Welcome to Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. I'm Eric James Stone, guest editor for issue 42. [Insert Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy joke here.] Presented for your enjoyment are the following tales:

Our cover story, "Wine for Witches, Milk for Saints" by Rachael K. Jones, starts us off in the holiday spirit. Puppetism, a disease that transforms children into wooden puppets, has a beneficial medical use: hearts that are defective in flesh can be easily fixed in wood by a Tinker. But when the promised wooden cogs fail to arrive by Christmas Eve, a Tinker must deliver bad news to his young patients - who proceed to take matters into their own hands.

Find out the full history behind "Eli Whitney and the Cotton Djinn" in Zach Shephard's story, which features numerous madcap inventions, two djinn intent on lovingly murdering each other, and one rainbow-maned walricorn (cross between a walrus and a unicorn, of course).

M.K. Hutchins makes her fourth appearance in IGMS with "A Dragon's Doula." Dragons may live among us in human form, but they still are born from eggs. The doula's job is to make sure the egg can hatch in a calming environment, but that can be difficult when there's an angry nine-year-old in the house.

Our audio story, "The Burden of Triumph" by Samuel Marzioli, is told from the point of view of a parasitic alien predator, reborn with a genetic memory of what happened to its ancestors - including a warning about the bipedal meats.

In "Fire Born, Water Made" by Adria Laycraft, a baby will be killed if his fireborn mother cannot prove he has the birthright of fire. But can she bring herself to steal another child's birthright to save her own son?

The first half of the novella "On the Winds of the Rub' Al-Khali" by Stephen Gaskell introduces us to a young Bedouin boy with a talent for math. Because he is uneducated, he may be better able to learn from the alien device that has baffled mathematicians ever since it landed in Africa a few years earlier. But even abstract math can have real-world consequences.

Darrell Schweitzer brings us an interview with award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi, whose dystopic short story "Small Offerings" is reprinted in this issue.

We are also privileged to present the first chapter of Orson Scott Card's recently released novel Visitors, which I can personally attest brings a very satisfactory conclusion to the Pathfinder trilogy.

Thank you for reading. Please come back next year for some more great stories.

- Eric James Stone