Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2005

Reviewed date: 2005 Aug 2
143 pages
cover art

This is an above-average issue. All of the stories except for Pipeline are excellent. I especially liked Second Person, Present Tense.

  • Novelette: Generations, by Frederik Pohl - If our universe was just a simulation in a computer, how could we tell?
  • Novelette: Pipeline, by Brian W. Aldis - Carl Roddard drives the length of Turkenistan's brand new oil pipeline.
  • Novelette: Second Person, Present Tense, by Daryl Gregory - A young girl, Therese, takes a designer drug called Zen that destroys her concept of self. She awakes a new person in her old body.
  • Novelette: Harvest Moon, by William Barton - In an alternate timeline several American astronauts get stranded on the Moon for nine years.
  • Finished, by Robert Reed - Medical science allows a person to be "finished" by downloading his brain into a new body; he stays young and healthy forever at the cost of losing to ability to change his personality or grow as a person.
  • The Company Man, by John Phillip Olsen - An agent for aliens on Earth must help them buy up Earth's greatest artistic treasures.
  • A Rocket for the Republic, by Lou Antonelli - Rocket ship in the Republic of Texas.


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