Carrie Vaughn's "The Best We Can" (short story, first contact, free)

This is hard sf. If you don't have the right taste, it probably will appear very dry.

Story summary.

An object has been found in a solar orbit. Something that's not natural. And not human. Story is speculation about what it could be & the fight of discoverer with the funding agencies to go look more closely at it.

See also.

1. James E Gunn's "The Listeners": Another hard sf & realistic look at a first contact scenario.

Fact sheet.

First published: Tor.com, 17 July 2013.

Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: A.

Added to my "best of 2013" list.

Related: Stories of Carrie Vaughn.

"Lightspeed", February 2012 (ed John Joseph Adams) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Whole issue.

Has 4 science fiction stories, including 2 reprints. I didn't find any really interesting, though Vaughn's is action packed.

List below is in order of my preference - best first.

1. [reprint] [ss] Gregory Benford's "Dark Sanctuary" (B); download; Omni, May 1979: A lone asteroid miner is "attacked" & chased by an alien craft. Story is mostly deductions by miner based on very little information.
2. [ss] Carrie Vaughn's "Harry & Marlowe & the Talisman of the Cult of Egil" (B); download; steampunk: Two Britishers, a princess & a soldier, steal an alien artifact from a temple in Iceland. Then they cross a blockade of British isles by Germans in an airship. Set in late 19th century.
   
   While the language is modern, the sentiments are from a century ago; not sure if it's intentional. First half could have been from an Argosy issue - "civilized" white man vs barbaric savage natives.
3. [reprint] [ss] Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Craters" (B); download; Future Weapons of War/Baen, March 2007: Two stories, actually, & dark - terrorists using bombs implanted in babies, & using engineered viruses to prevent wars.
4. [ss] Keith Brook's "War 3.01" (B); download: Description of a world where geolocation-sensing augmented reality is common. We already have some of it in phones; this one adds a version of it using spectacles or contact lenses' based mobile displays.

"Lightspeed", #1 (June 2010) (ed John Joseph Adams) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Whole magazine is online - 4 stories + some other stuff. ToC below only includes fiction, & links online copies of individual stories.

Kirtley's story is pretty good. McDevitt's develops suspense well but has a dud ending. Vaughn's is a decent enough read, particularly later parts, if you like emotional stories. Last one is readable, but I would rather skip it.

Table of contents (4 stories, best first).

My rating is in brackets. Link on author yields more of author's fiction. Link on story title goes to my post on individual story, if there is one.

1. David Barr Kirtley's "Cats in Victory" (A); download: Religious crusaders spare world's last living "animals" lives.
2. Jack McDevitt's "The Cassandra Project" (B); download: Discovery of an alien artifact on moon.
3. Carrie Vaughn's "Amaryllis" (B); download: New kind of family arrangements in a scarcity society, & where bearing a child without permit is a very serious crime.
4. Vylar Kaftan's "I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno" (B); download: A love story that's a bit too science fictional for my taste.
   A man & a woman. Next door neighbors. Forever in love, never really meeting. A lot of cosmic & relativity adjectives thrown in in the descriptions.
   
   In some ways, it's just a review of many popular sf tropes - time dilation during near
   light speed travel, & what the traveler will find back on earth on return, hibernation to survive to medical treatment in far future, mind uploading, ...

Related: Fiction originally published in 2010; best of 2010.

Carrie Vaughn's "Marrying In": Pains of a country newly divided

This is a non-genre story, & with a very old plot. I must have read at least several dozen stories with this plot. It's about human pain & behavior when a country is divided into smaller ones. Only difference I see with familiar India/Pakistan partition stories is: this one is only mildly emotional.

Story summary.

Country divided in the story is US. Alice from some new country on Atlantic coast has married Tom from the town of Pueblo, in the country called Colorado. Story is of her immigration hassles, & of local human behavior related to partition.

Fact sheet.

"Marrying In", short story, review
First published: Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2007.
Rating: B