My reading of this story started with a double hindrance. Firstly, I made the mistake of deciding that sitting in the only vacant seat on the train carriage was a better option than standing for the 45 minute journey. Normally a no-brainer, but in this instance I hadn't realised that all the other seats in that half of the carriage were taken by 16-year old schoolgirls coming back from a school trip to London. Had they been in uniform I would have spotted it straight away and avoided the empty seat, avoided the carriage (and possibly even avoided the train). However, they weren't in uniform, and so as I sat down I began 45 minutes of inane conversation about boys, singing, clapping, shrieking, yawning, giggling, more conversation about boys...
The second hindrance was finding that the last story in the issue was evidently in the hard-boiled detective milieu. Somewhat dispirited I kept my eyes on the book, studiously avoiding as best as I could the lame conversational gambits from the young 'lady' sitting opposite me.
In the end I gave up tried to make sense of the story, and waiting until today to read it properly.
The reason why finding the story was of the hard-boiled PI ilk is that as a rule such stories in SF magazines tend towards fairly banal humour and do very little for me. Fortunately, Kelly avoids such a convention, and actually goes to the other extreme, furnishing us with a story with a memorably setting and all-female cast (including the POV character).
Kelly's background is a near-future Earth in which aliens have arrived and got rid of virtually 50% of the human population - the male 50%. A couple of generations on and society is just about the same as it is now, the economy not as good as it was, but with robots supplied by the aliens providing a wide range of support, things could be worse.
PI Fay Hardaway is (with the exception of her gender) straight out of central casting, nursing a Johnnie Walker habit, unlucky in love, and bemoaning the lack of business. However, when one of the aliens, through the services of one of the robots, puts her on a very good retainer to do a bit of missings person detective work, things start to look up.
However, as is obviously going to be the case, Fay finds that things start to get complicated - very complicated. Girlfriends, mothers, priests, cops, pre-alien and post-alien generations, alien 'seeding' pregnancies, suicide cults - Kelly puts in a heap of 'soft' SF in a story that to me feels more like a James Tiptree Jr story than one written by a man (and if your knowledge of SF isn't sufficient to work out the sense of that last sentence then it is you who will have to do some detective work hehehe).
Three years ago since that train journey with the girls?
In addition to all this fiction, the non-fiction includes essays by Lou Anders on small and medium press publishers, Kevin J Anderson on SF film, John Picacio on SF art, MH Greenberg / Ben Bova / Ellen Datlow / Bill Fawcett in conversation about short SF, Robert J Sawyer on Canadian SF, Jack McDevitt on the importance of the Nebula Awards, and Josepha Sherman and Andre Norton on the Andre Norton Award, an essay on Harlan Ellison by Barry N Malzberg, and some pomes.
A must for anyone seriously into short SF, but if only the SFFWA could tighten up the rules to choose material from a given calendar year, and pick some more Science Fiction!
