All Hallow's Eve has just ended and I'm sitting here a bit uncomfortable from having liberated far too many Whoppers from my seven-year-old's candy bag. I don't know why I ate them--I don't like Whoppers. NO ONE likes Whoppers. They're the modern-day equivalent of Bits-o-Honey, or Cow Tails. But I ate them anyway.

And now I pay the price of being a middle-aged dude with an (apparently) indiscriminate sweet tooth.

Wherever you are, O Reader, I hope that your celebrations of All Saint's Day or Dia de los Muertos and the impending holiday season will be filled with good friends, good food, and a sensible appetite. No Whoppers for the IGMS crowd, Mr. Claus, please and thank you.

Harry Turtledove opens this issue with Not on the Gallows, a nautical tale of alternate history. Need I say more? Keep your eyes open--history does not want to be changed.

You know what else resists change? Old fairies. In Tim McDaniel's The Fairy Godfather, Paulie's uncle is the titular Fairy Godfather. And the Godfather has a problem: He's on the outs with the missus, the boys on the corner got no more respect for him, and maybe he's being a bit too liberal with the name-calling, you catch my drift? So Paulie sets about to make things right, like one does.

Andrew Woozer has never had to make things right--they just have always seemed to go that way for him. But at the beginning of Gregor Hartmann's Carry On, Torus, Earth has been slagged by nanotechnology, and Woozer finds himself on a desolate Kuiper Belt Object, far from home and its myriad comforts, with only his miniaturized AI for company. It's hard to imagine how things could go right--but keep a stiff upper lip, wot?

Turncrowe is Michael Meyerhoffer's mercenary-turned-abbey guardsman, who, right or wrong, has always tied his loyalty to whoever is winning. Now he finds himself charged with protecting the corpse of a long-dead saint. Easy enough work, if it weren't for traitorous nephews, diabolical kings, and stately, rebellious duchesses, all vying to use the Saint for power.

What price would you pay for the power to live in a young, healthy body forever? That's the question asked by Laura-Marie Steele's It Becomes You. Or rather, what price would you force someone else to pay . . . ?

Our audio selection this month is William Fischer's fable of a card game, creation, entropy, and anthropomorphized abstractions. Why Death is Silent asks the question and provides an answer in the tone of Fantasy Princess, Alethea Kontis. You can't really ask the universe for more (or can you?).

All this plus an interview with and reprint from the incredible Chuck Wendig!

Scott M. Roberts
Editor
Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show