Joe's wife finds the call of the collective too much to bear, and enjoins with the creature, leaving her husband with a choice to make.

Stross invariably provides value for money, and here the rural setting gives him plenty of rein for furnishing more invention than you can reasonably expect in such a small space.

An elderly member of a team of medics lands on a colony planet to find the colonists in what appears to be a terrible state - suffering seizures during which they see wonderful visions. There is a dilemma with regard to what to do in this situation, which is made more dramatic when the nature of the seizures, a virus which attacks the brain, infects the medical team.

The protagonist makes a decision - to dedicate what is rest of her life to help the colonists, rather than to leave them to their fate. The final sentence is one which is quite clearly a unique one in the entire SF pantheon (unless you know of a story which ends "Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es - etef efef! O, etej efef!")

In this story, the lunar cop Anna-Louise Bach, returns to our pages. She featured in the notable 'Barbie Murders' from 1978, which was collected in Terry Carr's Year's Best Science Fiction of the Year #8, notable for its use of a merkin (look it up) as a plot device.

Varley sets the story off which a pregnant woman fleeing a pursuer, and by mistake ending up in in airlock and ending up being exposed to the vacuum of the moon and dying.

The claustrophobic lunar society, bustling with pregnant women (of whom Bach is one) is vividly drawn. The plot - pregnant women are going missing, to be found dead, their fetus removed. Bach is sent out to act as bait for the serial murderer, and she hangs out in a nudie-freesex bar.

Sure enough, Bach is successful in her role as bait - but rather too successful as she is captured and whisked away. The dramatic denouement takes place in a domed cornfield, with Bach, now in labour, fleeing for her life, and the life of her child. She manages to turn the tables on her pursuers, who it transpires have been 'harvesting' the unborn babies to meet the demand for those remaining carnivores who have found even veal no long satisfies their needs.

Varley has spent a lot of time in Hollywood, I understand, and the story reads quite like a SF thriller movie. Not a bad story, for its type, but not a Varley classic.

Here, in the remote American wilderness, a scientist studying bears in the wild is piqued to be re-located to study elsewhere. Such is his strength of feeling that he risks all to remain with the bears. In doing so he stumbles across a secret that his re-location was meant to keep from his, and humanity's, prying eyes. The nature of the Hefn's presence on Earth is thus revealed.

Works well as a singleton, although familiarity with the novels will give added value.

A further electrical problem with his powertool evidently returns him home. But in a heartwarming twist which brought the tears to this soppy sentimentalist's eyes, he is called back into the house by his most definitely alive wife. Dangnabit.

Whilst time-travel is beyond us, it has proven possible to capture events of the past in sufficiently immersive detail for VR, and he is able to look back at his wife, before they met, and to finally come to terms with what he has lost.

Williams intertwines two, or in fact three stories, tying them together in a powerful ending.

We start in the warm waters of the Philippine sea - literally so, as Michelle is a mermaid, and we follow her on a fishing trip. She is not quite a mermaid - but a human currently occupying a genmod body. She is given a job by an aged scientist by the name of Davout - the job: to research a gap in the life of Jonathan Terzian, a scientist whose Cornucopia Theory literally changed the world.

Michelle's research is made possible by the vast amount of material archived in digital form (photographs, news clips, financial records etc.), and she soon makes progress. As her research identifies key data we then join Terzian himself, as he finds himself quickly embroiled in espionage, murder, and a scientific breakthrough which can virtually eradicate starvation.

The stories gradually unfold, with Terzian's bravery offering the world a chance to redeem itself. Where a less impressive story would end here, Williams then ups the ante by showing, via Michelle, that the scientific breakthrough for which many died was in fact not a success - almost the opposite. And Michelle's lover, who has been trying to find her since his last death (people can upload their memories to ensure that any fatal accidents are easily recovered from) finds that there is something she knows about him that she is not about to forgive.

Excellent.

A setting out of fairy-tale mythology, with a dark castle, a young, frightened girl, Lidia, and nasty adults.

