged (and sometimes disturbed) protagonists, like Gully Foyle.

OK: You refer to yourself as a sci-fi/fantasy editor and reader. What attracts you to this genre?

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Gardner Dozois has posted on his facebook page that he has just released his long out-of-print anthologies The Year’s Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection to the Amazon Kindle store. And you can get them for just under $7 each. That’s a steal.

My first two Best anthologies from St. Martin’s, THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, FIRST ANNUAL COLLECTION and THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, SECOND ANNUAL COLLECTION, are now available in Kindle editions. These are extremely hard editions to find in print, people have been asking me at cons for decades how they can find them, and I’ve seen them selling for hundreds and even thousands of dollars–so if you ever wanted to read them, the start of my long-running Best of the Year series (soon up to its Twenty-Ninth Annual Edition, which will out in July), this is probably your best chance.

So run out and buy these in a buying frenzy. Buy them as presents for friends. Buy them as gifts for your pets. If they sell well enough in Kindle format, I may be able to convince the publisher that they should make other old, long-out-of-print volumes in the series available in that format as well.

This is great news. I’ve already told the story of how I came to own a physical copy of the first annual collection, now I can get a copy of the missing second annual collection.

Tables of contents follow…
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Here’s the for the upcoming anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel:

• Introduction: In Which Your Editors Consider the Nebula Awards of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
• “Ponies” by Kij Johnson
• “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoff Landis
• “Map of Seventeen” by Chris Barzak
• “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” by James Tiptree, Jr.
• “In the Astronaut Asylum” by Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson
• “Pishaach” by Shweta Narayan
• Excerpt from Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis
• “Bumbershoot” by Howard Hendrix
• “Arvies” by Adam Troy-Castro
• “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” by Harlan Ellison
• “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard
• “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar
• “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone
• Excerpt from I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
• “To Theia” by Ann K. Schwader
• “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky
• 2011 Nebula Awards Nominees and Honorees
• Past Nebula Winners

In my last column, Laird Barron commented, albeit briefly, on the marginalization of the short story. The subject seemed to interest readers, so this time around my guest, Paul Tremblay, and I will discuss the current state of the short story and perhaps a bit of history as to how we got to this point.

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This week’s question is a simple one, but yielded lots of responses. We asked this week’s panelists:

Read on to see some great reading suggestions, then check out Part 1. And be sure to tell us your own favorites!

When I took a creative writing class in college, way back in 1991, we used one of the Norton anthologies. The professor asked us to pick a couple of stories to read and write about, so I of course scoured the table of contents for any science fiction stories at all. I found just a couple among the Cheevers and the Updikes and the Carvers: Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”. The former I had read before and found heavy-handed. (The teacher thought it was grand!) The latter story by LeGuin has stuck with me since. I suppose one could argue that it too is a heavy-handed polemic, but I had never seen science fiction deal so strongly with moral questions. It was quite moving to that 23-year-old fellow…

I think I’ll go re-read it now!

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This week’s question is a simple one, but yielded lots of responses. We asked this week’s panelists:

Read on to see some great reading suggestions, then check out Part 2. And be sure to tell us your own favorites!

One of my favorite horror stories would have to be David J. Schow’s “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy”. It’s the quintessential zombie tale that originally appeared in Skipp and Spector’s classic Book of the Dead anthology. In a collection of great stories by Stephen King, Joe Lansdale and others, this one stands out for humor that is as black as pitch, gore that is both horrifying and hilarious and an unbelievably weird protagonist in the five-hundred pound zombie apocalypse survivor Wormboy. I guarantee anyone who loves stories set in a Romero-esque zombified universe, J.K.M.W cannot be beat. Not with a baseball bat, an axe-handle or out of control spinning helicopter blades.

My favorite recent science fiction story is “Understand“, a great thriller by Ted Chiang. It’s about a coma victim who is injected with an experimental drug after suffering extreme brain damage in a near drowning. The drug not only repairs him; it also makes him smarter. The rest of the story involves the supercritical protagonist trying to find more of the drug to increase his intellect while preparing to meet the one person on Earth who may actually be smarter than he is. It’s a great story. The supercritical Leon’s struggle to live in a world in which he is rapidly becoming smarter and smarter, is fascinating. I actually felt smarter after I’d finished reading it.

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