This digest has a novella, three novelettes, two short stories, two poems an essay by Robert Silverberg of "Theme-parking the Past" and quite a few brief book reviews. This was a very good issue which in my experience was pretty much the standard under Gardner Dozois's reign as editor of the magazine.

The fiction content of this issue is:
Touching Centauri • novelette by Stephen Baxter
Advice to Alien Life Forms • poem by W. Gregory Stewart
Sheltering • short story by Tom Purdom
The Mouth of Hell • novelette by Tim Sullivan
Alternate History • poem by Maureen F. McHugh (placed #1 in the Asimov's Reader's poll for Best Poem for the year 2003)
From the Corner of My Eye • novelette by Alexander Glass
Exile • short story by Steven Utley
Benjamin the Unbeliever • novella by Allen Steele

Of note to me:

The long novelette by Stephen Baxter, "Touching Centauri" was a good opening piece of fiction which looks at the near future and the way the world ends, quite unexpectedly.

Tom Purdom's short "Sheltering" is set inside a bomb shelter in the future as a new kind of war rages across the country. The story is really about other things though, family dynamics esp between father and son and an old man who is the focal point of the story playing strategy war games from WWII on a handheld device while a real but different kind of war is going on.

"The Mouth of Hell" was a rather detailed historical fiction set in ancient Rome at the time of the rise of Constantinople and Christians. Two people explore a sulfurous fissure below the Circus Maximus. The story was interesting to read, and it is certainly a science fiction, but it seemed lacking a punch by the end.

I was a little slow to warm to Alexander Glass's "From The Corner of My Eye" which is set in the not so distant future where virtual reality is part of reality and ghosts, virtual people, are afoot. AI's are up to something. Pretty soon I was intrigued and wanted to know just what was going on and why.

Allen Steele's novella "Benjamin the Unbeliever" is the heart of the issue. I realized upon reading that it was familiar - it had been reworked and incorporated into Steele's novel "Coyote Rising" which I had read in 2012. I liked this story, but didn't think it the best part of the novel as a whole. ( )