Analog, January/February 2025“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin
“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike
“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler
“Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann
“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley
“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert
“Notes From Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden
“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day
“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor
“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham
“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen
“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté
“Vigil” by James Van Pelt
“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab
“The Spill” by M. T. Reiten
“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson
“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo
“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
With a single novella, a quartet of novelettes, and no less than fourteen short stories, the emphasis in this issue is definitely on briefer lengths of fiction. In fact, the lead short story supplies the inspiration for the magazine’s cover art, often reserved for a novella.
“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin mostly takes place aboard a sea vessel that fights excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere via bioengineered diatoms. The protagonist, who communicates with an artificial intelligence orbiting the Earth, takes two young people on his ship and faces a dangerous storm.
I hope I have conveyed the fact that this short story packs multiple concepts into a small space. In fact, I have left out many other speculative premises that appear in the text. The result is a very dense work of fiction that requires careful reading. At first, it is difficult to tell what’s happening or what this future world is like, but patient readers will be rewarded with a vivid and imaginative tale with appealing characters.
The novelette “Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike takes place in the early twentieth century. Kidnappers attempt to abduct a scientist who has invented practical solar power, but he is rescued by what seem to be people from the future. The man ponders what the time travelers want, and continues the development of his invention.
The folks from the future never show up again, and the bulk of the story deals with the inventor’s life after the attempted kidnapping. I found this to be anticlimactic, as the motives of the time travelers are never explicitly stated. (The protagonist, and thus the reader, assumes that it has to do with preventing climate change.) The work is best enjoyed as a portrait of its time and place.
In “Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler, the narrator, after being shot by police, has her consciousness downloaded into the dead body of another woman. Due to a bureaucratic error, this was the wrong body, and the narrator, formerly Black, is now White. She seeks out the husband of the dead woman whose body she now wears.
It can be seen that this story deals with several issues, from race to gun violence. (The White woman was also shot dead, but by a coworker rather than police.) The work is fairly short, and doesn’t go into these themes as deeply as they deserve. The climax, in which the husband of the dead woman sees the narrator in his late wife’s body, is powerful, but unrelated to the issues mentioned above.
In “Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann, a lawyer has to decide whether to accept a neurological implant that will take over routine tasks. The experience of a fellow attorney who rejected the augmentation influences his thinking.
The story is open-ended, with the protagonist still pondering his choice. This may frustrate some readers. The premise raises questions of efficiency versus intuition. If nothing else, it offers food for thought.
The novelette “Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley features an elderly couple who win a lottery that offers them the chance to be young again. The man runs into trouble with criminals, while the woman, thinking he has left her, returns to her former activity as a fighter against the Taliban.
The author creates a complex and convincing future that is neither utopian nor dystopian, but a mixture of good and bad. The plot serves both as a suspenseful crime story and as a psychological study.
In “Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert, people with obsessive/compulsive disorder can be given a drug that causes them to concentrate on the maintenance of starships. In this manner, their mental condition is put to profitable use. The main character has served this way before, and has to decide if she should return to that way of life.
The premise in interesting, if somewhat implausible. (Are there enough people with this disorder to support the starships? Are they the only ones who can be trusted to perform such duties?) Some readers may find the protagonist’s decision questionable.
“Notes From Your Descendants” by Lorrain Alden is a brief tale that takes the form of messages from four generations, dating from 2059 to 2168. They deal with the characters’ genetic enhancements. This tiny story ends in a mildly ironic way.
“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day is narrated by a woman whose husband has recently died. While she was caring for him, bioengineered algae that primarily devours manufactured materials has taken over the world. The resulting apocalypse destroys civilization, but the narrator finds a touch of hope.
The algae behave in ways I found very hard to believe. The manner in which it might be defeated also strains credibility. The best aspect of the story is the narrator’s straightforward, informal style.
In “As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor, two people separated by thousands of miles communicate via a video meeting, in which they prepare food together. Each one is reluctant to reveal love for the other.
I have deliberately omitted the speculative content of this story, as it is not relevant to the simple plot. The pair interact by advanced virtual reality, and the woman is about to depart from Earth on a starship. The characters act like lovesick adolescents instead of mature adults, and their conversation borders on the cloyingly cute.
The main character in “Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham accidentally discovers a way to travel into alternate versions of London, some very similar to the familiar one and others wildly different. He falls in love in one of these parallel worlds, but the arrival of an alternate version of himself causes complications.
