Explosive rags!!! Great stories!!!

[sergebroom]

I finished the September 2007 issue of Asimov's a few days ago, but it's only now that I can write about it. The last few days were spent cleaning up the house for the visit of my parents-in-law. In fact, there was more of that yesterday, starting at 6am until late afternoon when it was time to go pick them up at the airport. (I did take a shower before departing. Really. Honest.) My lengthiest task involved applying some product called Restor-a-finish upon the numerous scratches made by our canines to the house's varnished doors over the years. And it worked too because the scratches are gone. ("But wait! There is more!...") I had been warned though not to toss the soaked rags into the garbage can because the heat might cause them to spontaneously burst into flames.

That being said…

I especially enjoyed this issue of Asimov's, especially two of the stories. There was Ted Kosmatka's The Prophet of Florès, an alternate-History where the Theory of Evolution never took hold, and Intelligent Design reigns. There are suggestions that contradictory evidence was suppressed or manipulated. But it's becoming more and more difficult to keep the facts buried, no matter how harsh the ID people are. Recommended, and yes, I'm going to have to go take a look at more of Kosmatka's writing at http://www.tedkosmatka.com.

My favorite though is James Van Pelt's How Music Begins. Two years before, a high-school band and its two teachers disappeared from the Earth and found themselves imprisonned by some unseen aliens they call the Perfectionnist. Why, nobody knows, but the kids have become convinced that, when their performance is perfect, the aliens will send them back home. I was familiar with Van Pelt from the days when I used to read Analog, but this story really did it for me. Time to go peek at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com.