Uploaded March 6, 1997 -- Updated March 6, 1997
Here is the list of stories in this issue. If you have any comments or reviews, send them to jbailey@sff.net. Please indicate which issue and/or story you're referring to in the subject line, and try to keep comments for different stories separate in you letters so I can place them properly.
"Just a Couple Of Highly Experimental Weapons
Tucked Away Behind the Toilet Paper" by Adam-Troy Castro
"End City" by Phyllis Gotlieb
"Moon Six" by Stephen Baxter [1/30/97]
"Anomaly in a Decimal Expansion" by Frederik
Pohl
"What Would You Like To Know?" by Charles
Sheffield
Miscellaneous Comments (on the magazine as a whole, editorials, columns, etc.)
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Rich Horton: 1/30/97
There has been a mini-rash of Moon exploration stories recently, likely inspired by 25th anniversary of Apollo 11, as well as the movie Apollo 13. Baxter just published an alternate history novel in which we go to Mars instead of developing the Shuttle: and at a guess his research for that novel led to a couple of recent alternate history stories: "Prospero One", last year in Interzone, and this story. "Moon Six" involves an American astronaut landing on the Moon in a past very similar to our past. Once on the Moon, however, a series of strange changes occur, and he wanders through several alternate Moon landing histories: encountering an American woman, a Russian, and finally a British team. An explanation is given for the variety of alternate histories and their intersections, but it doesn't matter (though Baxter seems to poke gentle fun at his countrymen's engineering: like the Jaguar, very impressive, but rather buggy), the point of the story is the moving examination of the effect of minor or radical differences in history on the spirit of exploration: the protagonist ends up in a timeline with no space program at all, and this leads to a powerful climax.
Rich Horton
http://www.sff.net/people/Richard.Horton/
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