Current Issue Highlights
November/December 2026
The final issue of 2026 is here, and boy, do we have a banger for you! The divide between the haves and the have-nots is sure to follow us into space and any colonies we settle, with the reality of being one of the have-nots surely even harsher than here on Earth, so how is one family of hardworking lunar colonists going to navigate the holidays? Find out in our seasonally appropriate lead story from M.T. Reiten, “Xmas in Derbtown” (or, as I like to think of it: “The Moon is a Harsh Christmastress”). Our fact article for the issue is the first of two parts from Analog stalwart, Richard A. Lovett: the clearly named “Beyond the Sonic Screwdriver: How the Weird Wide World of Acoustical Research is Revolutionizing Everything from Medicine to Microplastics, Part I” And of course we have an array of other stories, seasonal and non, from Ted Kosmatka, Jerry Oltion, James Van Pelt, and many more, so you’ll want to ring in the holidays here!
NOVELETTE
XMas in Derbtown
by M.T. Reiten
Joey pressed against the clear side of his “hamster ball,” a repurposed rescue bubble scrounged from the Conglom’s luxury resort on the far side of the crater. The fine lunar regolith creaked beneath the tread as he moved. His dad steadied the squishy bubble with a strong hand so Joey wouldn’t accidentally roll away down the slope into the debris field below.
With his own eyes, Joey saw blurry plasma colors pinched in magnetic fields shifting against a permanent night sky. Joey recognized what the Weber fields made a kilometer away. A huge, jittery cone-shaped Christmas tree—neon red ornaments and argon green branches and a sodium yellow star on top—pulsated over the resort dome. Seeing it in person made better sense than the round, glowy blob on the satellite feeds on the display at home. “Wow.”READ MORE
Derailed
by Hûw Steer
She limped a few meters from the rails to get a good look at the crash site, already covered in a thickening layer of red dust.
“Well,” said Lowell, looking at the distinctly sideways nuclear steam train, “shit.”
Nobody heard the words but her. That was one of the many items jockeying for the hallowed status of “biggest problem” on her mental list. The dust storm that would be sweeping over this area for at least two days had filled the air with lovely scattering particles that rendered even the powerful radio aboard the train useless at any significant range. She could try to find a local transponder, but even those would be iffy in this weather. READ MORE
DEPARTMENTS
Editorial: The Long Road
by David Ebenbach
AI is inevitable; there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Or so, at least, we’ve been told.
In fact, if the proponents of AI are to be believed, it’s not even a matter of an inevitable future so much as an already-established present. READ MORE
The Reference Library
by Rosemary Claire Smith
I sat down to write this column on April 2, 2026, the day after Artemis II launched humanity’s first international crew of one woman and three men on a journey farther than any person had ever gone, including the astronauts in Apollo command modules that orbited the Moon over fifty years ago. READ MORE