#zoharjacobs — Public Fediverse posts

As a mail subscriber to #AsimovsScienceFiction magazine, I get a vote in their 2025 reader's awards. It was fun to go back and re-read my favourite stories for the year to decide my rankings:

Best Novella:
1. Quantum Ghosts, #NancyKress
2. The Chronolithographer's Assistant, #SuzannePalmer
3. Spare Parts for the Mind, #GregEgan

Best Novelette:
1. Most Things, #RichLarson
2. On the Night Shift, #ZoharJacobs
3. The Fight Goes On, #HarryTurtledove

Best Short Story:
1. Catch a Tiger in the Snow, #RayNayler
2. Lolo's Last Run, #EMKerkman
3. Woolly, #CarrieVaughn

Best Poem:
1. I Try to Explain the Concept of Teeth to My Alien Roommate, #RachelLinton

Best Cover:
1. July/August, #MaurizioManzieri (attached image)

- My subscription started after the Jan/Feb issue, so that got snubbed.
- For all that print #SciFi magazines are now extremely marginal commercially and culturally, this one at least still attracts some pretty great material (mixed in, admittedly, with some so-so stuff) including by veteran greats of the genre - Kress and Turtledove are still producing amazing work in their mid-late 70s!
- I found the Novella section hardest to trim down to 3, with narrow cuts for stories by T.R. Napper, Ted Kosmatka, and John Kessel.
- It was a great year for pets in SF stories, or maybe as a dog- and cat-lover I'm just sucker for them. I found a place in my heart for Lolo, Magritte, Goobler the miniature woolly mammoth, Sponge, and of course, the tiger in the snow!

#FinishedReading my first of a subscription to #AsimovsScienceFiction magazine. With its wonky printing (page margins randomly shifting, print changing darkness across each page) it feels a bit like samizdat; I don't mind that, but surely they could have done better with the cover (credited only to image corporation Shutterstock). More importantly the stories were solid and entertaining, although not top tier. My favourites were 'The Hidden God' by #TRNapper and 'On the Night Shift' by #ZoharJacobs , one a satirical thriller of AI attaining sentience and declaring class war, the other a fairly realistic story of mission control for a Mars landing trying to work through a climate change induced superstorm on Earth. #NancyKress , one of my favourite short story writers, has part 1 of a 2 part story so I'm intrigued to see where that goes next issue! @scifi