Analog, November/December 2025
“Aleyara’s Flight” by Christopher L. Bennett
“The Starworthy Slip” by A.C. Koch
“The Dancing Bear” by Joyce & Stanley Schmidt
“With Lanterns Borne Aloft” by Mark W. Tiedemann
“Termina” by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
“One Peek” by Lilian Garratt-Smithson
“The Wi-Fi Womb” by Avi Burton
“The Mountain At The Heart Of The Labyrinth” by Deborah L. Davitt
“And Every Galatea Shaped Anew” by Marissa Lingen
“People Of The Consortium Worlds V. Rax, God Of Misery” by Leonard Richardson
“Mammoth” by C.L. Schacht
“Faith” by Kate Maruyama
“One Step Away” by Lance Robinson
“The Riches We Take” by Sam W. Pisciotta
“Earth’s Last Library” by James Van Pelt
“Cobalt Plate Special” by Jon Hansen
“The Underappreciation Of Danny White” by David Ebenbach
“Chalice” by James L. Cambias
“Pirates Of Pan” by James Dick
Reviewed by Axylus
Full disclosure: when I was a starry-eyed and under-achieving elementary school student in suburban Flyover State, USA, with pallid skin, matchstick arms and gloriously bucked front teeth, my father had a large stash of copies of Analog in our basement. They weren’t considered contraband; there was just nowhere else to keep a hefty wheelbarrow load of magazines with eye-catching, otherworldly covers. Maybe eight or ten of these dated all the way back to the publication’s venerable pulp format days—bulky riches in my awkward, eager hands. Hiding from the taunting of athletically-inclined neighbor kids, at least two of whom are now six feet under due to a love of liquor, I spent rapturous hours with my nose pointed squarely at all that SF. It is an enduring regret of my life that every one of those mags somehow fell off the earth forever after my parents’ divorce. I really had not read an issue of Analog since then, so it was with quiet but sincere anticipation that I began to read this one. In my tender days of dental malocclusion I might have shed a tear at “Termina” and would definitely have loved “The Underappreciation of Danny White” and “The Pirates of Pan.” As for other stories, well… several of them feature writing that’s as smooth and seamless as the bodywork of an expensive sports car, so Analog raises the bar somewhat on the use of the adjective “well-written.” Alas, however, many fall short in the area of storytelling, in my humble opinion.
The first work, a novella titled “Aleyara’s Flight” by Christopher L. Bennett, immediately sets up an interesting but slightly uncomfortable scenario involving sociocultural interaction. No, I’m not talking about cultures within the story. I’m talking about a clash between the tastes of yours truly and Mr. Bennett and his intended audience. Think of it as different subcultures of dorkdom (and I do fly the dork flag with dork pride). Here we go: I love rich world-building. But take my concept of rich world-building (I hold up the works of Jack Vance as a salient example) and put it on steroids, then take whatever that would be, and put it on even stronger steroids. Then bombard the whole shebang with Incredible Hulk-inducing gamma rays. At that point, you have climbed into the world-building realm of Bennett. Reading this novella is a bit like wading through an encyclopedia of the world he has constructed—and don’t get me wrong, many people are thrilled to the core when they pore over such mountains of minutiae. As for me, not even two pages into the story, I stopped reading and turned to the encyclopedia entry, erm, the background bit in “In an Alien Past: The History Behind ‘Aleyara’s Flight’” in The Astounding Analog Companion (The official Analog Science Fiction and Fact blog, at https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2025/11/12/in-an-alien-past-the-history-behind-aleyaras-flight/ ). But even with that aid, I was still kinda pretty much lost, as often as not. To be honest, I had to read both the novella and the blog page twice before I had any idea at all what was happening to whom. Buffeted by waves of “As you know, Jim” backstory, dodging torpedoes of alien terminology, swimming through thick tides of biological, evolutionary, cultural, and technological detail, I bravely pressed on. Momentarily knocked off course by lines such as “[m]y esteemed biographer has plenty of noble females lining up to let him pollinate their bellyflowers,” I followed Winston Churchill’s advice, and never gave up. Great walls of exposition rose before me, parachuted-in explanations (in painstaking detail) of calendars (“Paira’s calendar was the most precise in the world, dividing the year’s 469 days into fourteen months alternating thirty-three and thirty-four days…”) and folklore and flora and fauna and sexual practices (“Dissection of animal and Biauru corpses suggested that almost invisibly fine components of the reproductive organs must be brought into precise alignment, both in position and in the timing with which…”) and… oh, you get the picture. I did not