As her son falls ill with the strep throat, she uses her husband's invention, allied to her son's illness, to free them before the FBI waco the house.

Suffers slightly from the rather too unsubtle way the situation is set up - the description of the house's security system is literally only just finished being described before the said system is invaded and we get into the meat of the story.

Almost a Nancy Kress meets Stephen King: except that Stephen King would have got a 700plus page novel out of the storyline!

Here we have a high-tech near future story. Not unlike, in some respects, Nancy Kress's Steamship Soldier on the Information Front, but IMHO much better. It features lots of techie stuff which I like (others won't), and also features two of my own favourite drinking places in Amsterdam, and kinky sex in which the female takes the lead.

The story shows you can have technology in stories without having to forego characterisation, wit and invention. Did someone mention Analog?

Swanwick proves that it can be done, in a wonderfully bizarre/baroque sort of futuristic-steampunk-ishy way. Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux is an upright, walking, talking dog of some class, who falls in with a rum sort of cove when visiting London. A plot is hatched in which the very heart of the English monarch (a gross, maggot like Queen, symbolising, perhaps....) is threatened. Gads sir, a palpable hit!

I've enjoyed all of the aforesaid stories with few reservations, so it with a bit of disappointment that I have to report being slightly less enthusiastic about this story. Whereas the others are uniformly quite inventive, far-future stories, this, whilst retaining a far-future setting, comes across as a more workmanlike story - a distant planet with a secret to be found, and a mystery to be solved. Still good, mind you, but more of an Analog story than, say, an Asimovs story, if you get my drift.

On that basis, this story disappoints.

Whilst en route to its faraway destination, the AI of the Alabama disgorges Leslie Gillis from biostasis. This is neither accident nor malfunction, but harks back to the conspiracy element of the first story. Gillis is unable to return to biostasis and is thus condemned to a Robinson Crusoe existence.

The story follows him through alcoholism, insanity (I would have preferred a more scientific term!) and his eventual fate as a writer of fantasy tales about a Prince Rupurt - on that score I think alcoholism and insanity would have been a kinder fate!

The story does not really get to grips with what would surely be the bone-chilling horror of realisation that you are going to be truly alone for the rest of your life, nor the desperate sense of loss of what one has left behind (Gillis has a brief, maudlin rummage through some old photographs) or for the future not to be.

And a couple of other issues:

• Surely the AI and the ship would have systems in place for dealing with failures in biostasis pods? There appears to be ample space and energy for there to be some spare biostasis units.
• Gillis evidently gives no thought to causing major technical problems which the AI states are the only reason it would wake the crew
• In the darkness of his despair might not Gillis have attempted to unfreeze a companion - a Man or Woman Friday, so to speak. In William Barton's Heart of Glass (Asimovs January 2000) the sole crew member on a long-haul cargo ship finds the temptation some of his cargo offer beyond resistance.
• The story ends with a note that the rest of the flight went smoothly. If this is to be the only reported incident of a long interplanetary journey I would suggest the author has not quite hit the mark.

In the story we read that Duluth takes a shower no less than six times, and are introduced briefly by reference to their skin colour to any number of enter stage left/exit stage right 'characters'.

There is little invention in the story, with a lot of comfortable contemporary references (as I have mentioned in previous reviews): Duluth checks into, and gets the key for a non-smoking hotel room, and has toast and marmalade for her breakfast. No real sense of the truly alien nature of the marine creature with which Duluth is able to communicate is given, and she is able to communicate and empathise to such an extent that she finds herself falling for the octopod.

Reed slowly reveals just enough juicy snippets of information to keep the reader interested. A small, tight-knit community of woods-dwelling humans/elves/creatures forage from the 'big people, who are obviously human beings.

A hard winter proves fateful, and the youngster Raven finds himself having to reveal himself in order to save a friendly human.

But very much the first chapter of a novel, as opposed to a true singleton short story.

The story starts far, far future, with a seriously post-modern genmod human called Mada, fleeing across multi-dimensional multi-chronological space. The ship's AI (actually a DI - Dependent Intelligence) is a bit of a wuss, panicking because the chasing Utopians have put an identity mine five minutes downwhen of them. Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and Mada's evasive action is quite dramatic : jumping to the even further far future (two 10th of a galactic spin).

Mada makes her way to humanity's homeworld, and finds it a strange, sparsely populated place. The contrast in this second half of the story to the first is sharp. The story slips close (albeit with the rider about Kelly doffing his virtual plume-ed cap to Cordwainer Smith/Alfred Bester) to a faux-Medieval cod-pastoral idyll.

She decides to re-populate the planet (and *that* genmod transformation is a real treat) and re-start humanity on its way to the stars. In the climax Mada makes a major personal choice.

An enjoyable story, well-written and inventive. In previous reviews I have bemoaned the Eleanor Arnason 'Lydia Duluth' stories for lack of invention - I would use this story to exemplify what I think good SF is about : more ideas in a couple of pages than a tranche of Lydia Duluth stories.

