Maxima Library

With its exotic alien and distant space travel, our dramatic cover story is set far in time and space from some of the author’s stories of the near future and the historical past. The determination and inner reserves of this tale’s remarkable character, Azia, are not unlike the self-reliance of Ms. Duchamp’s title character in her last story, “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta de Pietro Cavazzi” (September 1997).

The medieval world and the modern; illuminated manuscripts and laptop computers; and neoplatonism and the age of reason; are all part of the wonderful tapestry woven in… Animae Celestes.

A vegetarian actor moonlighting in the kitchen of a delicatessen finds that some people will stop at nothing to revise our memory of the past.

Daniel H. Jeffers tells us he “left a small desert town in California to join the Navy and see the world. I ended up as one of Rickover’s nuclear submarine operators. I went around the world, twice, but most of it looked like the inside of an engine room to me.” Once out of the Navy, he ended up with a degree from Georgetown Law Center, and he attended the 1996 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Jeffers’ first sale was to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine in 1989. His second appears here now.

The author’s most recent book, Maximum Light (Tor, December 1997), is a hard science fiction novel about genetic engineering. On a personal note, Ms. Kress adds that she’s just married fellow SF author Charles Sheffield.

In his first piece of fiction for us in seven years, our insightful and provocative literary critic, Norman Spinrad, shows us why it pays to be careful in… The Year of the Mouse.