enjoy this novella at all. It was just a slog, pure and simple. From my perspective, this is world-building porn. But we have to be fair here. As I said, many people love this stuff. Analog granted it twenty-eight pages of their choice real estate. And to be fair again, there is actually some drama that starts taking place about twenty pages in to that twenty-eight page total. If this is to your taste, then this story rates a two-out-of-three star review. Me, I see no stars at all. Plot summary: On the planet Rulenau (adjective: Rulai), sentient scaled bipeds known as Biauru dwell atop a canopy of huge forest trees with leaves so densely interlinked that the canopy can be built upon on as if on solid ground. The creatures do not even travel to the forest floor beneath them, believing it to be the Under, the land of the dead. In a previous story, a female Biaru (Aleyaru, as in the story’s title) believed that the Under was a tangible place, and journeyed there with three companions (Mirelle, Tirenu, and Narrayo). Aleyaru has developed a philosophy known as the Method, which is analogous to the scientific method, in competition with the folklore-based culture of her people. She and her followers, the Aleyarists, have separated from the other Biauru. There are other sentient creatures who live on Nilyoro, the solid ground. In this story the Aleyarist band is joined by one such Nilyoru, named Paira. A young Nilyoru king gives the Aleyarists financial backing, but Aleyara and her followers are betrayed by characters both inside and outside her own group.
As Exhibit A for well-written stories that took a bit of a miss on storytelling, see for example “The Starworthy Slip” by A.C. Koch. The protagonist is a getaway driver, erm, getaway spaceship pilot for a thief who is stealing a priceless artifact. Working under the assumed name of Juvisado Lumami, he is also running a side-scheme to acquire a fool-proof new identity via the skills of Naïma, a brilliant data engineer. For all the skill and craft embedded in its writing, I humbly suggest that there’s no emotional payoff in this short story, perhaps because there are no stakes to speak of. Lumami seems to experience little or no threat of being captured, and has nothing of value hanging in the balance. The key choice he makes is not an outcome of any deep inner wound, character flaw, or other particularly compelling emotional force. Neither he nor Naïma are afforded any particularly memorable personal characteristics, aside from skill at their respective jobs. In short, there’s no emotional engine driving this story. If there’s any payoff at all, it is a modest cognitive reward, as hinted-at elements of Naïma’s own identity become clear.
In “The Dancing Bear,” a novelette by Joyce and Stanley Schmidt, polar bears are both an economic boon and a constant source of potential danger to the people of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. Jake Flintrock is a knowledgeable and capable Inuit who serves on polar bear patrol, working to protect people from bears and vice versa. As the community discusses a recent increase in bear attacks, Jake mentions the legend of the Dancing Bear, which represents a temporary mystical union between a bear and a man. He himself was formerly a shaman. The final outcome of a crisis in the town leads some to wonder if the Dancing Bear is a real phenomenon, while another possible explanation resides in the experiments of a visiting team of scientists.
“With Lanterns Borne Aloft” by Mark W. Tiedemann could’ve been retitled “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The story never really picked up anything vaguely resembling momentum or power, or any other emotional or dramatic element. In it, the citizens of Springville are thrown into a bit of turmoil by the return of a prodigal former resident. And the returning black sheep has brought strangers along with him. The story builds on a mysterious sense of paranoid isolationism of the town’s residents, hinting that there are some dark secrets buried here. And yet, nothing comes of it. It features excellent writing skill in a story that goes nowhere, and does not really seem to want to go anywhere. It is nearly 100% atmosphere. And in the end it lands not with a thud, but a quizzical shrug. I would like to give it points for drawing its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, but if there is any hidden connection between the sublime eeriness of that work and this story by Tiedemann, I have not yet fathomed the answer.
“Termina” by Subodhana Wijeyeratne is a genuinely touching (and needless to say, very well-written) story of a robot raising a human from infancy. The problem here is not so much the story itself, which is pretty good, but the well-trampled ground of its trope. Humans die, robots look on, poignant sunset. Stop me if you’ve read or watched something like this before. Nevertheless, this story is recommended.
