Then I spotted the mention that Levine was a recent winner of the James White Award for short SF by unpublished writers, so I checked back on my review of Nucleon, which appeared in Interzone, December 2001. I did this partly because the only recollection of the James White Award I had was a vague one of a story which I felt read as a story by a novice writer. In fact the story I was remembering was a previous White winner, for my review of Nucleon pointed out that unlike that previous story, Levine's winning story was not obviously a first published story. But I did point out that Nucleon was somewhat Bradbury-esque.

I'm not making a fuss about any kind of pattern in derivativeness, but merely point out the coincidence.

Enough of the waffle - 'The Tale of the Golden Eagle' has that lyrical feel, of a story told many times over the millenia.

As in 'The Ship Who Sang', intergalactic travel is made possible by giving a ship a biological brain. In this case, it is the brain of a Golden Eagle. And the ship in question lives through many centuries, ending up in reduced circumstances, before it is finally recognised for what it is and rescued. The AI is made free, to inhabit the body of a beautiful, though sexless, silver body. The gambler who gambles all to win the ship finds that his financial security requires the ship to be re-equipped with a biological brain. Can he bear to inflict on the now-mobile AI a return to its non-corporeal status? Indeed he cannot, but there is an alternative. And thus the myth of the ship with the beautiful silver lady as captain is born.

A strong story, which suggests a bright future for Levine.

And, having just written the preceding I took a quick peek at Bluejack's review of this story, and dang it if he didn't mention Cordwainer Smith and The Ship Who Sang in his review!

The POV character is indeed Bernardo's House AI, which is struggling to cope with the long absence of its owner. Something has obviously happened, both to Bernardo and to society as a whole, but the AI is struggling gamely one, even after two years.

A feisty young girl appears in the garden, and she and the AI begin to build a relationship, which ends with the AI coming to terms with the loss which she had been hiding from herself.

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.

But there is one condition - she must never open the door.

Yup, you guessed it. She opens the door, and finds herself into a horrible, mechanised far-future with humanity evidently reduced to dull slavery. However, she meets up with a younger girl, from her future, and the pair find themselves playing a key, heroic role that will help save humanity from the terrors of the future.

Shepard addresses Ground Zero in a different way. A small team of workers on Ground Zero head off to a bar after each day's work, each of them struggling with the aftermath and their own response to it. A young businesswoman is a regular at the bar, and she seems strangely out of place.

The woman and the protagonist between them come to their own, and a shared, resolution. Not a clear-cut, resounding resolution which enables them to make sense of what happened, and why it happened and so forth. But a resolution which enables them to take another step away from that date. In her case, the step is a big one.

Top quality.