Current Issue Highlights
January/February 2025
Our January/February 2025 issue starts the new year off with an exciting jolt. We have a huge new novella from James Patrick Kelly. “Moon and Mars” is a harrowing story about a group of young people who will soon crew an interstellar starship through a wormhole—unless complex human relationships or unsettling Earthly politics intervene!
Robert Reed returns with a Great Ship tale about “A Girl from Hong Kong”; Jendayi Brooks-Flemister offers us a situation that is anything but “Completely Normal”; Siobhan Carroll takes us on a journey in which birds spy, humans and aliens are unreliable, and “In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind”; new author Nikki Braziel uses spaceships, time travel, and future technology to create “Through the Pinhole, or, the Origin of a Holostory”; another author new to Asimov’s, Beston Barnett, gives us an unsettling story about a scientist fighting an AI for survival that reveals “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”; Matthew Kressel, who’s also new to the magazine, shoots us “Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven”; Rick Wilber splits the timeline with “Jilly in Right”; as does Frank Ward with his bittersweet story about the “Shadow of Shadows”; and Faith Merino’s disturbing take on “My Biggest Fan” is as complicated as a Robert A. Heinlein tale.
Robert Silverberg’s Reflections whisks us back in time with “Uintatherium, I Dream of Thee”; James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net welcomes us to “The Zoo Hypothesis”; Peter Heck’s On Books considers works by Rebecca Roanhorse, Laura Anne Gilman, Michael Swanwick, and others; Kelly Lagor’s Thought Experiment continues her three-part look at Stanley Kubrick films with a viewing of “The Impossible Spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey”; plus we’ll have an array of poetry you’re sure to enjoy.
NOVELLA
Moon and Mars
by James Patrick Kelly
One
Mariska Volochkova settled onto a swivel chair that had started life as a bar stool over in North Robinson. “Surprise me,” she said. Now it served as the lone styling station for the base’s makeshift salon.
“I hate it when they say that.” Andra floated a styling cape over Mariska’s spacer uniform and snapped it behind her neck. “Okay, we’ll have to keep it simple since there’s not much to work with here.” She spritzed product onto Mariska’s head and rubbed it into her hair. READ MORE
NOVELETTE
In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind
by Siobhan Carroll
When Sarah Hawksfeather told Charlie his good-for-nothing brother was missing, he wasn’t worried. It was just like Gabe to head out to the Grasslands and forget to tell his latest girlfriend he was going. Charlie told Sarah as much as he soldered a connection on a Vestigium motherboard. His hands were full of alien tech right now; he didn’t have time for Gabe’s latest craziness. READ MORE
POETRY
Too Far Away
by Jenny Blackford
for Marjie
The gaps
between your
spoken words READ MORE
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial: An Evening In Soho
by Sheila Williams
Writing this editorial in early fall of 2024 for an issue that will be in sale in the winter of 2025 makes me feel a bit like I’m slipping through time. We held an authors’ reading in celebration of Asimov’s and Analog in New York City on a warm August evening a few weeks before the unofficial end of summer. It was our third time hosting an event at the beautiful Housing Works Bookstore. Housing Works, which was founded in 1990, advocates for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The bookstore is located on Crosby Street in a historic SoHo neighborhood. To reach the store, you can stroll down a cobblestone street, just as someone might have done in the nineteenth century. The store is lined with mahogany bookshelves and the balconies are reached via cast iron spiral staircases. The bookstore is the perfect location for an event celebrating the written word. READ MORE
Reflections: Uintatherium, I Dream Of Thee
by Robert Silverberg
We take for granted the strangeness of the not yet extinct animals with which we share our planet—the long-nosed tapir, the even longer-nosed elephant, the remarkable big-mouthed hippopotamus, the towering elongated giraffe, the jowly orangutan. Australia has given us a whole menagerie of oddities, the kangaroo, the bandicoot, the wombat, the echidna, and of course the platypus. We take their strangeness for granted—in fact we do not see them as at all strange, because we become familiar with them in childhood in our visits to the zoo. Their weirdness vanishes before we are old enough to see it. READ MORE
On Books
by Peter Heck
The concluding volume of Roanhorse’s “Between Earth and Sky” trilogy follows a handful of characters in a fantasy world loosely based on Native American cultures in the pre-contact era. Among them are Serapio, an avatar of the Crow god; Naranpa, who embodies the Sun god; Balam, a rich merchant who is learning sorcery in hopes of becoming the Jaguar Prince; and Xiala, daughter of the queen of an island nation ruled by women. READ MORE
On the Net: The Zoo Hypothesis
by James Patrick Kelly
craze
On June 24, 1947 a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had an adventure https://www.history.com/videos/kenneth-arnold that would change his life and the lives of many others.
Or did he? READ MORE