Reviews and Comments

An average issue with interesting stories by Gregory Feeley, Cao Baiyu and Natasha King.

• "Symbiosis" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: in the future, only selected individuals can become pregnant. This particular mother is initially aghast at being selected. But as the pregnancy progresses, she becomes attached to the foetus; perhaps too attached.

• "The Fortunate Isles" by Gregory Feeley: in the far future, an unknown narrator tells the story of a time when humanity has ventured to Neptune and is now preparing to enter its depths in search of places to live.

• "Anais Gets a Turn" by R.T. Ester: a story of a woman who, due to apparent bad luck, loses a contract as a graphics designer and later her job. It then turns out that it may not be bad luck, but the workings of a latent 'world intelligence' that had involved her in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, as explained to her by a worker for a corporation she meets. And now she has a chance to affect what the intelligence may do by being involved in the next interation of that game.

• "Zhuangzi's Dream" by Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu: a man, who would be a famous philosopher in the future, goes to sleep, and we see the fantastic dreams he has. But the last part is the most fantastic, as a butterfly from the future visits and possibly changes the past; or does it?

• "Sharp Undoing" by Natasha King: in a future where information and memories can be transferred by 'slots', killing the slotted person, one such person is pursued and captured by a local gang leader eager for the information being held. Little does the gang leader know that this particular person has a different kind of slot personality that would change who is in charge of the outcome of the slotting procedure.

• "Pearl" by Felix Rose Kawitzky: in an observatory looking for dark matter, one lower class person in charge of maintenance lets loose slugs that appear to be able to concentrate dark matter, leading to consequences that would blur and sharpen what can be seen of dark matter.

A fascinating and entertaining book about living on a world in a universe where people can come in different scales. Here, there are eight of them, each one half the size of the previous scale. This comes about because there are eight different kinds of leptons (like electrons) with different masses, causing the atoms they make to have different sizes. Egan explores the possibilities this difference in sizes causes to mass, biology, physics, chemistry, etc. to come up with a world where people of different sizes have learned to live next to each other.

But all may not be well. At the start of the book, a private investigator is hired to find a missing sister. His investigations would lead his to discover a secret being hidden by some people from a smaller scale. As he passes on his investigations to fellow investigators from the smaller scale, what they find would lead to the discovery of a secret that will alter the delicate negotiated balance the people of various scales have agreed to on how to share their environment. And now, the race is on to find a solution to avert a possible crisis that may involve weapons of unimaginable power being used on the peoples of other scales.

Egan expects the reader to be able to pick up the physics of the world from the situations and characters presented in the book, without much exposition being dropped in by him. If you find the consequences of living at different size scales puzzling, then this might not be a book for you. Otherwise, the reader will find living in a world where people are of different scales to be a fascinating experience.

Egan also gives a thoughtful and rational look at how people of different scales interact with each other and what can happen if people of one scale discover they have the ability to radically change the balance of the relationship between themselves and people of other scales: a rough equivalent would be people of different cultures on our world interacting with each other to share a common environment. The debates and arguments that ensue show the different possible reactions, and it is left to the reader to discover which option will be the one that will determine the future of all the people at various scales.

A fabulous coffee-table sized book, featuring hundreds of images taken during the Apollo missions, along with some from the earlier Mercury and Gemini missions. As described at the end of the book, the images were digitally scanned from the original master images from the missions that have been kept in cold storage. The scanned images were then altered to adjust the contrast and colour and to remove dust, damage and other artefacts. Panoramic images were stitched together, while some images were stacked to improve the image quality and recover some image details.

The result are large, fantastic images of space, the Earth and the Moon that are close to what the astronauts would have actually seen. You may have probably seen similar images to those in the book from other publications or website, but few, if any, look as excellent or as true to life as those featured in this book.

Captions are provided with each image, giving a reference number and the context for the images: what the image is showing, how the image was taken and, if known, who took the image and when.

At the time of this review, there are plans to return people to the moon. Until then, these images are probably the best images available that show what it was like to travel through space and to walk and explore on the moon.

An average issue, with interesting stories by Ben Berman Ghan, S.L. Huang, Lu Ban and Vandana Singh.

• "Law of Tongue" by Naim Kabir: negotiations between the matriarch of an Orca pod and humans may not go well for humans when the price to be paid for the negotiations to conclude is revealed.

• "Keiki's Pitcher Plant" by Bri Castagnozzi: an AI run biological lab that has been helping with ecological restoration makes an unusual call for assistance. The person answering the call would discover a startling outcome to a secret project involving another kind of restoration.

• "The Resting Place of Trees" by Ben Berman Ghan: a robot makes its case for a future Earth, nearly devoid of life, to be preserved so that it may continue to extract and try to make sense of the remains of various messages people try to pass to each other as the world slowly comes to an end.

• "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" by S.L. Huang: a story that initially starts as an investigation into who was sending lots of abusive and trolling messages to a victim that changes into an essay on the goodness and madness that can come from the use and abuse of AIs trained to communicate with people.

• "Upstart" by Lu Ban, translated by Blake Stone-Banks: a fascinating story of a world where the lifespan of people can be predicted. People are offered money by an organization, in return for dying at the predicted date. Known as upstarts, the story follows one upstart who is about to die. But before he does, he gets pulled into a possible conspiracy involving the organization, which ends in a plot twist.

• "Left to Die" by Vandana Singh: on an alien world, one explorer is left to die by her companions. She later figures out that the truth, but in order to be rescued, she will need to communicate with the plant-like life forms on the world to send her message.

• "To Exorcise Mechanical Ghosts" by Laney Gaughan: after a mining accident, a miner is given a cybernetic arm that belonged to another miner who had died in an earlier accident. The miner begins to get audio feedback that may be messages that the arm still retains from its previous user; messages that make the miner rethink about whether the previous miner did die in an actual accident and what he will do with the messages.

• "The Lightness" by Alex Sobel: on an alien world where items from Earth are considered collectables, a woman considers returning home while being a surrogate mother for the aliens, who hope their child can then become an Earth resident.