Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2006

This is an excellent issue of Analog. In particular, Lady Be Good is a great story, reminiscent of Firefly or Cowboy Bebop, and it has one of my favorite elements: an intense moral dilemma. Another good story is Nothing to Fear But. Several of the other stories are interesting, but are clearly parts of larger works, and will be better in novel form.

• Novella: Boundary Condition, by Wil McCarthy - Pope Dave I visits the space station where the weathermen study quantum decoherence storms and make Projected Free Will Index forecasts.
• Novelette: Lady Be Good, by John G. Hemry - The spaceship Lady Be Good makes a quasi-legal run to the Fagin system, and First Officer Kilcannon faces a moral dilemma: will he do whatever it takes to keep the ship running?
• Novelette: Numismatist, by Richard A. Lovett - A well-adjusted, religious, Boy Scout-type coin collector suddenly goes on a shooting rampage just minutes after researching some coins on the web with his neural inducer headset, and the investigating detective tries to figure out why the man turned violent.
• Short story: Nothing to Fear But, by Stephen L. Burns - A brilliant but phobic inventor, who hasn't left his house since he was four, builds a machine that suppresses anxiety in the brain.
• Short story: The Lowland Expedition, by Stephen Baxter - On Old Earth, time is layered: the higher you go, the faster time travels. An expedition to the slow-time lowlands stumbles upon a previously unknown city, which is deserted.
• Short story: Lighthouse, by Michael Shara and Jack McDevitt - Astronomer Kristi Lang discovers some anomalous brown dwarfs that are 50% deuterium, which is impossible in nature.
• Short-short: The Emancipation of the Knowledge Robots, by Carl Frederick - A pun-filled tale of robot civil rights.
• Science fact: The Shape of Wings to Come, by Alexis Glynn Latner - Gliders are quite efficient and can be used for all manner of air travel