The September 2010 issue of Analog, with my novelette “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” has officially been released. That means you may be able to find it at bookstores or on newsstands. You can also buy it as a single issue from mymagstore.com. (Don’t worry if they still have the prior issue cover showing; what matters is which issue date they say you are buying. Plus, they will ship to prisons! [For some reason, their site puts a lot of emphasis on that fact.]) You can also download the issue from Fictionwise.com for use in various e-readers. From what I can tell, you can’t buy the issue individually for the Kindle, but you can subscribe and get that issue here as part of your 14-day free trial.
To whet your appetite, here’s how the story begins:
Sol Central Station floated amid the fusing hydrogen of the solar core, 400,000 miles under the surface of the sun, protected only by the thin shell of an energy shield, but that wasn’t why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station’s multidenominational chapel. As a life-long Mormon I had been speaking in church since I was a child, so that didn’t make me nervous, either. But this was my first time speaking when non-humans were in the audience.
The Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only six human members, including me and the two missionaries, but there were forty-six swale members. As beings made of plasma, swales couldn’t attend church in the chapel, of course, but a ten-foot widescreen monitor across the back wall showed a false-color display of their magnetic force-lines, gathered in clumps of blue and red against the yellow background representing the solar interior. The screen did not give a sense of size, but at two hundred feet in length, the smallest of the swales was almost double the length of a blue whale. From what I’d heard, the largest Mormon swale, Sister Emma, stretched out to almost five hundred feet — but she was nowhere near the twenty-four-mile length of the largest swale in our sun.
“My dear Brothers and Sisters,” I said automatically, then stopped in embarrassment. The traditional greeting didn’t apply to all swale members, as they had three genders. “And Neuters,” I added. I hoped my delay would not be noticeable in the transmission. It would be a disaster if in my first talk as branch president, I alienated a third of the swale population.
This story is the most “Mormon” story I’ve written, but it’s completely understandable to non-Mormons — there’s no way Analog would have published it otherwise.
