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phoebe_phorreal 's review for:
Analog Science Fiction And Fact 2021, May/June 2021
by Trevor Quachri
All in all, a decent volume. The stories were in general harder to get into than Asimov's, but the concepts were just as great. Heart of Stone, In-Flight Damage, and The Summoner's Apprentice are spectacular standouts, and I'm loving the trans and sapphic representation here.
To be fair, there are some duds. I couldn't stand Longevity Averaging at all- it just seemed overly gratuitous with its descriptions of bodily fluids, clinical yet at the same time nauseating, with no real rhyme or reason to that choice. Sunward Planet is also decidedly meh and underdeveloped.
And then there's the what-the-heck: things I feel I really can't conventionally rate. Take Dendrochromatic Data Recovery Report 45-274's use of ciphers as a creative way to tell a story (you can choose to crack them or not- I strongly recommend cracking the last two, at least) and Dancing on Spun Sugar's campy love letter to pop music.
Other than that, most stories were in a three or four territory. I did like the novella here, Uploading Angela, more than Asimov's. The ones I liked often had a Bradbury-ish feel, the ones I didn't felt like troubleshooting stories with uninteresting characters and plots.
To be fair, there are some duds. I couldn't stand Longevity Averaging at all- it just seemed overly gratuitous with its descriptions of bodily fluids, clinical yet at the same time nauseating, with no real rhyme or reason to that choice. Sunward Planet is also decidedly meh and underdeveloped.
And then there's the what-the-heck: things I feel I really can't conventionally rate. Take Dendrochromatic Data Recovery Report 45-274's use of ciphers as a creative way to tell a story (you can choose to crack them or not- I strongly recommend cracking the last two, at least) and Dancing on Spun Sugar's campy love letter to pop music.
Other than that, most stories were in a three or four territory. I did like the novella here, Uploading Angela, more than Asimov's. The ones I liked often had a Bradbury-ish feel, the ones I didn't felt like troubleshooting stories with uninteresting characters and plots.