Stop me if you’ve read or watched this one before: thousands of years into an interstellar voyage, a space colonist awakens from stasis and deals with the reality that her loved ones are long dead. If you have never read that sort of story before, then “One Peek” by Lilian Garratt-Smithson will be a revelatory experience for you. Otherwise, take comfort in the fact that it is very well written.
Stop me if you’re read or watched this one before: an invasive technology, presented as being beneficial to its users, is aggressively marketed to customers who agree to let it be implanted in their bodies. Then the subscription rate keeps going up and up, as negative side-effects occur. If you haven’t, you may enjoy “The Wi-Fi Womb” by Avi Burton.
I have really never been much impressed by the flash fiction I’ve read. “The Mountain at the Heart of the Labyrinth” is flash fiction by Deborah L. Davitt, and surprisingly enough, it is to my mind the best thing encountered up to this point in this issue. In it a woman journeys to a cryovolcano on Pluto to scatter the ashes of her dead husband. Partially due to its brevity, it leaves key questions unanswered—but in a gently poetic way that created an emotional connection (in me, at least). Its spare plot seemed intriguing rather than merely under-specified. Your mileage may vary, but in my mind, this story is recommended.
Once again checking in from the land of clever titles (although this one actually makes sense), “And Every Galatea Shaped Anew” by Marissa Lingen is a short-short story about a romantic breakup brought about by the protagonist becoming fed up with the cumulative effects of technologically-induced personality alterations. These changes to her perceptions and attitudes were specifically designed to make her more compatible with her partner. The level of tension is so slight that it barely registers, and while the ending wants to reach for workaday profundity, it instead feels a bit banal.
The title of the short story “People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery” by Leonard Richardson is of course a tone promise. An intergalactic lawyer faces a God of Misery and his soul-crushing Bellows of the Reap, and everything proceeds more or less as you might expect. The ending is a bit anticlimactic.
“Mammoth” by C.L. Schacht is a short story worth the price of admission. In a futuristic China where protein is rationed and everyone is watched nearly constantly by drones—the People’s Eyes—an agent of the Committee on Crime attempts to catch smugglers of woolly mammoth meat. The mammoths, recreated from ancient DNA, live in a preserve called Mammoth Run. Whenever one dies, game supervisors sell the meat to the organized criminals of the Triad to help keep the park financially viable. The story includes interesting characters in an interesting setting, enjoyable twists and turns, and a satisfying ending. Recommended.
“Faith,” a novelette by Kate Maruyama, really threw a pitch straight into my strike zone by starting with a snippet of poetry. The evocative title and poetry snippet are both wholly irrelevant to the story, however, which is about family bonds, losing family members, and moving on in life. And I really should have liked this story more. But it felt too much like a heavy dose of catharsis for the author, with a faint sprinkle of a speculative-genre air freshener, and a Taylor Swift-ish “resuming my own life and relationships” cherry on top. I think my appreciation of the tale might have been improved if the protagonist had taken a far more active role in the outcome, being forced to pay some sort of bitter price for the wisdom and knowledge she gained, by making some kind of utterly blind leap of… wait, what’s that word? Oh yeah, faith. Faith in someone or something. That would have closed the circle for me. And oh yeah, the plot: on a Martian colony, the daughter of a genius biochemist must obtain the procedures for creating a bacteria that converts plastics into oxygen from her mother. Unfortunately, her mother is in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s, fading in and out of reality. The daughter has to put her own life on hold, somewhat miserably, to be the constant caretaker for her mom. She spends endless days and hours waiting on her mother hand and foot, sometimes being recognized and sometimes not, hoping her mother’s fading contact with the world will somehow be strengthened enough to share the bacteria creation process. After internal debate, this story is recommended (with reservations) for its realistic emotional experience.
There are readers who love Tom Clancy-like stories with long, complex setups and very heavy doses of geopolitics. Those folks may also love “One Step Away,” a novelette by Lance Robinson, if they forgive its lack of tension or action. Me personally, if I have to wait about 5k words for someone to take (a minor degree of) action, my focus begins to wobble. But never mind that—global warming threatens the world, and the world knows it. Hell, even the Republicans in the US have stopped denying it! Regrettably, the UN is cram-packed with representatives who cannot agree on any course of action, in a complex political standoff: “They all knew what to do, but were tied with strings that would not let them do it.” The stressed-out negotiators fret, fail, and retreat to their AI mental health apps. Something, however, is in the air, some aura of excitement tied to winds of political change. Can it be true? But both the tension that should have been driving this tale and the speculative element that should have seeped into its bones needed to be hit with a considerably bigger hammer, in my opinion. Readers who love carbon taxes and/or spend their spare time breathlessly following the programming of C-SPAN will find some comfort here.
