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Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine
June 1998
This month's issue of Analog starts with an editorial
by Stanley Schmidt on the importance of doing 'basic' research that do
not have immediate payoffs, if any. He fears that the trend towards
funding only research that has set goals and targets may lead to a
drying up of breakthroughs.
Stories featured in this issue are:
- "Spindown" by Wolf Read looks at a race between two
people in close to lightspeed ships. One is determined to collide
with one of a pair of spiraling neutron stars in an attempt to delay
the inevitable collision of the stars, resulting in a burst of
radiation that will kill off a nearby civilisation. The other is
trying to dissuade her, saying that this is the natural order of
things that cannot be altered.
- "The Book on the Book" by Dr. Paul Levinson looks at
books and considers whether they have a future in a world increasingly
turning to digital storage. His answer is both yes and no, depending
on what and how the data is to be stored.
- "Cosmic Corkscrew" by Michael A. Burnstein looks at
what happens when a time traveler goes back in time to get the
manuscript of a famous author. Which author? For those who know
quite a bit on the history of Science Fiction, the title of the story
is a dead giveaway.
- "Little Differences" by Paul Levinson is another time
travel story but with a difference. The time travelers go back in
time to try to make the Challenger disaster less of a disaster. But
they are drawn back to the 1960s and have to struggle to decide
whether they should change history in even more drastic ways to ensure
that space travel has a future.
- "The Children Star" by Joan Slonczewksi (part three
of four) continues the serial. On a world where life develops into
circular forms, colonists who leave find themselves falling sick,
causing an emergency meeting to decide whether to eradicate the
planet's lifeforms. But quickly, evidence comes up that indicate that
there may be intelligence of a kind on the planet.
- "The Quantum Eraser" by John G. Cramer is an
"alternate view" article on how quantum effects work for 'action at a
distance' (where particles separated appear to be acted upon
simultaneously) and shows how this effect could be used to 'erase' the
past (or rather, the effects that have occurred on a particle in the
past).
- "My Pal Clunky" by Ron Goulart is a humourous story
about a down-and-out actor who is given a chance to revive his old
series. But he needs to find his co-star, a robotic dog, who may have
other plans for the series.
- "Mary Had a Little..." by Dean McLaughlin is a
'Probability Zero' story about a birth that shock the world. Let's
just say the title has to be read in a different manner to get the
gist of the story.
- "The GUAC Bug" starts off as a big breakthrough on
how to treat a virulent form of AIDS to a patent dispute to the art of
how to decode a string of DNA sequences to reveal a message.
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