Website: analogsf.com

"The Mountains of Mourning" Author: Lois McMaster Bujold Main Characters: Miles Vorkosigan Main Elements: Science Fiction - Space Opera "In the Fluff" Author: Rick Shelley Main Characters: Mort Cavendish, the Tuckers Main Elements: Science Fiction - Colony planet "The Epsilon Probe" Author: Deam McLaughin Main Characters: T. Martin Carradyne, Willyum Best Main Elements: Science Fiction - A.I. "When Life Hands you a Lemming..." Author: Thomas A. Easton Main Characters: Cal Main Elements: Science Fiction - Bioengineering "Bank Robbery" Author: W.T. Quick Main Characters: George Stanley, Berg Main Elements: Science Fiction - Cyber Crime Non-Fiction "The Economics of Interstellar Commerce" by Warren Salomon "Editorial: Utopia Test" by Stanley Schmidt "Futures" by Matthew J. Costello "The Alternate View: The Mystique Beat Goes On" by G. Harry Stine "The Reference Library" by Tom Easton

The collection starts with "The Mountains of Mourning". Now I've already read three Vorkosigan books, and I'm sure this story is best appreciated by those who are familiar with the series (in fact exactly the three I've read since that's where this one sits in the chronology). We have a society where anyone born damaged in anyway is, well, disposed of. However we also have Miles, the son of nobility who was himself born damaged. Society is changing, starting to accept that the physically weak may not be also useless, and Miles is determined to prove that. But first, he must got into the backcountry of his family's domain and try to find justice for a child that has been murdered because of her cleft-lip, something easily repaired. But how to convince these people of his authority given he himself is one of these "mutants"? And if he fails, how will he ever take his father's place. I found this was a particularly key story in the Vorkosigan saga and if you're reading this series you will need to try to find a copy of this story as it looks like it will define Miles' character going forward.

"When Life Hands you a Lemming..." is next and it's what I often associate with the short story genre. It's very weird, people are engineering things like cars out of living things like a mix between a cockroach and a lobster, only to find that it's not so easy to do, that such vehicles tend to have a mind of their own and an instinct to return to the sea they forgot to engineer out. I don't particularly recommend it, but a little bit of weird doesn't hurt and can make one think.

"In the Fluff" was interesting, a planet colonized by a group of people wanting to get away from the crime and murder of Earth. For the most part that was working except that every utopia only lasts as long as the people behave themselves. And when a girl is kidnapped, and that is followed by murder, the colony will never be the same. Oh, and don't forget the Fluff, a deadly natural event that occurs every year, to perhaps emphasize that even paradise is almost never what it appears. Nature will do it's own thing.

"Bank Robbery" is a tale of identity theft, which given it was written in 1989 kind of predicted how online our identies could be in the future and how dependent we would be on our databases to define who we are.

Finally, "The Epsilon Probe" at first kind of bored me since it took a while to get to where it was going, but as it went along I started really getting into the tangled web of lies, truths, and possibilities. A story that questions if you program an AI to achieve something, how far would it go to actually achieve it, would it actually make stuff up on it's own and outright lie about it's mission if it was a failure? Or was it human intervention manipulating the data? Or something else entirely, and how would we know? Especially when it takes 11 years for a signal to reach the probe in question and 100 years to send another probe to confirm the results.

I also enjoyed the non-fiction article "The Economics of Interstellar Commerce", which aside from the fact kind of destroying any hope of having meaningful space trade given the laws of physics as we know them. Even if you can get near the speed of light, it can still take a decade, one way, to get from one planet to another, and so any "orders" you make for a product will take 20 years and a LOT of money to arrive...it would be hard to find a product that you couldn't get closer and that doesn't go out of style/date by the time it gets to you. On the other hand, if you travel on such a ship, what appears as 10 years to someone on Earth may be only 3 for you, pretty good if you can make some investments, go on a long holiday, and return to reap your rewards. One thing the author doesn't cover though, is that everyone you knew and loved will have aged those 10 years while you aged your 3, that's not an easy thing to leave out of the equation.

I also really enjoyed the commentary on being able to find a word processing application that just did what you needed and not a billion other things that you didn't, and finding one in a discarded discount bin for less than $10 when the "real" applications were going for near 100...this is actually still true today, the apps have to keep adding more and more useless and obscure features to have an excuse to release a new version...I mean how many features of Word can you name let alone do you use? If anything, this problem is getting worse. Yeah, I know...I'm one of those people that uses my cell phone to *gasp* make phone calls, I can probably count all my texts on one hand (I have found it useful for work email though, but I have an ereader to entertain me so I don't even have games on my phone). So I kind of sympathized with this author writing this 30 years ago.

I haven't had much SF/F magazine experience to judge it's overall quality, but I really did enjoy all the stories. Because it was written nearly 30 years ago there are some funny thoughts on what computers will be like in the future.