The included fiction is:
The Caramel Forest • short story by Chris Beckett
Golden People • poem by Bruce Boston
The Wizard of West 34th Street • short story by Mike Resnick
The Waves • novelette by Ken Liu
Flower Power • poem by Karin L. Frank
The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing • short story by Sandra McDonald
The Pipes of Pan • short story by Robert Reed
Your Clone Returns Home • poem by Robert Frazier
Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected • novella by Steven Popkes

A good issue of Asimov's with a mix of story types. The book review column by Peter Heck covered 6 books, and one of the reviews pleased me - it was praising the reissue of Keith Roberts' Pavanne which I read in September and will probably be my favorite book read of 2019. An excerpt from the review, if mine didn't convince you to read it, is this: "The book is one of the most richly imagined of alternate histories, focusing not on the stock scenarios that reverse the outcome of World War II or the American Civil War, but on a quieter yet equally significant turn of history. If you enjoyed it in its first appearance, you'll be glad to know it's back again. And if you missed it, here's your chance to make up the omission. You won't be sorry."

There were no award winners in this issue although Ken Liu's excellent story 'Waves' was nominated for the 2013 Nebula award in the novelette category and made it in to David Hartwell's "Year's Best SF 18" anthology. "The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing" a short story by Sandra McDonald made it in to Richard Horton's Best SF and Fantasy anthology for the year and what was probably a tie for my favorite story in the issue, "Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected" a novella by Steven Popkes made it into Gardner Dozois's Best Science fiction of the year anthology.

So, we have the bones for a good issue. Of the six fiction stories in the issue that were not among the three best ones noted above (once in a while it seems I agree with the anthologists) I was mildly disappointed with Robert Reed's "The Pipes of Pan" mostly because I expect so much of him, and it was probably the weakest of these stories. There is an intriguing premise but seemed to have foundered playing with it. I must say however that I like the idea of renaming Homo sapiens as Pan sapiens. The Caramel Forest was a domestic (family) drama set on another world which is rather an odd world, and the story is viewed from the eyes of a young girl Cassie who unknown to herself is having her mind and memory and consciousness altered by an indigenous race generally referred to as "Goblins". Mike Resnick's 'The Wizard ...' was a cute bit of fluff about a man who could see the future that was entirely too predictable.

In sum, the three best stories make this very much worth reading and the rest isn't bad. The three poems were thoughtful and Robert Silverberg also gives us an essay on the importance of libraries when he was growing up in Brooklyn.

Ken Liu's 'Waves' is classed as a novelette but think of it as a short story that just gives you a glimpse of what could be a full novel. A generation ship is launched on a 400 year mission to a promising system for colonization from Earth. Shortly before the ship loses contact with Earth the secret of immortality is discovered and the instructions are transmitted to the ship. What follows is how a couple of the explorers choose to live forever or die, and their descendants and a glimpse at where mankind may evolve to - something I think of as transcendence. I found it to be an excellent and thought provoking short story.

'The Black Feminist's Guide to Science Fiction Film Editing' by Sandra McDonald isn't a great story by any means but it is entertaining in this story set in a dystopian future where the survivors live on mountaintops of a drowned world and stay out of the blistering sunlight and what do they do? They digitally re-edit classic science fiction films to correct the sins of the past and remake them so that, for example, no one would think that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the star of Total Recall and not Sharon Stone. The bulk of the story centers on a restoration of an unreleased Leigh Brackett film, The Ginger Star with Eric John Stark.

And it is a toss up if 'Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected' by Steven Popkes is a better story than Ken Liu's 'Waves'. Well, that is the wrong way of putting it - they are both very different, good stories. Popkes story is about a washed up but very talented musician who is recruited to work with a singer who wants to up her game, write better songs, more mature music than what she performs for the teenybopper crowd - the kick here is that the performer is an artificial construct. The story is more than that too. ( )