Redstone Science Fiction #10, March 2011

“The Hubbard Continuum” by Lavie Tidhar
“First Light” by Patrick Lundrigan

Reviewed by Jo-Anne Odell

In “The Hubbard Continuum” by Lavie Tidhar, Gordon Hartwell uses a Thetan implant station to travel through time. In order to prevent a devastating war, he returns to the past, jumping forward in stages to implement his plan. Though he knows it will deprive his world of something he considers a great truth, Hartwell considers it the lesser of two evils. His vehicle is the creation of a new work of fiction, and a young Isaac Asimov, his chosen author.

This is one of those clever stories that will delight those familiar with the subject matter, and confuse everyone else.

In “First Light” by Patrick Lundrigan, the crew of the spaceship Icarus takes great risks to hunt down the technology of an extinct species they call the Tree Huggers. What they seek is organic, self-repairing technology, something prized by the Fleet. The holy grail of the new, green science is that the Tree Huggers captured more than just technology. When our hero and his companion discover an ancient cache, they find something amazing.

It’s both an appealing tale, in that it scratches the surface of many interesting ideas, and a frustrating one, in that it fails to explore most of them.