The Fluted Girl is a strange, fragile creature, the exact nature of which we only find out towards the end of the story - she has been forced to have many surgeries and treatment that have indeed made her a human flute. The music from her, and from her sister, is a music to die for, created through an incestuous sapphic performance fit for a queen.

And the Queen is a wicked one, of course, and the young man who had loved Lidia and plotted the Queen's downfall, but failed in its execution, is himself executed and served for dinner.

But, as with most fairy tales, there is a happy(ish) ending, and Lidia turns the tables on the evil Queen.

Robert is an 'Eye' - some who connects to a tachyon stream whilst in a total immersion chamber, controlling equipment in deep, deep space, seeking life on other planets.

His job is one that carries a heavy emotional and psychological price, in that he is reliant on drugs to be able to engage with the 'real world'. He is struggling to find his true self having 'returned' from his last trip, trying to avoid taking the drugs. Whilst out driving he meets a woman, widowed a couple of years ago, who is similarly trying to recover her true self.

The two find that between them they might be able to begin to meet their individual needs, although a final challenge awaits them before this can happen.

An excellent story.

The 'cluster' of cloned children is an intriguing one, and the singleton throws into relief that complex relationship, to provide a thoughtful story.

Things quickly go from bad to worse, as the person he is sharing the room with begins to cause concern. Mr.Schumberg has a similar infection, which should be neither infectious, nor serious. Wrong on both counts. Schumberg has unwittingly been infected by some very, very unpleasant nano-tech, which is evidenly dismantling his lung to create - something else.

Schumberg dies, and as his infection spreads, including to the protagonist, it transpires that the infection has quite chilling potential to spread. Only a nuclear or radioactive intervention can kill the nano. As the town is sealed off, and a bomb drop appears quite likely, radiotherapy is found to be one solution.

What could be a fairly routine story about a nasty tech-plague is much more, thanks partly to the quality of the characterisation, and the final scenes, in which some of the nano which escaped provides a very alien landscape compared to the human landscape which the story had features.

Dixie Mae and her colleagues set out to solve the mystery. It transpires that Dixie Mae is in fact an upload, and she and her colleagues are being run in a computer simulation. Time and time again.

Vinge posits massive hardware and very clever software, and has an interesting idea, but the story comes across as being just a tad pedestrian - not least in that most of the action is in the form of the characters walking between office buildings!

There's a palpable lack of emotion as the characters find out that they are just uploads, and in one case a character come face to face with another instance of themselves, but takes it in her stride. Hark back to 'For I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream..' for a group of people memorably uploaded into a computer and the human reaction to that circumstance - written some 40 years ago?

And there's an awful lot of dialogue and tech discussion between the characters, which tends to get in the way of a story developing, and the ending is somewhat anti-climactic - the characters have worked out pretty much what is happening, but resolving it is the challenge on which the story ends.

But having said that, I did finish the story thinking I was holding a copy of Asimovs in my hand, which puts the story some way ahead of the average Analog story.

I'm not the greatest fan of stories which leap a decade at a time - it feels as if the author has cheated a little and taken the easy option, rather than trying to build a coherent and chronologically contained narrative, with the use of flashback as (and if) necessary.

An interesting story, but it did feel as if it could have been worked on more.

Here van Pelt sets up the story with an unusually downbeat section. With nuclear armageddon underway a team at Mission Control are desperate to live those few minutes more to see the space Advent make the leap from our space to another space. Can humanity make that leap and survive? Sadly the final moments of those at Mission Control see the experimental spaceship fail disastrously, with the ship making the jump but those on board evidently left floating in deep space.

There can't be many more downbeat beginnings to a story!

There are then a couple of scenes, generation by generation, in which humanity's recovery from the nuclear winter is seen. Once the stars can be seen again we have something to aim for. But will we be a backward looking race, or one which looks to the future.

Intertwined with those scenes are intriguing glimpses of a consensual consciousness formed from those on the Advent, whose noncorporeal intelligence is able to penetrate deep into space before returning.

And as with the aforementioned Tiptree, the reader is left wanting more.

In true X-Files fashion, the protagonist is in a race against time to find the ans