OUR JULY/AUGUST ISSUE
Our July/August “double” issue features two big stories. The cover is for “Seed of Revolution,” the latest and possibly the best of Daniel Hatch’s series about Chamal, the world where evolution works very differently than it does on Earth. (No, it doesn't matter if you haven’t read the earlier stories; in fact, you may get a clearer understanding of Chamal’s bizarre biology from this story than from any of its predecessors.) The differences necessarily color the way its inhabitants look at everything, so when they’re exposed to human ways and ideas, conflict is inevitable, peculiar, and lively.
No less deserving of “lead” status is Barry B. Longyear’s two-part serial, "Turning the Grain". It’s a time-travel story, but with several differences from the usual. Few writers have fully grasped just how far back our prehistory goes, and how much could have been hidden back there. So what if you found evidence of a startling advanced culture existing much earlier than it should have, and you had a chance to visit? The usual cautions about changing history don’t apply because this culture was nipped in the bud by a natural disaster, so nothing the visitor does will matter, right? Well, yes, but remember that both visitor and the people-before-their-time are people, and people are clever and complex. . . .
We also take advantage of the extra space in the double issue to offer not one but two fact articles, quite different but both by authors having unique personal connections to their subject matter: one on the Large Hadron Collider and one on Alzheimer’s disease. The versatile Michael Carroll shares “Musings from the First Generation” wherein he remembers growing up at the dawn of the Space Age. And we have a wide variety of other fiction by authors including John G. Hemry, Tom Ligon, Scott William Carter, and Don D’Ammassa.
