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Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine
June 1998

This month's issue of Analog starts with an editorial by Stanley Schmidt on the importance of doing 'basic' research that do not have immediate payoffs, if any. He fears that the trend towards funding only research that has set goals and targets may lead to a drying up of breakthroughs.

Stories featured in this issue are:

• "Spindown" by Wolf Read looks at a race between two people in close to lightspeed ships. One is determined to collide with one of a pair of spiraling neutron stars in an attempt to delay the inevitable collision of the stars, resulting in a burst of radiation that will kill off a nearby civilisation. The other is trying to dissuade her, saying that this is the natural order of things that cannot be altered.
• "The Book on the Book" by Dr. Paul Levinson looks at books and considers whether they have a future in a world increasingly turning to digital storage. His answer is both yes and no, depending on what and how the data is to be stored.
• "Cosmic Corkscrew" by Michael A. Burnstein looks at what happens when a time traveler goes back in time to get the manuscript of a famous author. Which author? For those who know quite a bit on the history of Science Fiction, the title of the story is a dead giveaway.
• "Little Differences" by Paul Levinson is another time travel story but with a difference. The time travelers go back in time to try to make the Challenger disaster less of a disaster. But they are drawn back to the 1960s and have to struggle to decide whether they should change history in even more drastic ways to ensure that space travel has a future.
• "The Children Star" by Joan Slonczewksi (part three of four) continues the serial. On a world where life develops into circular forms, colonists who leave find themselves falling sick, causing an emergency meeting to decide whether to eradicate the planet's lifeforms. But quickly, evidence comes up that indicate that there may be intelligence of a kind on the planet.
• "The Quantum Eraser" by John G. Cramer is an "alternate view" article on how quantum effects work for 'action at a distance' (where particles separated appear to be acted upon simultaneously) and shows how this effect could be used to 'erase' the past (or rather, the effects that have occurred on a particle in the past).
• "My Pal Clunky" by Ron Goulart is a humourous story about a down-and-out actor who is given a chance to revive his old series. But he needs to find his co-star, a robotic dog, who may have other plans for the series.
• "Mary Had a Little..." by Dean McLaughlin is a 'Probability Zero' story about a birth that shock the world. Let's just say the title has to be read in a different manner to get the gist of the story.
• "The GUAC Bug" starts off as a big breakthrough on how to treat a virulent form of AIDS to a patent dispute to the art of how to decode a string of DNA sequences to reveal a message.

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