Lerner | 5621 words In 1995, two academic researchers were tasked with assessing twenty years of U.S. government and government-funded studies of "anomalous mental phenomena." (You have seen the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, right?) That awkward expression, "anomalous mental phenomena," stand...
My favorite 'genres' are ballet and contemporary. Dance is the interaction of space, time, and the body. This story is about the disruption of all three." I It all began with a picnic. A flat, grassy plain on the muggy surface of Omega-Alpha-III. Volcano to the north, algae-green forest on all si...
Where do you get your ideas? Do you work every day? What hours do you work? What sort of research do you do for your stories? Do you use a computer? What kind? How many drafts do you usually do? Do you show anyone your work before you send it to your publisher? And so on and so on, very little va...
Another kind of translation is a one-to-one conversion of some episode of human history to science fiction. Isaac Asimov did that in his Foundation series, which was based on the division of the Roman Empire into eastern and western halves. Randall Garrett, in his 1959 story "Despoilers of the Go...
In other news, I'm working on a novel that will feature the further adventures of Mariska Volochkova, whom Asimov's readers may remember from 'Going Deep' (June 2009) and 'Plus or Minus' (December 2010)." Daya had been in no hurry to become a mother. In the two years since she'd reached childbear...
Decades later, she must use that system in a desperate race against time to locate her lover's ship in the treacherous and unknown reaches of foldspace. ALSO IN AUGUST Jack Skillingstead folds time and space together to give us the quietly moving "Arlington"; Gwendolyn Clare transports us to a di...
In 2012, she won the Rhysling Award for best long form poem. Other work has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer. Like many of her stories, Megan tells us, inspiration for "A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard" came about through "the convergence of several unrelated imag...
She's sold over ninety short stories to Tor.com, Analog, Lightspeed, and more. Her first tale for Asimov's takes on the complex world of the future. If we are to resolve difficult issues with diplomacy, it may be wise to seek advice from an expert. Dear Citizen Etiquette: ...
I used it to express my belief that we are never going to have any close encounters with the inhabitants of other solar systems. They're just too far away. Despite the best efforts of such people as my friends, the brothers Jim and Greg Benford, who even now are working to drum up interest in an ...
The lobby of the Escabero Building, in the heart of the city of Chicago on Earth, was opulent beyond anything Dr. Samuel Marsh had ever seen or imagined. A holographic fountain dazzled his eye; the walls were lined with brilliantly lit aquaria of live fish. The carpet was a deep lush blue, and ...
Spiders from the Stars Assuredly, "M.C. Planck" is the best name ever for a happening SF writer. It combines a rapper's hipness with scientific laboratory cred. I am going to assume that the possessor of that byline came by it through an accident of birth and parental dispensation, and not by his...
Although this is his first appearance in Asimov's, his fiction was published in a half dozen professional and semiprofessional genre magazines of the nineties, including Aboriginal Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, and Pirate Writings. Jay's stories emerge from life-long dialogs with people fa...
While there are good arguments to be made that we spend too much time thinking about the Nebulas, Hugos thehugoawards.org >, World Fantasy Awards worldfantasy.org/awards > and the like, the fact is that not only do awards provide yearly snapshots of the state of science fiction and fantasy,...