January/February 2017 Analog Now on Sale
As 2017 dawns, we enter a new era for the oldest continuously published science fiction magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact (which has been around since January 1930, when it was called Astounding Stories). With this issue it switches to a bimonthly publication schedule, following The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and its own sister magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction.
The cover story is “The Proving Ground,” a novella by Alec Nevala-Lee, whom I first met when he was moderating a panel on John W. Campbell at the 2016 Nebula Awards. The issue also contains “Whending My Way Back Home,” a novelette by Black Gate writer Bill Johnson (“Mama Told Me Not to Come,” BG4), plus short stories and novelettes by Scott Edelman, Edward M. Lerner, Marie DesJardin, Christopher L. Bennett, and many others. Here’s editor Trevor Qachari’s summary from the website.
Birds are mysteriously dying out near a distant wind farm, and something much worse may be in the offing. Can the researchers on this cold, lonely hunk of rock survive “The Proving Ground”? Find out in our cover story, from Alec Nevala-Lee.
Then Richard A. Lovett brings us our fact article, “Rendezvous with a Comet: How ESA’s Rosetta Mission is Decoding Ancient Planetary Mysteries,” and the title says it all.
Then we have people born to die struggling to live in Scott Edelman’s “After the Harvest, Before the Fall”; kidnapping and cultural conflict in Christopher L. Bennett’s “Twilight’s Captives”; a race to find bizarre signals in Canada in Tom Jolly’s “Catching Zeus”; some very alien aliens in both “Dall’s Last Message,” by Antha Ann Adkins, and “Briz,” by Jay Werkheiser; a look at the things we do for companionship, in Marie DesJardin’s “Long Haul”; a slight slice of semi-silliness in Stanley Schmidt’s Probability Zero, “Throw Me a Bone,” and more, from Thoraiya Dyer and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Bill Johnson, Andrew Barton, Marissa Lingen, Tom Greene, Joel Richards, Edward M. Lerner, and Guy Stewart, as well as all our regular columns and features, plus our annual index and Analytical Laboratory ballot.
Here’s the complete Table of Contents.
It’s not often that we in the Fantasy and SF community get two time-travel related productions – the movie Arrival, and the TV series Timeless – at once. Even better, we’re being served two different theories of time, and time travel. (There might be some spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen either film or TV show, so watch out.)
