Current Issue Highlights
January/February 2025
New year, new fiction! Let’s kick things off right, with our lead story for 2025: “Our Lady of the Gyre,” from Douglas R. Franklin. In his own words, it’s “about the fraught relationship between inhabitants of a seaborne community and an orbital artificial intelligence tasked with mitigating climate change.” It’s a short story, but also the cover—once you get it in your hands, I think you’ll see why.
We also have “Apartment Wars,” a novella from (relative) newcomer, Vera Brook: it’s an evocative look at the relationship between a physicist (and physicist’s widow) and her next-door neighbors in an Eastern European apartment block . . . but what role does their physics research play? Find out!
We also have stories including Paul Di Filippo’s Vancian “Quest of the Sette Comuni”; a bit of judicious temporal intervention in Tom R. Pike’s “Strange Events at Fletcher and Front”; the collision of the past and present in a science mystery for the ages in Sean McMullen’s “The Prince of Spirals,” and plenty more, from John Shirley, Richard A. Lovett, Kelly Lagor, James Van Pelt, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeffrey Benford, and others.
NOVELLA
Apartment Wars
by Vera Brook
Poland, 1979
Warm sun filtered through the leaves and dappled the sidewalk as Helena walked back from the farmers’ market. In May, the linden trees bloomed all over the city, the same cheerful green fringed with white as the year before, as if nothing had changed.
Helena tried not to dwell on the dissonance. Julian wouldn’t have wanted her to.
It was still morning, barely nine o’clock, too early for her daughter to call, but she walked briskly, anxious to get home. A wooden crate of tart cherries, shiny and red, bounced on her arm. They were her favorite fruit, neither sweet nor sour but wonderfully complex, a problem for her taste buds to solve. The handle of the crate was a phantom of her husband’s arm inside her elbow, easing her nerves and offering reassurance, as he had always done when alive. READ MORE
SHORT STORIES
Our Lady of the Gyre
by Doug Franklin
The wind sings in the petal wires. Alma hangs by one arm from the hull of the lily. With the other she works furiously at the tether brake. Each time the lily is lifted by a wave the tether zips down into the big dark. The third time the water breaks over her she gives up on fixing the brake and, when the lily starts sliding down the wave, snubs the tether. Then the next wave hits and all that slack is taken up in a moment, and the tether snaps, whipping up and through her like she was made of nothing more than water, which is approximately true but specifically false because the water is red and there is so much of it. And then I am on my back, Hayate sitting on my chest saying, “She’s already dead, Mel, she’s already dead,” while he opens the ballast valves. Alma rises away from the lily as we sink beneath the storm, blood spreading like the dark corona of her hair. READ MORE
POETRY
Beyond the Standard Model
by Ursula Whitcher
They call it spontaneous, this desire
to climb towers in the pale light of spring.
The wind separates hair into cilia waving
READ MORE
DEPARTMENTS
Guest Editorial: Information is Power
by John J. Vester
In today’s world, the idea that information is power hardly needs explaining. In the right hands, data makes it possible to do great things. In the wrong hands, however, it can be weaponized to disrupt elections, distort the truth and, via the computer, wreck lives.
As in anything, information (therefore power) can be used for good or ill. Its application says more about the user than about the tool. And, of course, what is presented as information often has little to do with facts or the truth. READ MORE
Alternate View: Will Quantum Computing Improve AI?
by John G. Cramer
In recent years, two of the most transformative technologies in active development have been artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. Both of these technologies have independently made great strides. Therefore, one is tempted to think that if the new deep learning AI technology could be implemented on a top-of-the-line quantum computer, a groundbreaking improvement in AI speed and power, and perhaps even self-awareness, might result. READ MORE
Reference Library
by Sean C.W. Korsgaard
Auld lang syne, dear Analog readers, it’s another new year!
While I’m sure I might not speak for everyone when I say this, for me at least, 2024 felt so much longer than it was. READ MORE