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Our September issue features a couple of decidedly unusual and decidedly different kinds of alien contact stories. David D. Levine’s “Pupa,” as its name suggests, shows a highly charged incident in international politics from the viewpoint of someone too young—and otherwise immature—to participate in it in a conventional way, but uniquely placed to play a pivotal role. Stories told from an alien viewpoint are one of the hardest kinds to pull off, but I think you’ll find this an outstanding and memorable example.
In Eric James Stone’s “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” it would be even harder to write the alien viewpoint, because these are leviathans on a scale, and populating an “ocean,” that go far beyond the biblical kind.
Our fact article is “Bad Medicine: When Medical Research Goes Wrong,” by the versatile and professionally knowledgeable H. G. Stratmann. It’s a subject of interest to everybody, and Dr. Stratmann, himself a cardiologist and medical researcher, is well positioned to understand both the dangers and why we can’t completely avoid them.
And, of course, we have a wide variety of other stories, by authors including Sean McMullen, Jerry Oltion, Richard A. Lovett, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (not in the Retrieval Artist series!).
analog is up in space! chosen for the library
on the international space station.
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Some of the best teaching is by example, but isn’t always planned!
Sol Central Station floated amid the fusing hydrogen of the solar core, 400,000 miles under the surface of the Sun, protected only by the thin shell of an energy shield, but that wasn’t why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station’s multidenominational chapel. As a life-long Mormon I had been speaking in church since I was a child, so that didn’t make me nervous, either. But this was my first time speaking when non-humans were in the audience.
The Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only six human members, including me and the two missionaries, but there were forty-six swale members. As beings made of plasma, swales couldn’t attend church in the chapel, of course, but a ten-foot widescreen monitor across the back wall showed a false-color display of their magnetic force-lines, gathered in clumps of blue and red against the yellow background representing the solar interior. The screen did not give a sense of size, but at two hundred feet in length, the smallest of the swales was almost double the length of a blue whale. From what I’d heard, the largest Mormon swale, Sister Emma, stretched out to almost five hundred feet—but she was nowhere near the twenty-four-mile length of the largest swale in our sun.
“My dear Brothers and Sisters,” I said automatically, then stopped in embarrassment. The traditional greeting didn’t apply to all swale members, as they had three genders. “And Neuters,” I added. I hoped my delay would not be noticeable in the transmission. It would be a disaster if in my first talk as branch president, I alienated a third of the swale population.
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Encounter in a Yellow Wood
by Bud Sparhawk
The trouble with long range plans is that a stage that lasts a long time doesn’t feel like a stage. . . .
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