Our September issue offers an uncommonly wide variety of stories, including two unusual novelettes: one by a well-established Analog favorite; and one by a writer new to these pages and almost new to science fiction writing, but promising to attract plenty of attention. You already know you can count on Carl Frederick to come up with some of the strangest, most original ideas around, and he's certainly done it again in “Helix of Friends.” (I'll leave you to speculate on what the title means.) Gray Rinehart isn't really new to SF—he's worked for Baen Books in an editorial capacity for some time—but I believe he'd published just one story of his own before ours, a mere few months earlier. And he's managed to overcome one of my standing biases: “psi” stories were so overworked in past years that our readers tend to resist new ones unless they bring something very fresh and unique to the concept—and “Therapeutic Mathematics and the Physics of Curve Balls” does just that.
In the science fact area, we all know about the “Ring of Fire,” the band of frequent seismic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean—but once in a while we hear disturbing references to the threat of a massively destructive earthquake in an area not normally associated with them. After all there was a dilly 200 years ago, centered near New Madrid, Missouri. Are we due for another? Richard A. Lovett takes a critical look at the prospects.
And, of course, we'll have several short stories and Part 3 of Edward M. Lerner's all too timely serial Energized.