Magazine Reviews

These stories are from the November/December 2024 Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and the November/December 2024 Analog magazine. If these are not still in your bookstores, you can order them from their publishers.

In Asimov’s, the cover story is “Murder on the Orion Express” by Peter Wood. It’s a catchy title, but other than the fact that it’s a mystery, it bears no resemblance to an Earthly train. It’s on a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year trip to Orion, and it’s Ava Martin’s shift to be out of stasis as a ship cop. And it’s just her luck that a murder occurs on her watch. The ship is divided between two political parties, neither of which listens much to Ava. The leader of one party is missing. A recording shows the other leader killing him with a photon gun and shoving the body off the ship. But the other leader points out none of the photon guns have been removed from the armory in years. So what is going on?

Wood deftly goes from segments on the murder mystery to segments on the mutiny, thirty years before. The mutiny isn’t that important; Ava mainly has roommate problems. Her roommate purposefully stays out of stasis long enough to outrank her. This does not help when the roommate comes out of stasis again and tries to one-up Ava during the murder investigation. This story works well as a collision of different personalities.

I think the best story in Asimov’s is a much shorter one, “Deep Space has the Beat” by Mary Robinette Kowal (and yes, it’s another catchy title). This is a contemporary story, wherein Isolde, an engineering major, has opened a dance club. The title has to do with how all the wall screens show images of deep space. But someone is sabotaging her opening night by turning some of the wall screens into porn. And a big investor is going to show up in fifteen minutes.

Isolde has psoriasis on the back of her neck, which acts up during stress. She has to constantly fight the urge to scratch the itch, which turns into a crawling burn as she tries to figure out who is sabotaging her. This is a good story for people (like me) who don’t know what that condition is like, and for people who like the club scene.

In Analog, the best story is another mystery, “Mirrorstar” by Sean McMullen. The Mirrorstar is a massive space telescope, wider than the Earth. Only three dozen people are in the Habitat area. The main character is Dr. Connell, who is a doctor and had been a forensic pathologist, so he can serve as a detective if the need arises. It certainly does when one of the crew in a distant part of the telescope has her body temperature go down to minus one-twenty Celsius. This appears suspicious when a distant camera show her to be naked. But then it turns weird when her body is shown to be covered in brown fur.

Things get even stranger in “Mirrorstar” before there is some resolution. I can’t say I find it completely satisfying. Also, there is the overall attitude that people still on Earth are somewhat barbaric compared to the people in the telescope. But McMullen has an interesting style, combining careful investigation with terse conversations with co-workers.