Our two annual double issues always offer plenty of “extras,” and this year’s July/August issue features something especially extraordinary. Back in the early 1980s a completely unknown writer named David R. Palmer made a huge splash here with his very first story, “Emergence,” featuring Candy Smith-Foster, one of the most memorable people many of our readers had ever met on or off the printed page. But she’s much more than just a remarkably talented little girl emerging from the ashes of a worldwide genocidal war: she’s one of the first of a new species “just like us only more so,” emerging into the world as a delayed result of a historic plague. “Emergence” was followed by one more story here, then grew into the acclaimed novel Emergence. Now Emergence has a worthy sequel, Tracking, in which Candy discovers that, devastating as past events were, they weren’t as finished as she thought. So naturally she has to set forth to Do Something About It, and we’re proud to present her further adventures as a three-part serial.
Carl Frederick, well known in various circles as both science fiction writer and physicist, appears as both next month, with a fact article on “The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe” and also the novelette “The Exoanthropic Principle.” Certain physicists lately have been debating which of several hard-to-swallow hypotheses are the least hard to swallow; Frederick’s article surveys the ideas, and his story explores the implications if some of them turn out to be right.
Rounding out our oversize issue we have another of Richard A. Lovett’s special features about writing (this time dealing with story beginnings), and an assortment of fiction by such writers as the perennially popular Michael F. Flynn, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Jerry Oltion, and a promising newcomer or three, covering a wide spectrum of length, subject matter, and flavor.
