In our lead story for March, popular and prolific UK writer Brian Stableford returns to the near-future setting of stories like “Hot Blood” with another carefully plotted and chilling example of the possible effects advanced biotech might have on humanity. In “Following the Pharmers,” the biotech can be as subtle as a flower’s perfume on the wind, yet still be insidiously harmful to humans exposed to the scent. It’s an exciting and compulsively readable story, though we at Asimov’s earnestly hope this kind of future remains wholly fictitious!

Marching on, we find Cat Rambo, prolific semi-prozine contributor and up-and-coming talent, making her Asimov’s debut with a charming and funny tale about an intergalactic shopkeeper who finds all four of his hands full as “Kallakak’s Cousins” descend upon his threatened livelihood; Elizabeth Bear joins us again with an unsettling Lovecraft-inspired tale called “Shoggoths in Bloom,” in which the words “stygian,” “Cyclopian,” and “shambling” are not used (we promise!); Ian Creasey plumbs the darker side of life when a loved one is lost for good in “This Is How It Feels”; Tom Purdom, whose “The Mists of Time” was one of our most popular stories with readers last year, returns with the exciting science-fiction adventure, complete with swashbuckling augmented humans, “Sepoy Fidelities”; Sue Burke, whose name ought to be familiar to fans of the poetry in Asimov’s, makes her short fiction debut here with “Spiders,” a poetic and evocative tale of familial relationships on a recently colonized world; and Carol Emshwiller returns  in an American gothic style, with a tale of strange nomadic beings somehow both human and inhuman and their search for a permanent home—a home that can be found only by “The Master of the Road to Nowhere”!

brain-balming stories by Kate Wilhelm, Barry B. Longyear, Ian R. MacLeod, S.P. Somtow, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Neal Barrett, Jr., Kij Johnson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Kress, Steven Utley, Catherine Wells, Jack Skillingstead, Robert Reed, and many others!