The plot is that of the eternal triangle, in which two of the people involved are the same person. (One might call it an isosceles triangle.) The various parallel Londons are described only briefly, and are far more interesting than the love story. The story feels more like fantasy than science fiction (the way to reach other realities is to walk on a road of mist under the full moon) and thus seems out of place in Analog.
In the novelette “Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen, conspirators kidnap a forensic anthropologist and force him to study samples from the skeletons of two bodies thought to be the so-called Princes in the Tower, heirs to King Edward IV of England. (This is a famous historical mystery, often treated in fictional form, from Shakespeare’s play Richard III to mystery writer Josephine Tey’s popular 1951 novel The Daughter of Time.)
The motive is to determine if either Prince survived to have descendants, giving members of the conspiracy a claim to the throne. One of the criminals has a hidden agenda. The anthropologist performs the required task, while trying to find a way to escape.
This is a suspenseful crime story, with intriguing speculative technology and an interesting look at the techniques used by forensic anthropologists. History buffs will enjoy this delving into a very old mystery, while others may not. I found the notion that positive proof of the line of the Plantagenets surviving into modern times would upset the current monarch’s claim to the throne much harder to believe than the story’s James Bond style of intrigue and violence. (The conspirators use pseudonyms, and one calls herself Emma, after Emma Peel from the British television series The Avengers.)
The protagonist of “Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté investigates the crash of a spaceship into Ganymede that killed all aboard. He interviews the head of a company that is the rival of the one he works for and the physician who examined the pilot of the vessel.
The structure is that of a mystery story, but more of a whydunit rather than a whodunit. The conclusion is downbeat, and may disappoint readers expecting something more dramatic.
Less than two pages long, “Vigil” by James Van Pelt depicts the descendants of a very old woman witnessing her death aboard a starship. There is little plot, and the work is most effective as a wistful, nostalgic mood piece.
In “Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab, a technician examines a robot soldier in order to find out why its commanding officer thinks it is malfunctioning. In conversation with the machine, he finds out what happened to the human soldier that accompanied it into combat.
The story ponders the relationship between human and robot. It refers to famous movies and television programs about self-sacrificing machines, which may take readers out of the story. This introspective tale is simple, but fairly effective in its depiction of a robot programmed to think of itself as expendable.
Barely a page long, “The Spill” by M. T. Reiten deals with a plague of destructive nanomachines (often known as the grey goo syndrome) that is defeated in a surprisingly simple way. There is not much else to this miniature work than its ironic premise.
The main characters in “Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem are a very old man whose body and mind are deteriorating and the robot that takes care of him. As the man sinks into senility and finally dies, the machine learns more about humanity.
This is a very emotional story that avoids sentimentality. It examines the consequences of aging realistically and makes the robot a sympathetic character without overly humanizing it.
The novelette “Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson takes place in the near future, when NASA sends a pair of spaceships to the Moon to set up a permanent camp and orbiting station. A medical emergency forces a physician/astronaut to work under very difficult conditions.
Both the space travel and medical aspects of this story are depicted in an extremely detailed and convincing way. Despite an inherently dramatic situation (albeit a familiar one) all this technical stuff makes for very dry reading.
At first, “Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo seems like pure fantasy, as a female satyr and a golem set out to rescue a princess from a wizard, in order to free their master from his imprisonment by a sea-dwelling queen. It soon becomes clear that the golem is actually a machine and the other characters are the result of advanced biotechnology.
The setting is richly imagined, from an underwater Venice inhabited by amphibious humans to an antagonist who has made himself resemble the Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem. Although not a comedy, the story has sufficient amount of subtle wit to draw the reader into its colorful world.
The magazine concludes with the novella “Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. The setting is Poland in 1979. The widow of a scientist faces the possibility that she will be forced out of her relatively large apartment by the government because she lives alone. She expects her daughter and son-in-law to arrive soon as permanent guests, justifying her need for the place, but time is running out. Meanwhile, the abusive boyfriend of a neighbor threatens to expose her situation to the authorities, as does a former colleague of her late husband, who is eager to claim the dead man’s work as his own. The situation takes a dramatic turn when the widow discovers an extraordinary device built by her husband.
The homemade machine has a truly astonishing effect; so much so that it is very hard to believe that a single person, no matter how brilliant, could create it. The realistic aspects of the story and its portrait of Poland under Communism are more interesting than its speculative content.
Victoria Silverwolf has read Richard III and The Daughter of Time.