The Fix has reviewed InterGalactic Medicine Show #10, which includes “The Robot Sorcerer.”

Here’s the money quote:

The story is personal in scale and filled with mystery, action, and even tragedy. Stone explores many themes: the nature of life, magic versus technology, magic as technology, moral dilemmas, and self-sacrifice being only a few. He does so while also creating a complex plot that doesn’t confuse the reader, establishing depth of character, and describing a rich and fascinating world while also maintaining a good pace. It is, by far, the best story in this issue.

The InterGalactic Medicine Show Anthology, including my stories “Tabloid Reporter to the Stars” and “Taint of Treason,” is now available as an audiobook from Audible.com.

I first read Brandon Sanderson’s novelette “Firstborn” while proofreading the story for the Leading Edge, BYU’s speculative fiction magazine, and I thought it was great.  Brandon’s usual genre is fantasy, but “Firstborn” is science fiction, and he pulls it off very well. 

Unfortunately, since the circulation of the Leading Edge is small, not many people had a chance to read the story when it came out.

Fortunately, “Firstborn” is now available for free at Tor.com.

For any stock held now or bought within the next quarter and sold after 2010, reduce the long-term capital gains tax rate from 20% to as low as 4%, using a sliding scale of 2% reductions for each year the investment was held.

This would have two major immediate effects:

• Encouraging investors to hold on to current investments for at least another two years, rather than selling to try to avoid losses as the market moves even lower.
• Encouraging investors to buy now for the long term.

The result of those effects would be to reduce selling and increase buying of stocks, thus ending the market’s slide.

The reason for the sliding scale is to make it so these incentive tax cuts don’t all expire at once, leading to massive sell-offs in a couple of years.  (The scale may need some tweaking as to rates and length of time held, but the basic principle is there.)