Sage Akwesasne steps forward to be the first time traveller. One drawback to the system of time travel is that it is one way - she will be encoded as pure information, then squirted digitally via a black hole into the future, where she will be reassembled.

Successfuly transcribed in the future, she awakens to instant global celebrity, and to copyright ownership issues! The Metameme corporation, headed by billionaire mega-geek D. B. Beddoes, has her in his portfolio, and Gilman explores issues around the commodification of knowledge, and information needs and information wants, at length. The love interest is a little creaky, it has to be said.

So with a track record of that strength you would expect something good, and (drum roll to heighten tension) in 'Isabel of the Fall' I can safely say that MacLeod has achieved and probably surpassed his usual high standards.

In a setting which will be featured in another Asimovs story shortly, MacLeod produces a richly woven fable on a planet (?) in which the sun's rays are reflected into a valley by members of a religious order, blinded at birth, who are tied to the mirrors and sing the bringing of light to the valley. The society described is recovering from war, divided into religious groupings, and though a far-future society, is quite fundamental in its practices. For me as a librarian, the description of the work of the librarians, and the homage paid to the founding fathers (sic) of librarianship Dewey, Bliss and Ranganathan was a nice touch, although will likely be missed by most non-librarians!

The novella is surely a shoo-in for a Years Best collectee, and has to be up there as one of my top stories of the year. A lengthy interview of MacLeod by Nick Gevers follows, and my only criticism is the decision to put a photograph of the author in 1989 on the page after a current photo (the late 30s can be a cruel time - of this I can vouchsafe!)

I would say to anyone who has read and enjoyed his other stories - keep an eye open for this one.

The protagonist is seeking her brother Binam, who chose to become a sym as a child. Through him she finally makes contact with the groupmind of the forest and comes to an arrangement regarding their joint desire for freedom. In doing so, however, she reveals more about the nature of the tree/human symbiotic relationship than was known previously.

As appears to be de rigeur nowadays there is an (albeit minor) lesbian episode.

For me the story didn't really manage to engage me with the characters, who were pretty much there to carry the plot and the concept along.

Here we have a story where the main character is somewhat smaller - a humble worm. Well, a worm that is no longer humble - for the worm in question is a research lab who has been genomically grafted to a human brain and ergo can think. I think, therefore I am, is the fundamental premise of the worm's existence, and we get a true worm's eye view of his perspective on life.

One of those stories you will either love or hate. I loved it.

BTW the other Dick is Richard Nixon. To my mind this story fails even more so than most AH because the nature of PKD's take on reality was far more complex and fascinating - this story comes across as being just a little too obvious, for my liking.

The experiences of Oates' time-travelling cloned resurrection in the future is described rather too lengthily and by-the-numbers, with this reader struggling to engage with the character or the plot, to the extent that I ended up skimming the last part of the story.

And according to the author on rec.arts.sf.written, this is to be the first part of a novel. Hmm.

I personally have felt this series of stories as being rather heavy-handed and none-too subtle. As someone in the same line of work there are far more subtle, insidious futures than his cruel extension of Thatcher's idea of a welfare state. In this story Beckett takes a quantum leap, as he adds to the current trough of quantum/parallel stories with visitors from alternate Midlands popping into existance. This of course does not please the authorities!

The story in hand is an interesting one. It starts out evidently as Alternate History, following the life of a young Scotsman, John Matheson, in a world in which the outcome of the Second World War was quite different. For those of you with a limited knowledge of post-war Europe the story may be somewhat confusing - certainly as confusing as I find Alternate History stories set in the USA. Suffice to say that the USA and the Soviets are still at loggerheads, and it is Stalin's death (he early survived the nuclear bomb dropped on Moscow by dint of not being in the city) in the mountains of the Caucasus at the hands of American soldiers which kicks the story off. The domination of the superpowers is also threatened by a pan-national movement - the Human Front, fighting for a global free humanity.

Sufficiently unsettled by the shift in history, the reader is then put into the situation of having to assimilate the crash-landing of a very strange bomber on an airfield. The ship is a flying-saucer, a peculiar craft whose development has been shrouded in a haze of mystery. The young boy witnesses the pilot being removed - a young child it would seem. But the boy is sworn to a most urgent secrecy.

As he grows up, John finds himself drawn to the Human Front, and becomes a guerrilla leader. An attack on a railway line goes from being a huge success to a desperate failure when one of the flying saucers arrives to tip the balance in the battle.

And here the story pitches into yet more bizarre territory, with John and his colleagues transported by the flying saucer to a most un-Earthlike location.

They are esconced in what amounts to a POW camp, with their captors the tall 'Venusians' and squat 'Martians'. The story quickly rattles through to a conclusion in which all is revealed. (SPOILER: the Venusians/Martians are in fact far-future time travellers from different threads of Earth's past/future. John meets and settles down with a woman from a version of history which the reader would recognise as ours.)

All in all a story which is at times quite powerful and grittily believable, although I think the story could have benefitted from greater length.