The setting is a near-future US, strangely affected by both geographic and religious upheaval. An academic group are visting part of the countryside where the geography no longer matches the maps. A splintered christianity is a further backdrop, and the fervour with which the group attend to the righting of the wrongs that their eyes see is a chilling foreboding.

For me, similar to last year's 'The Calorie Man' by Bacigalupi, Rowe has put together a believable, three dimensional, near future projection that is quite unique. OK it is short, but better that than ekeing out something thinly over a lot more pages (did someone say 'Frank Herbert'?). A lot of SF simply relies on standard settings and tropes, and doesn't really provide anything truly original, and stories which do have that bit of inventiveness do stand out. (Paging Messrs Dozois, Hartwell, Strahan, Horton).

We follow a group of virtual sibs, a cadre, who are approaching their Incarnation Day, and what appears initially to be an adventure story surrounding them, becomes much darker as the strains between one young woman and her mother develop into a life-threatening situation, as the parents have the right to return their virtual children to a zero state, and start again.

This story is set in the milieu of 'The Calorie Man', and if not quite up to the heights of the original story, that's more a reflection of just how good 'The Calorie Man' was. The future Bacigalupi posits is a relatively near future Earth which has suffered a lot of societal changes wreaked by multinational agribusinesses and bio-engineered plagues ravaging food crops.

This story opens claustrophobically and intensely, with a nightmare of machetes and blood waking Tranh, who has been sleeping with hundreds of other Chinese, refugees from Malay, in a rundown high-rise in Bangkok. Previously a wealthy businessman in Malay, he had not been quick enough to see the politics and the nationalism that would lead to the rivers of blood which have washed him and his fellow Chinese to such a state of depredation as refugees in yet another country. With only a thin suit, the only reminder of his past he has held onto, to mark him from the thousands like him who are looking for a step on the ladder, he has only his skills and knowledge to help him avoid starvation.

He has to face not only his compatriots in the same situation he is in, but an ex-employee who has managed to do well for himself, and who has obtained the beyond-price Yellow Card which marks him out as not a refugee, but a bona fide citizen of Thailand.

The story follows Tranh through a failed attempt to gain employment to a chance further encounter with his ex-employee, via a scarily dark clockwork prostitute. Bacigalupi gets under Tranh's skin throughout, and you can feel his hunger, and desperation and follow his mental turmoil as he struggles to avoid drowning in the sea of starving humanity.

Following hard on the heels of 'Pop Squad' (F&SF Oct/Nov 2006), a brace of stories of top quality.

A lyrical ghost story and well worth the admission price.

An excellent story, one which a couple of years ago would doubtless have appeared in 'The 3rd Alternative'

Wilson uses technology to make virtual the Cartesian soul. A couple of centuries hence a somewhat unpleasant performance artiste demonstrate how he can use hi-tech to substantiate a copy of a living creature, out of nano-gel. Having created a canine doppelganger, it lives for a few minutes before it starts to decohere.

The next step is to copy himself, and to set up a chillingly bizarre piece of theatre in which both he and his temporary twin will wait to see which of the two is the version which will not live long.

There is a neat twist in the tail as to who exactly is pulling the strings, the better to explore the nature of intelligence, humanity, and the soul, in creatures not of flesh and blood.

It appears that it can, with the pair relating both emotionally and, surprisingly, physically. But he is an AI who can incorporate many instances of himself, the better to multi-task, and of course a woman can not share a man with others in this way. For her it is all or nothing, and as the rules are changed to make such powerful AI's as he illegal, she has to choose between him and the Krishna cop who wishes to turn him off.