Leaving the house of the courtesan she serves, a servant comes across a beggar who has discovered the concept of zero.
A story about a group of people taking a hard stand against the kind of people who refuse to believe in global warming.
A story of the latter years of Roman colonisation in Britain, c.600CE (at the beginning of the Saxon period). Strongly historical, mildly fantastical.
An alien is sent to Washington DC to determine how its bureaucracy works, with a view to invading the planet. He finds he is not the only alien civilisation with this plan–and none of the others can work out Earth bureaucracy, either.
'Apparently the DNA of all cheetahs alive today is so similar that they appear to be identical–all of the thousands of them out there. The basic trope is that the cheetahs of the world have almost identical DNA because they have driven out all of the imperfect members of the species. What is fun, and what the author does very well, is to extrapolate from this to the idea that the cheetahs are actually the dominant life form on earth, and the rest of us are being ignored by, or entertaining them.
'Kudos to Mr. McMullen. He goes even further than this with interesting ideas; he invents an ecological foundation that uses DNA alteration to save wildlife, causing trouble as when "the bile from bears that's used in traditional Chinese medicine, suddenly becomes toxic to humans." And even more clever touches such as the cheetah protagonist of the story playing with her human victim, much as a house cat toys with a captured mouse.'
Source: Tangent (http://www.tangentonline.com/print–bi-monthly-reviewsmenu-260/interzone-reviewsmenu-59/1249-interzone-222-june-2009). (Sighted: 20/2/2014)
