Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?

Set in the same universe of Learning the World, where stars are surrounded by green habitats, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?,” by Ken McLeod starts out looking like a romp across the stars. The narrator sleeps with the wrong woman, and rather than work for the next 257 years to pay off his fine, he agrees to go “clean up” Wolf 359. He then receives a series of rude surprises and deals out a few surprises of his own. Like “Always,” the first-person narrator is never named. Your conception of him shifts radically through the story. He starts out acting like Don Juan and ends up more like Genghis Khan.

Distant Replay

It’s hard for me to say much about “Distant Replay,” by Mike Resnick. It falls into the vague middle ground of an okay story, but I don’t love it or hate it enough to really get into it. It begins when Walter, an old man marking time until he can join his dead wife, Diedre, meets a 30ish woman who is exactly like Deedee. Exactly.

War on Weeds

Some weeds native plants I can tolerate.

Like these violets.

They can be a nice groundcover in the shady spots. But…

Cosmic Jackpot

A good book you might wish you had read before tackling “The House Beyond Your Sky,” is Cosmic Jackpot. In clear, entertaining arguments, Paul Davies works his way through the various flavors of theories attempting to explain the “Goldilocks” problem. That is, there are a small set of critical constants that have to be within extremely narrow ranges to make life in this universe possible, and since there is life in this universe, all those constants are just right. And nobody has a good explanation for this tautology.

The House Beyond Your Sky

Some science fiction reads like popular science writing dressed up in story. “The House Beyond Your Sky,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, is a story you really can’t understand unless you already know some science. The references to cosmology–like simulated universes and critical constants–go completely unexplained. And you know what? I like being treated as an adult.

All Seated On The Ground

I usually don’t like Christmas stories. Or Christmas. And especially not Christmas carols. But I do like choral music. Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why like “All Seated On The Ground,” by Connie Willis so much. It begins in the middle of the frenzy of the “holiday season,” when six aliens come to Denver and do nothing. Well, not quite nothing. They glare.

Wikiworld

You know how you’re not supposed to use wikipedia as a reference? By the same token, you can’t take “Wikiworld,” by Paul Di Fillippo all that seriously. Full of wordplay and in-jokes (the biggest being the term jimmywhale), it’s set in a world were wikis become social groups that collect for various purposes, from building a house to running a country.

Save Me Plz

What kind of world do you want? “Save Me Plz,” by David Barr Kirtley offers a bigass One Impossible Thing: a game artifact that can change the real world. With such a premise, naturally the story blurs the distinctions between levels of reality. It begins with Meg throwing her sword into the trunk of her car. You’re thinking well, maybe she studies historical swordplay, or does LARP or SCA. Then she has to kill a giant spider. Okay, things are not what they seem.

Recovering Apollo 8

I was just a kid in the 60s, but I remember the uncertainty of the Apollo program, from the terrible reality of Apollo 1, to wacky speculations that Apollo 11 would sink into the lunar dust. The movie “Apollo 13″ captured wonderfully the constant fear that something might go wrong. When you look at what technology we had available, the amazing thing is that it worked at all. In “Recovering Apollo 8,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch explores a world where Apollo 8 didn’t come back from the dark side of the moon.

Promising Greenery

I feel like such a wuss. A couple weeks of nice weather and suddenly 55 degrees feels cold again. The plants don’t mind. There’s bleeding heart coming up, even though I moved them. There’s tulips holding their colors in reserve. There’s hosta, too.