Our October/November issue is the one that seems to get the most attention and, frankly, the April/May issue is tired of being overlooked. We don’t play favorites with our issues, but we sympathized with April/May’s plight and have obliged it by loading it full of excellent SF stories sure to grab your attention from the very first pages. To this end, the ever-popular Kristine Kathryn Rusch returns to the futuristic milieu of her story “Diving into the Wreck” in a new novella—this time, a mysterious zone affected by alien technology must be plumbed by a crack team of professional “divers” who may well find that no training could ever have prepared them for . . . “The Room of Lost Souls.”

This is, as you must already suspect, not all. We take great pleasure in offering, after too long an absence, the latest story by S.P. Somtow, a haunting, lyrical tale of a troubled cleric investigating “An Alien Heresy.” Barry B. Longyear also returns with his clever rumination on the inevitable affects of aging upon the writer with “The Advocate”; Neal Barrett, Jr. offers a witty, wise, and, most importantly, weird tale about the end of the world in “Slidin’”; Kathleen Ann Goonan explores the consequences of a man’s transformation into a “Memory Dog”; Merrie Haskell, making her Asimov’s debut, posits that life might not be so easy under the employ of benevolent interstellar rulers in “An Almanac for Alien Invaders”; Catherine Wells’ latest, “Ghost Town,” presents the troublesome effects of time upon a recently returned space explorer; Robert Reed skulks around the neighborhood trying to get a subtle peek into the windows of “The House Left Empty”; one of science fiction’s greatest, Kate Wilhelm, returns with a bittersweet story of young lovers destined to always be “Strangers When We Meet” the morning after; Nick Wolven makes his Asimov’s debut with a moving tale examining the emotional difficulties faced in a completely customizable world in “An Art, like Everything Else”; and up-and-coming talent Matthew Johnson returns with an alternate history in which the tired, poor, huddled masses of the past must emigrate through time and adjust to a confusing new life in “Another Country.”