Our September issue features the welcome return of William Barton, with a new tale set in the sad, beautiful, uncertain future of his acclaimed novels When We Were Real and Acts of Conscience. An augmented human given the wrong end of the stick by the Standard ARM conglomerate gets a chance to finally turn the tables on his cut-throat employers when he uncovers a mysterious alien vessel during a routine expedition. “In the Age of the Quiet Sun” is Barton at his adventurous best, proving once again that he’s one of the best hard science fiction writers in the business today.

September also contains Will McIntosh’s second story for Asimov’s, in which a young boy, eager to absorb the fabulous powers granted the finders of mysterious spheres hidden around the world, encounters the rarest sphere of all: the “Midnight Blue”—what happens thereafter will charm and delight you, and certainly makes this tale a solid contender for next year’s Readers’ Award; Stephen Baxter plays with [un]history as unlikely heroes Hobbes, Defoe, Newton, and Swift go toe-to-protuberance with chilly invaders from outer space in “The Ice War”; Robert R. Chase examines the difficult rehabilitation of a fanatical “Soldier of the Singularity”; Mary Rosenblum pens a pointed tale exploring the effects of high-powered handicapping on unsuspecting children in “Horse Racing”; UK talent Ian Creasey suggests the uncomfortable limits of parent/child obligation after a consciousness-upload in “Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone”; Derek Zumsteg, making his Asimov’s debut, contributes an uncomfortable vision of teen athletes of the future in “Usurpers”; and Steven Utley takes us right down deep into “Slug Hell.”

new stories by Nancy Kress, Brian Stableford, Melanie Tem & Steve Rasnick Tem, Carol Emshwiller, Ian R. MacLeod, Leslie What, Jack McDevitt, Larry Niven, Geoffrey A. Landis, Robert Reed, Jack Skillingstead, Steven Utley, Gord Sellar, Brandon Sanderson, and many others. . . .