Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine - April 2015

In this issue

It may still be the depths of winter outside, but our next issue embraces its April cover date with stories both serious and light-hearted.

Our lead piece is Bond Elam’s “The Eighth Iteration,” in which colonists on a forest planet discover a mystery with profoundly unsettling implications.

The fact article, “New Horizons at Pluto,” from Richard A. Lovett, looks at the New Horizon probe’s impending flyby of the dwarf planet. We’ll also have a special feature on writing from Stanley Schmidt, full of valuable advice from a veteran editor on “Hiding the Info-Dump.”

Then a ship’s crew has an unexpected encounter while hunting comets in Ramona Louise Wheeler’s “Dancing in the Dark”; paternity turns out to be a more complicated matter than one would guess in K.J. Zimring’s “Partible”; and “The Last Days of Dogger City” by Mjke Wood are full of danger and adventure.

On the lighter side, Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini bring us a day in the life of an Immigration officer at a very Golden Age spaceport in “Transfer Point”; Ron Collins shows us that more isn’t always better in “Daily Teds”; Guy Stewart nods at pastoral SF in his Probability Zero, “Whey Station,” and we get a peek behind the curtain at a seemingly obsolete job that has persisted into a science fictional future, in Adam Troy-Castro’s “Down, Please: The Only Recorded Adventure of Ensign Lars Fouton,” not to mention all of our excellent regular columns – no foolin’.