"Walk in Silence" by Catherine Asaro
"A Deadly Medley of Smedley" by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
"Emma" by Kyle Kirkland
"Coming of Age" by Mary Soon Lee

The bulk of this issue of Analog is taken up by part three of Rajnar Vajra's four-part serial "Shootout at the Nokai Corral" (which I won't be reviewing as per Tangent policy) and Catherine Asaro's novella "Walk in Silence". That leaves us with three short stories but no novelettes this issue.

The first of the short stories is F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's hilarious Moorcockian multiverse spoof "A Deadly Medley of Smedley". In this pun-filled extravaganza the Paradox Patrol in their trusty chrono-cruiser pursue the nefarious interdimensional time smuggler Smedley Faversham and his evil henchmen (who just happen to be alternate universe versions of himself) up and down the River of Time. Memorably pun-named characters such as the protagonists Julie Anne Callender, her brother Gregorian Callender, and their uncle Newgate Callender (with his best impersonation of Scotty from Star Trek) hound Faversham and his minions, running into the likes of Mobius Dick, the one-sided whale (yes, and it gets worse…), until the scoundrels are finally captured. The Paradox Patrol's hilarious, whacky interrogation of the three-in-one alternate Faversham's is guaranteed to leave you totally confused in a pun-filled orgy in which nothing is sacred.

This sort of story will never be my choice for the Hugo Awards (as I'm a boring old fart and will pick something more straight-laced), but it is a very clever and entertaining pun-fest that will have you groaning from start to finish. Very enjoyable.

Kyle Kirkland's "Emma" is a short story of the more serious kind, in which a scientist in a future Earth society "resurrects" an elderly woman who died way back in the mid-twenty-first century by using the latest quantum computing technology to recreate an exact copy of her. The woman, Emma Krath, is all alone in this strange future, with everyone she's ever known long dead, but these future inhabitants of Earth need her for some reason. She's persuaded (against her better judgement) to play the part of impartial observer (as she's the only really impartial person on the planet) in a forthcoming teleconference between Earth and its colonies. Her responsibility is a great one, for if the conference fails, there will be war. But as she struggles in vain to make any sense of her research into the background to the conflict, she begins to realise that the problem is that nobody else understands the reasons behind it either. Language has become so obscure and convoluted, filled with legalese, abstract concepts and theories, and total gobbledeygook that people find it impossible to understand what should be simple ideas. Both sides are on the slippery road to war because they are totally incapable of understanding the point of view of the other side. In a stroke of genius Emma has a simple AI take her place at the teleconference, and spur both sides to seek further talks by the simple tactic of stopping the conference at various intervals to have delegates explain the real meaning of obscure terminology, thus forcing them to actually think about the true meaning behind the language.

Overall I found this an interesting story which makes some very interesting points about the importance of clarity in language and communication and deeper points made on the nature of equality in that, all other external factors being taken into account, we're all pretty much equal.

"Coming of Age" by Mary Soon Lee is my favourite from among the short stories. It's set several millennia (at least) in the future, and begins with a citizen of Mars receiving an invitation to attend the eighteenth birthday celebrations of a young man, the strange thing being that this young man is a total stranger. Intrigued, the protagonist, Duncan Mannheim, accepts the invitation and makes the forty three light-year trip to the artificial worldlet which is the home of the aforementioned young man, Cary, his parents, and more than two hundred other colonists. But it isn't long before Duncan finds he's been drawn into the life of a rather disturbed young adult who seems determined to do something very foolish and dangerous for his "coming of age".

This short story would have benefited greatly from being expanded into a novelette or even a novella. There's so much background potential that I was left wanting to know so much more about this universe. It gives tantalizing glimpses of a far future society in which the human lifespan has been greatly extended so that people live to well over a thousand years old. The human race has long been purged of its baser tendencies, but has lost something as a result – the urges, obsessions and drives which made their ancestors so great and talented. In this boring and sterile future there seem to be few challenges and little drive left in the human race to accomplish anything when all the exploration and retention of knowledge is better done by sophisticated AIs.

The structure of this society and the various social groups seems to be radically different to our own, and young people are relatively rare, as you'd expect in a society comprised mainly of people many centuries old. It would be a lonely society for children, who are ritually "bratted" soon after birth to another child – I'd like to have had this explored in more depth, but it seems to be a bonding along the lines of "blood brothers", but with a much deeper emotional and social significance. I found this and quite a few aspects of the background to this society very interesting, and deserving to be elaborated upon in future stories. Just who were the mysterious "Builders" who created all the artificial worlds, then mysteriously vanished? Did Duncan an Cary ever meet again? Will Mary Soon Lee ever expand on this universe in future stories? I certainly hope so.

Now we come to what was, for me, the highlight of this edition of Analog: Catherine Asaro's novella "Walk in Silence". I must confess that I've always been a big fan of Ms. Asaro's writing, in particular her Skolian Empire stories and their offshoots. She always writes intelligent, entertaining stories, full of strong characters and interesting relationships. Whenever I see her name on the cover of a magazine, her story is usually the first, or one of the first, that I read, as I know it's certain to be good.

And "Walk in Silence" doesn't disappoint. An enthralling novella set in the Skolian sequence, it focuses on the female captain of an Earth starship, Jess Fernandez, who has a romantic and sexual fling with Ghar Ko, the ambassador of the Cepheans, descendants of abducted humans who have been genetically altered to such a radical degree that they now have little in common with their human cousins. Jess later discovers that she is pregnant, but since she hasn't been with another man, Ghar Ko is the only candidate for fatherhood. Clearly impossible, as humans and Cepheans are genetically incapable of breeding, so how can she be pregnant?

The search for the solution to the mystery drags Jess back to the ice-world where it all started, leading her into a near-fatal encounter with a cartel of human smugglers who are planning an act of genocide against the Cepheans, and leaving her rescuer, Ghar Ko, acused of murdering one of the smugglers and taking Jess hostage. A very touchy situation ensues in which the deep racial tensions and hatreds between humans and Cepheans threaten to boil over into outright hostilities, while the two lovers try to keep their "forbidden" relationship and birth of their child secret from both sides.

Once again we get another strong offering from Ms. Asaro, an intelligent story with an interesting twist and a nice yet bittersweet ending. Again the strong character interactions and relationships steal the show, particularly the believable love match between the two "alien" lovers, and the strange, abrasive dislike/friendship between Jess and her ship's doctor. I rate this a very strong story, by far my favourite from this edition of Analog, and one of my favourite Analog stories of 2003.

Overall, this was a strong issue of Analog, with several very good short stories and an excellent novella (and that doesn't even include the latest part of Rajnar Vajra's excellent serial). "Walk in Silence" was my top choice, but I also rated "Coming of Age" very highly, although it could've been potentially so much better if it had been longer. "Emma" was also a strong story, and "A Deadly Medley of Smedley" was great fun, if pure pun-filled hokum. So nothing to complain about in this issue, which gets a strong thumbs-up from me.

Phil Friel lives in the city of Derry, in Northern Ireland. He's been reading SF since the late 1960s (his first SF novel was The Time Machine when he was eight years old), and his tastes range the spectrum from space opera to the hardest of hard SF. He's always looking to expand those tastes, and reckons that the SF magazines are the perfect place to do just that. He likes both novels and short fiction, but prefers the shorter forms.