On with the show!

Stewart C. Baker offers A View from Driftwise Spindle. From the top of Driftwise Spindle, you can see political posturing, war, greed and selfishness. All the little miseries that make humanity insufferable. You can also see love, devotion, and ingenuity--all under the inevitable and impending doom of Earth.

Speaking of the doom of Earth, Shane Halbach's teenage protagonist in Ten Things Sunil and I Forgot to Prepare for, When Preparing for the Apocalypse might have been able to teach the folks in Driftwise a thing or two. That is, if their apocalypse had involved pop-culture zombies and not the shattered remains of Mars. But seeing as how the young man's own world is not threatened by zombies either, he has a lot to learn.

Silvio Cortez, in Andrew Neil Gray's Mathematical Certainty, knows a lot. But knowledge will only take you so far, and in the high-risk world of asteroid mining, it's what you don't know that will inevitably get you stranded in the middle of nowhere, and bargaining the rest of your life to the insurance companies for the price of a tow back to safety. The question is whether that kind of life is worth living . . .

Sabina's life in the Kingdom of Sicily had been well-planned by her family. She upset all their plans when she tempted the laws of God and man and began practicing the art of bestia mastery. Now, disgraced, she's been sold off to the convent of Santa Agata--a dreary life she can't wait to escape. In Aimee Picchi's Only Then Consume Them, Sabina may get her wish for freedom, but at a bitter cost.

The cost of doing business as a gong farmer is . . . fairly high. There's the cesspits full of human excrement, for one. Let's be honest, that's a high enough price. Pretty much anything else is just overkill. For Kat Otis's Lidea, being The Gong Farmer's Daughter also means contending with an age-old family "blessing" and her drunk, layabout father. Also, the plague. And gunpowder plots.

Amy, in Rachael Jones's The Raptor Snatchers, is too young to know much about diabolical plots. What she knows is that someone is stealing kids' velociraptors from them, and that her own raptor is strangely attracted to the woods near her home. What starts out as a sweet story about a girl and her alien dinosaur becomes something much more bittersweet as Amy does a lot of growing up in a very short amount of time.

We've also got a reprint of Kameron Hurley's short story The Light Brigade, and Lawrence Schoen's interview with her. Bonus content: Kameron's essay, Why I'm Not Afraid Of the Internet, from her new book, The Geek Feminist Revolution.

Enjoy!

Scott M. Roberts
Editor