Rhetoric and Logic

POLOSTAN by Neal Stephenson

From the Bomb Light series , Vol. 1

RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2024

An adventurous young woman makes her way into the Soviet Union’s intelligence service in the first volume of Stephenson’s new Bomb Light series.

The Great Silence Written by Ted Chiang

Oct 12, 2016

Issue No 230

Recommended by Karen Joy Fowler

As any long-time reader of science fiction can tell you, “The Great Silence” is another name for the Fermi Paradox, and the Fermi Paradox is a meditation on two contradictory truths: 1) the idea that we represent the only intelligence in the universe is preposterous and 2) despite the increasing range of our extraterrestrial search, we have found only silence.

And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

May 24, 2026

Those alarmed at the paucity of myth-based art-history heist-caper invasive-fungi alien-overlord space operas will be relieved to learn that Molly Tanzer is here to fix things for us. And Side by Side They Wander not only manages to bundle all this (and more!) into a fairly modest-in-length novella, but does so without sacrificing brisk pacing or borrowing off-the-shelf characters. Her narrator, Fennel Tycho, is an art historian recently employed as a PR flack for Lennox Enterprises, “the oldest and only corporation left on Earth” – an Earth which has finally achieved some sort of stability after catastro­phes of the 21st and 22nd centuries left most of its major cities in ruins. Lennox needs PR because its signature fungus, bioengineered to gobble up radioactive detritus, has become invasive, taking over most of Colorado, and even partly infecting some humans – who claimed vastly improved sensibilities as a result. On the plus side, the corporation has established a series of massive art preserves to collect the world’s greatest artworks and protect them from various environmental disasters. The problem with that, it turns out, is that an advanced civilization called the Celerians had arrived back in 2037, offering us all sorts of advanced technologies (much like Arthur C. Clarke’s Overlords) but insisting that they could bet­ter protect our art masterpieces by removing them to a gigantic sort of Guggenheim halfway across the galaxy – and then replacing them on Earth with reproductions so perfectly en­gineered that even at the molecular level they couldn’t be distinguished from the originals. Now, however, Earth wants at least some of those originals back, and the Celerians aren’t budging.