A novella by Nancy Kress is the main story in this issue along with seven shorter length stories. Also included is a monthly editorial by Isaac Asimov, letters to the editor, some poems and Baird Searles' book reviews column.

The stories in order are:
"The Moral Bullet" by Bruce Sterling and John Kessel
"Nine Tenths of the Law" by Susan Casper
"What Eats You" by Norman Spinrad
"Leg" by Avram Davidson
"The Will of God" by Keith Roberts
"Dispatches from the Revolution" by Pat Cadigan (nominated for Hugo best Novelette, 1992)
"Goddard's People" by Allen Steele
"And Wild for to Hold" by Nancy Kress (nominated for Hugo best novella, 1992)

Nancy Kress lost to herself for the Hugo, which was won by her "Beggars In Spain".

I devoured most issues of Asimov's as they came out back when this was a new issue in 1991. It seemed like every issue was a good or great one - lots of good stories. This was one I never read though, until now. As it turns out, this was a very weak issue.

"The Moral Bullet" by Sterling and Kessel is a dystopian piece. The United States has apparently collapsed due to the development of a drug that not only arrests ageing, it appears to reverse it. Haves vs. have-nots. Didn't care for this one really. "Nine Tenths of the Law" was a short one where the spirit of a woman who has died in surgery takes possession of the surgeon's body. It was intended to be humorous but fell flat for me.

I've just never been a fan of Norman Spinrad's writing, fiction or non-fiction. No particular reason that I can think of other than that it just didn't click with me. So I wasn't expecting much from "What Eats You". This came through as I feared. I guess Spinrad writes to be hip, with smacky lingo that just doesn't jive with me. I rather quickly didn't like this future L.A. cop and drugs drama. He tries reaaal hard to be snarky funny. Joe Friday and Dragnet parodies? c'mon. Didn't do it for me. This reminded me somehow of a new wave throwback, and the poor sort of new wave at that.

This issue was not looking so good as I got to "Leg" by Avram Davidson. After "Leg" it was looking much worse. Whatever this story was I didn't like it at all.

Keith Roberts, I think, is a good writer; please save me. His story "The Will of God" turned out to be pretty good. An inventor works tirelessly trying to build a device to capture sound and also to reproduce it, as he struggles to understand electricity. He is losing touch with the world around him except for a young woman who tends to him and tries to pull him out of the obsession which is haunting him. The setting felt at first like a dystopian future that has regressed and lost much knowledge, but we then see it is Germany in 1589. Unfortunately the Spanish Inquisition has come to Germany and the inventor is rather quickly tortured horribly and put to death for making compacts with demons and everything else the small minds can dream of. The discoveries are lost. Not really science fiction as we usually think of it, but rather historical fiction about science.

Pat Cadigan's "Dispatches From The Revolution" may have been Hugo nominated, but this was another odd story that I didn't care for. And I was annoyed that the City of Berkeley was spelled Berkley. This is an alternate history though, where Robert F Kennedy is not assassinated in Los Angeles, among other things, so maybe it was an intentional wrong spelling. In any event the story was yet another example in this issue of writing in a manner that appears to be an attempt to be hip, but it isn't. The new wave again maybe? Didn't that thing die? Some people may like the edginess here, just not me.

Then we get to Allen Steele's "Goddard's People". Steele is a writer whose stories I always seem to enjoy and "Goddard's People" was an excellent one. It is one of Steele's first published stories and it is an alternate history tale that speculates that the space race really began in WW2, with both the U.S. and Germany launching manned rocket planes that achieved suborbital altitudes. It is told in such a matter of fact fashion that it is completely believable and I really enjoyed the story.

Nancy Kress's "And Wild for to Hold" turned out to be a pretty good story as well. The future, dominated by a bizarre church that tries to fix history to prevent major wars, kidnaps Anne Boleyn through time, in an attempt to change English history. Anne Boleyn turns out to be a force of nature in the future too.

So, this issue had a bunch of stories that I thought were quite poor, balanced against one good and two very strong stories at the finish. ( )