This issue contains 4 short stories, 4 poems, a novella and 2 novelettes as well as the usual variety of essays, articles and book reviews. I'm primarily going to comment only on things that I thought were above average and/or quite good in some way. As it happens this was a pretty strong issue and I liked it quite a bit primarily on the strength of two longer excellent stories and the fact that we had science fiction stories here, not a bunch of little emo things and middle school dramas. There is still some uneven storytelling here which interferes with good ideas, and another family drama/emo thing using a science fiction element to hang a story on, as well as a story that seems more fantasy than anything, and a story I disliked ...

Included fiction is:

Novella
"The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred" by Greg Egan

Novelettes
"Empty" by Robert Reed
"Of Apricots and Dying" by Amanda Forrest

Short Stories
"We Jump Down Into The Dark" by M. Bennardo
"Riding the Waves of Leviathan" by Garrett Ashley
"Bidding War" by Rich Larson
"Come-from-Always" by Julian Mortimer Smith

Poetry
"Slicing Time" by Bruce Boston
"Shatter" by Jane Yolen
"Circumstantial Evidence of Time Slippage" by Robert Frazier
"Magic in the Air" by Flip Wiltgren

Robert Reed's "Empty" is a long challenging story to read and understand, and I read parts of it two and three times trying to wrap my head around it, which is at least partly why this novelette felt more like a novella. I realized afterwards that what I was doing was what the primary character was doing with some data to analyze - going over it again and again, examining it frontwards backwards and from the middle, in order to understand what it was. The author gives us some info at the end which would affect ones reading if given at the beginning, so I think this was an intentional story element. It is a story set in the age of machine intelligence and really a hard, challenging piece of science fiction.

My favorite story in this and other recent issues of Asimov's is Greg Egan's novella, "The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred" which is set in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's DAWN mission from a few years ago gave us discoveries about two proto-planets there, Ceres and Vesta, and Egan has woven us a fascinating tale of the future of exploration, colonization and mining there. We get contrasting societies and moral considerations against what amounts to a sort of civil war and discrimination and hate against certain colonists. ( )