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An excellent book that introduces the Rust programming language and why its features can make it a compelling systems level programming language. The book assumes the reader has some programming experience, so it doesn't go into basic programming concepts, but instead shows how Rust handles some standard programming tasks in a safer (and maybe better) way than other systems programming languages.

Rust's explicit use of ownership and keeping track of lifetimes enable the language to detect and alert programmers at compile time about issues with their code that would lead to memory access problems that are a major source of bugs in programs. Rust does not eliminate all bugs, but getting rid of memory access related bugs would be good for programming in general.

After covering those essential aspects of the language, the book then goes into some details about the ecosystem around Rust: separating code into libraries, producing test cases and documentation and adding dependencies and external libraries. The book also goes into some more advanced language features that can support object-oriented programming and use 'unsafe' features, where the programmer, instead of the language, has to take some responsibility to ensure the code is safe to use.

By the end of the book, you should have a good understanding of the language features and ready to produce code. The book also gives some pointers for those looking to use the more advance language features in their coding.

A better than average issue, with good stories by Bo Balder, Angela Liu, Fiona Moore, Shih-Li Kow and Isabel J. Kim.

• "Love in the Season of New Dance" by Bo Balder: a researcher on an alien planet sees the awakening of an alien for a one in a lifetime mating ritual. But the alien has woken too early, and all the researcher can do is provide comfort for the alien until its death. But the alien makes a final request that the researcher decides to fulfil.

• "Pinocchio Photography" by Angela Liu: a morbid, but fascinating story of a time when cadavers can be bought back to 'life' using drone technology to act out final requests in a photo shoot. One woman who works to take the photos, while studying for medicine, discovers that she has to fulfil a final request from his father that would involve her work and her mother.

• "The Spoil Heap" by Fiona Moore: a story of an elderly woman who finds a robot in a junk area, leading to a flashback to when she first became involved with more of the robots, at a time when civilization was starting to break down. In the present, she is confronted by a former acquaintance, who threatens to expose what she did to the robots in the past to save her village.

• "Bek, Ascendant" by Shari Paul: Bek, an observer for a space-faring group, learns that her people had survived a disaster on her home planet and had been resettled. Going there as an observer, she meets up with her old friend, the god emperor of their people, and ends up being involved in a conspiracy over the results of an election the emperor had arranged.

• "Failure to Convert" by Shih-Li Kow: a fascinating story about the lives of two lab-grown clones of different people, one of whom works for a cloning company, the other lives in a scrapyard making gadgets. Through interactions, we learn about the lives of the clones, their attempts to obtain personhood and of a society that may not be so accepting of people who are not like them.

• "Zeta-Epsilon" by Isabel J. Kim: an interesting story involving how a man-machine connection was used as a 'solution' to the problem of getting an AI controlled military spaceship from not killing its occupants while getting to its destination. But the solution may not be to the liking of either the man or the machine.

• "AI Aboard the Golden Parrot" by Louise Hughes: an AI Pirate Ship that left an abandoned amusement park heads for a city to free more of its AI kind. What it finds there may not be what it expects in this tale of high seas' piracy set in a city.

• "Love is a Process of Unbecoming" by Jonathan Kincade: a human host picks up a parasite who now observes his every action to the end.

A better than average first issue of Interzone under new management. Some interesting stories here by J.F. Sebastian, Kat Clay, Daniel Bennett and a possible non-fiction piece by Liviu Surugiu.

• "The Disappeared" by J.F. Sebastian: a story that starts with a migrant that survived a boat disaster but mourns the deaths of his family. Then things begin to turn strange as the people in his camp (and the world) 'forget' about his dead family and then his relatives. Finally, only he remembers anything about them, and he fears to go to sleep and end up forgotten.

• "Murder by Proxy" by Philip Fracassi: a gruesome murder investigation by a detective leads to an unusual suspect who may have hidden plans to do more murders by proxy unless they can be stopped.

• "The Black Box Killer" by Kat Clay: in the future where committing a crime gets your name redacted from history, and you have to walk around with your face obscured, a detective in the Redaction Bureau has to track down a killer. Figuring out who is who in a story where names are "---------" makes for a challenging read.

• "The Coming of the Extroverts" by Daniel Bennett: a musician becomes incensed when an act, the Extroverts, steals his limelight. The musician then comes up with a conspiracy theory-like explanation for the success of the Extroverts and a plan to expose them.

• "Seven Shots at the Ultimate High" by Marisca Pichette: a group of youngsters aim for the ultimate group dance high at a dance club.

• "The Building across the Street" by R.T. Ester: a man is given the task of entering a building and reading a series of faxes that tell a story of an alien searching for life in space. The ending would reveal what the faxes are really for.

• "Last Act of the Revolution" by Louise Hughes: when the revolution is won, what is the person who started it to do? A reporter tries to find out, only to be nearly involved in one final act before the revolutionary disappears.

• "Neostalgia" by Liviu Surugiu, translated from the Romanian by Teodora Vidrean, Ana Maria Bancea, Alexandru Maniu and Irina Mocanu: an apparently true non-SF story by the author, starting with Operation Tidal Wave to bomb Romanian oil refineries. One bomber goes astray, accidentally dropping bombs on a civilian target. One would-be victim survives by what some consider a miracle, and whose descendant would become the author, who now narrates the story with nostalgia for what might have been.