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I sat down, intending to read a couple stories from the new issue, take some time off to digest them, dip back in, and finish another few tomorrow.
Didn't happen. I read the whole mag in one sitting. It's a bonanza of good fiction; a buffet of quality speculative story-telling.
My favorite entrees:
Body Language, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Saskia is a puppeteer, whose previous projects include creating the personality for the robotic eDog. When a kidnapped child's ransomers request the boy's eDog to deliver the money, the FBI contacts Saskia to help rescue the boy. Kowal manipulates this story with skill and deftness-- the little ironies of Saskia being a better puppetmaster than the FBI's Artificial Intelligence; the delicious plot twists that are delivered with subtlety. Kowal (a puppeteer herself, in real life) knows that its not in the grand motions that characters are made; but in the small personal quirks that accumulate subtly and slowly.
Lo'ihi Rising, by Geoffrey W. Cole starts out slow and a bit confusing. Stick with it-- the payoff is worth it. Fadid is a composer (literally) of a virtual world, whose songs all point back to his failed relationship with Kabime, his lost love of thousands of years ago. When a volcanic seamount that the two had scouted out begins to breach the surface, Fadid leaves his comet-side studio apartment (as it were), and comes back to Earth to make good on his promise to meet Kabime and have their consciousness(es?) merge.
I know...it's confusing as all get out when you lay the summary to paper like this. Cole is a better writer than me-- he weaves far-future science and music together, along with relationships, jealousy, and (believe it or not) a sleazy realtor and a avant-garde crochety poet together to make for a great yarn.
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Lo'ihi Rising came through my slush pile, and I was laughing with delight when I first read it. I told Edmund it was full of scifi weirdness, but good weird. I also had a hard time describing it!
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