The bulk of this issue is taken up with the third part of the serialisation of Frank Herbert's 'Children of Dune'. Though densely-written, I found it interesting as a dip into a novel which has been on my "to be re-read" pile for a while.

There are short stories from Herbie Brennan (an effective piece on the theme of implanted artificial personalities) and Stephen Robinett (a future lawyer story on a similar theme which reads very much of its time, but has a neat turn of sardonic humour and outré futurism in places). But perhaps the most interesting things in this issue are the contributions from real scientists.

Dr. John Gribbin contributes a guest editorial on his theory about the "Jupiter Effect", the book he and Marcus Chown wrote about it, and what happened next. (He got monstered by the popular media; the effect turned out to be real but resulted in effects on Earth measured in millimetres rather than metres.)

And Margaret Silbar contibutes a detailed piece on gamma ray bursters - except that they were very new science then, and no-one knew where they came from, especially as they had not been tied to any visible phenomena at that time and would not be for another twenty years. So Silbar makes some wildly inaccurate predictions, albeit based on the best information at the time (which was not much): that they would turn out to be phenomena within about 300 light years. In fact, we now know that they are perhaps the most distant events that we can have evidence for, occurring in distant galaxies billions of light years from Earth,