Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2025 issue
Edited by Trevor Quachri
208 pages
Published 2024
Read from January 31 to February 6
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I’ve had subscriptions to both Analog and Asimov’s ever since we moved last spring. I wanted to support both magazines, while keeping abreast of what they’re looking for in fiction these days.
Sadly, I haven’t read any of the issues I’ve gotten. Both magazines are printed by a newsstand puzzle game publisher, making the physical experience of holding and leafing through them especially unpleasant. The ink on my copy’s cover smeared on my hands within minutes of holding it, before I even began reading it. By the time I finished the first story, the spine had begun to peel apart.
The start of a new year of issues seems like a good, round spot to begin, though.
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“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin. Despite the passage of decades, and turnover in the editor’s chair, the “house style” of Analog seemingly hasn’t changed all that much since the late 1990s. This piece opens with a traumatic flashback in italics, then throws you in at the deep end with a bunch of in-universe jargon — lilies, observing Eyes, a mysterious Her. Classic Analog.
The ensuing paragraphs are loaded with perhaps a touch more exposition than strictly necessary, over-compensating for the initial opacity. The general gist: our narrator drifts with geoengineering “lilies” around a gyre in the Pacific, harvesting fish while the diatoms in the gyre sink carbon dioxide into the deeps.
There’s a whole bit about “generative AI exacerbated the carbon crisis, but it also gave us the tools to start fixing it,” which feels pulled directly from some tech oligarch’s PR department. I suppose reading the “hard sci-fi” magazine means encountering a rather more, erm, credulous attitude toward Big Tech than I’m used to here in 2025.
Once “Gyre” stops tripping over its own worldbuilding, a perfectly adequate human-scale story emerges, only to end almost as soon as it settles into its groove.
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“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike. This tale of time travel and solar technology in the nineteen-oughts confirms the Analog “house style” is still going strong. (One story, see, could have been a fluke.) I mean this without a trace of aspersion: this feels like it could have been printed in 1999. I enjoyed it; telling a story of time travel intervention from the perspective of the person whose life was changed, who then spends years trying to figure out why, is an interesting angle.
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“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler. Brief but compelling examination of race and uploaded consciousness. Excellent.
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“Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann. Highly topical yet rather flat story about installing a neural augment in order to stay competitive in an increasingly automated job market. The characters all felt generic, even before anything got installed in their heads.
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“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley. Didn’t care for this one. There’s an interesting kernel in the idea of what rejuvenation would entail for someone turning young again, psychologically and hormonally. But it gets lost in this story. So much expository dialogue, not much to hold my interest, and it felt much too long for what little story there was.
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“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert. Another dense, jargon-forward piece, but this one drops us into a fascinatingly constructed future of corporate drugs and psychological manipulation, where certain hereditary anxiety disorders are harnessed to turn people into walking starship maintenance machines. The best aspects of sci-fi’s New Wave collide with the bleak corporate futurity of the current age. Quite good.
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“Notes from Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden. This flash fic was another blast from the 1990s past, all about designer genetics, as if genetics hold more power over us than how we’re nurtured and what our environment does to us. That’s a pet peeve of mine. If that isn’t an issue for you (and I suspect it was used as a tongue-in-cheek plot device more than anything else), “Descendants” is effective enough. Does what it sets out to do.
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“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day. It’s telling of what our future has been reduced to that so much contemporary sci-fi is about attempts to salvage our biosphere and ameliorate the carbon crisis. (Thanks, billionaires! May you all have the future you deserve!) This story features bioengineered strains of algae, meant to eat waste and sink carbon dioxide, instead going rogue and dissolving industrial civilization. Excellent entry, affecting and well-written.
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“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor. I was going to remark that this was only the second story in this issue that involves neither climate catastrophe nor corporate serfdom, but no: a casual line of dialogue makes sure we know Earth is “going to shit.” Oof. Sometimes realism is a curse. This is a human-scale tale of a researcher readying herself for humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s sweet and solid.
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“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham. A young man learns how to walk the Way between parallel realities, and finds a timeline where he’s happy — until another version of himself comes along.
None of our contemporary problems with futurity here, right? Well, I’d argue that the multiverse became such a staple of 2020s science fiction as an escape from those selfsame issues. It’s that “our timeline took a wrong turn” feeling we all remember from November 2016, and March 2020, and November 2024. And sure enough, in one of the realities Ferdinand visits, the mistakes of internal combustion were pointedly avoided, making for a clean-air utopia with rapid trains. Secretly on-theme after all.
This story held no surprises, and was (to my tastes) excessively heterosexual, ending with two versions of the man arguing over which of them is “better” for their dream girl, rather than giving her a say in her own life. But it was pretty good overall.
I do want to note, for history-of-the-genre enthusiasts, that another world Ferdinand visits is directly lifted from Keith Roberts’
Pavane. Like, almost down to the letter.
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A poem: “Beyond the Standard Model” by Ursula Whitcher. It’s quite lovely.
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“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen. This one is a boiled-down sci-thriller involving remote archaeology, forensics, and the Boys in the Tower. If you’d shown me this story when I was a 16 year old Michael Crichton fan, I would have loved it. I still think it’s an adequate example of its genre, though one with few surprises up its sleeve. I’m just not into the genre anymore.
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“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté. Speaking of sci-thriller vibes, this one is a spacecraft-crash mystery set on corporate Ganymede. Not of much interest to me.
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“Vigil” by James Van Pelt. A sweetly intimate flash fic about memories on board a generation ship.
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“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab. Military sci-fi with robots
can be a beautiful work of art, as with “Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees” by Marie Vibbert, in the
January / February 2019 issue F&SF. Or it can be flat and procedural, as with this piece.
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“The Spill” by M. T. Reiten. Humorous micro about nanotech gray goo.
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“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Geriatric care robot assists his declining patient and thinks about purpose, the self, and the loss of both. Well-executed rendition of a recurring plot. Feels very 2000-ish.
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“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson. Forget the house style of 1990s Analog. We’re going all the way back to the 1960s for this medical emergency in space piece. It is of such vintage that it unironically puts the phrase “steely-eyed missileman” back into print, perhaps the first time in decades. And characterization? Never heard of her. Ends with a Boomer-standard joke.
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“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo. Mashing together high fantasy with technobabble, this one sees a neon satyr and her helpful little robot go on a quest in 23rd century Italy. Clunky exposition blunted my enthusiasm for this piece, which is a shame; if I ever get into Analog myself, I could see it being thanks to a story like this. I think it was mildly entertaining overall, in a pulpy kind of way, perhaps because I wanted to like it.
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“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. A marvelous novella grounded in character, place, and emotion. The science-fictiony topic of quantum topology is blended skillfully with widowed Helena’s precarious position in 1970s Poland, and it’s beautifully written besides. Maybe my favorite story in the issue.
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Lastly, a poem: “‘Oumuamua” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Pretty standard rhyming science poetry. Nothing objectionable.
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And that’s it! An uneven issue overall, with excellent highlights equal to the best of what 2020s SF has to offer, but an equal amount of what felt to me like filler (but what the old Analog heads probably enjoy).