“The Riches We Take” by Sam W. Pisciotta is a short story with a promising structure: One person. One problem at a time, and no more than three problems. Woman versus corporate bloodsuckers. Woman versus nature. Woman versus loneliness, against all prior evidence. How will it end, and why? I like my tricky stories tricky, and my straightforward stories straightforward. This one is the latter. On Callisto, an icy moon of Jupiter, Clementine lives a hard and mostly solitary life mining mineral-rich meteorite rock, detritus from past space collisions. She needs to find a rich vein to keep herself financially solvent, but corporate claim jumpers abound. And Jupiter’s moon is a stern schoolmistress indeed, with brutal temperatures that drop far further during an eclipse. What seems to be missing here is a character to be the face of the Bad Guys—someone to do Clementine wrong in a way that ends up creating or significantly exacerbating her later woes, interacting with her briefly, then walking away (preferably sans animosity or mustache-twirling: the henchmen of evil corporations are almost always overwritten). This would gel the reader’s opposition to Clementine’s foes, creating more emotional energy in support of Clementine.
“Earth’s Last Library” by James Van Pelt is a story that had me teetering on the recommended/not gonna recommend fence. Its two characters, astronauts Lyra and Cetus, are taking two ships filled with priceless ancient Earth books through space when Lyra’s ship malfunctions. Cetus suggests they just abandon the disabled ship and all its books and continue on; Lyra is adamant that losing any books is unacceptable. Together they try to formulate a plan to bring all the books in one ship, including one suggestion that would be fatal for both of sthem. Perhaps if they had tried an initial plan that failed? Perhaps if the characters had more sharply-drawn and contrasting personalities, more memorable dialog? Admittedly, the story is very short. Just eyeballing it, it seems fewer than 3k words long. But the entire weight of its narrative experience is placed upon the cleverness of the solution they devise, which is not quite enough to sway this reader.
In “Cobalt Plate Special,” a short story by Jon Hansen, a hostess named Pru in the Barsoom restaurant in Burroughs Habitat (which I guess is on Mars?) has communication problems with an alien “cyber” (“…an average size humanoid, cobalt skin covered in various cybernetic implants and attachments”). The customer is offended, controversy ensues, Pru is demoted to waitress, and then she must face an entire group of cybers and find a way to communicate with them.
Thank you, Analog, for including “The Underappreciation of Danny White” by David Ebenbach. Earth has been taken over by Overdominators, aliens that “…float a few inches off the ground, looking kind of like mustard-colored, king-sized blankets glowing and roiling in the wind.” The lives of human beings have become painfully grim. Ebenbach’s tale recounts a bizarre and dangerous Thanksgiving dinner with humans and Overdominators and… NFL football. I should tell you more, but honestly, I don’t want to. This one is memorable. Definitely recommended.
And at this point Analog throws me atop that recommend/not recommend fence again with “Chalice” by James L. Cambias. Similar to “Mammoth,” the setting and plot are interesting, the characters are interesting, and the writing is topnotch. It’s just that the surprise ending was unsatisfying to me, not so much because of what happened, but who did it. In this story, two thieves (Devica and Ispatica) are hired by a third (Mukade) to steal tech from an asteroid that is heavily guarded, infested with invasive nanobots, and under quarantine. Mukade’s motive is interesting. The three have very satisfyingly different personalities and speech patterns, and their time on the asteroid is tense and reminiscent (to me at least) of many “alien infestation” movies. I think my hesitation here is unfair. This is a good story. Recommended.
And finally we have “The Pirates of Pan,” a novelette by James Dick. Does Analog always save the best for last? This oh-so-Heinleinian story won my admiration. In it, a young Fire Control Officer aboard a trader spaceship declines to fire upon pirates engaging the spacecraft. The pirates board, but what they steal puzzles him. Back home, his wife solves the puzzle, and the conclusion she draws leads them and many of their trader colleagues on a radically different path in life. Strongly recommended.