We’ve stuffed two huge novellas into Asimov’s January/February 2023 issue. Norman Spinrad elevates us into the “Up and Out” with a plan for taking humanity into interstellar space. David Ira Cleary returns us to Earth for a coming-of-age story about “My Year as a Boy.” These thoughtful tales contain vividly imagined futures. They are not to be missed! 

Peter Wood recounts “The Less Than Divine Invasion”; an unusual therapist treats difficult patients in Tochi Onyebuchi’s “Jamais Vue”; well established, but new to Asimov’s, Karen Heuler offers us a disquieting look at “Alien Housing”; Ramsey Shehadeh, another author new to Asimov’s, offers a tricky tale about “Cigarettes and Coffee”; and our third new author, T.K. Rex, uncovers “The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones”; Dominica Phetteplace reveals that “What We Call Science, They Call Treason”; Rudy Rucker plunges us into the wild world of the “Tooniverse Tele­marketer”: and Genevieve Williams’s lovely “Woman of the River” is a generations-spanning tale told in six pages.

Up and Out
by Norman Spinrad

There are only two absolutes that no one anywhere can ever ignore.

Nothing anywhere can go faster than the speed of light, and no one will ever es­cape the cost, whatever it may be, of making choices.

How old am I?

In the Biblical three score and ten orbits of the Earth around our star, seventy years in biotime, but over a thousand years of realtime, as we still like to measure both.

Four years at the speed of light to the next star system. About two hundred light-speed years to the closest known extrasolar civilization. Seventy years spent biotime and a hundred or more to spend. READ MORE

Alien Housing
by Karen Heuler

Marisela Feddie had profound reservations about her job. She was old enough to miss the world as it had been, and smart enough to know that it would never be that way again. The two current beliefs—that someone would find out the aliens’ weak­ness, or that it was best to learn to live with them—both annoyed her. There were waves of aliens, coming and going, and no one had figured out any weaknesses in the past ten years. And she didn’t want to live with them.

Livelihoods were, of necessity, altered. The decrease in human reproduction—whatever its cause—meant that as a teacher, she had been in a field now too competitive to be solvent (the world was running out of children). She took an ad­ministrative job with a large housing complex, but the aliens were interested in ac­quiring more housing, and they got what they wanted. They might keep her on if they liked her; she was about to be interviewed. READ MORE