Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2010
Reviewed date: 2010 Aug 2
112 pages
112 pages
- Novelette: Page Turner, by Rajnar Vajra - Bookstore clerk tells a weird, rambling story to an imagined audience while she's trapped under wreckage after an earthquake.
- Novelette: Hanging By A Thread, by Lee Goodloe - An expedition to a water world is in trouble when an unexpectedly large storm snaps the floating station off the end of the space elevator.
- Novelette: The Day the Music Died, by H. G. Stratmann - A music virus that takes over people's minds and renders them helpless is thwarted by a music researcher who is immune to the virus because he is deaf.
- Novelette: Farallon Woman, by Walter L. Kleine - A scientist working at a top-secret project studying a crashed alien spacecraft realizes his new girlfriend is the alien pilot.
- Short story: A Talent for Vanessa, by David W. Goldman - A manager of an idiot-savant talent agency turns away a woman who want the dangerous talent surgery done to her brain.
- Short story: Fishing Hole, by Rick Cook - A sushi restaurant serves an exotic species of shellfish, which a paleontologist recognizes as a trilobite extinct for millions of years.
- Short story: Teaching the Pig to Sing, by David D. Levine - In a world ruled by hereditary royalty, an underground freedom movement kidnaps a royal, deprograms his mind so that he has free will to choose, and tries to convince him to join their cause.
- Short-short: Quark Soup, by Bond Elam - The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is an artifact produced by the limited computing power of God's simulator that powers the universe: it approximates in order to save computing time. However, increased observation by humanity means the simulation can't keep up, and the whole system is in danger of collapse.
- Science Fact: Robots Don't Leave Scars: What's New In Medical Robotics?, by Stella Fitzgibbons, MD - Tiny surgical robots make it possible to perform operations without cutting the patient open, which makes surgery easier to perform and easier to recover from.