Besides a sort of shared theme -- how we live with the decisions we make at certain critical "Forkpoints" (the Shelia Finch title about a worn-out actress who has made some seemingly bad choices) and possibly correct them -- this issue also struck me as the classic type of thing I devoured at the archetypal "golden age" of 12. Wondrous tales of time travel, beings from another world who turn out to be humans just like us but with the benefit of a literally broader perspective of the universe, a Twilight Zone vignette of a cynical character beleaguered by strange technology, a couple of ghost stories of both the ephemeral and literally re-emerging from the grave variety. Just the thing to while away a rainy Saturday afternoon or a day beneath the bedcovers sick from school.

Wilhelm's time travel piece explores how we perhaps never fully comprehend how our youthful decisions affect not only us, but those important to us. In a similar way, Steven Utley's "Foodstuff," another one of his time travelling Silurian Tales, works the theme of how even someone supposedly crazy can affect our view of reality. "Black Dust" by Graham Joyce is a fairly run-of-the-mill ghost story, and while Robert Sheckley also visits familiar territory -- that of a curmudgeonly science fiction writer beset by a pair of talking shoes ("shoes with soul" in other words) that attempt to straighten out his wayward life -- it is still quite amusing. The best stories here, for my money, are Jack Williamson's "Afterlife" and Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage." Williamson manages to take a stock SFnal theme -- a visitor from outer space becomes a Messiah figure -- to a thoughtful consideration about how choices based on faith alone can prove fatal. As for the Bailey story, here is what editor Gordon van Gelder has to say:

Okay, don't believe your editor. No one will blame you. But there are papers and documents to prove it, a contract dated October 2000, a check, email correspondence. Fact is, the... story was written before November 7, 2000.

Speaking of changing the living, Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre contribute a piece on the decisions humanity is making as it fuses biology with technology in our already cyborged world. Also of interest in the non-fictional department is Elizabeth Hand's review of Samuel Delany's classic novel, Dhalgren, if only because that book, whatever else it is about, raises the question of how little choice we sometimes actually have in confronting change.

Some people are worried about the future of the genre because the average 12 year old has become jaded by the special effects of movies, computer games, and the technologies of ordinary every day life that have destroyed the sense of wonder such stories generate. I think those concerns are misplaced. It may be true that written stories that are just about time travel, or visitors from outer space, or the living dead might pale in comparison to a mediocre night of programming on the Sci Fi Channel. But such stories as these inspire a different sense of wonder. If there is anything to worry about whether the genre can attract a new crop of younger readers, it's not that they are too technologically jaded, it's that they are not yet old enough to understand this sense of wonder, a sense that can only be shared by those old enough to have gone down -- and perhaps regretted -- how we've traveled down our own personal forkpoints.