As you know, Bob, I don’t care
And while I'm being a Monday morning curmudgeon, I may as well pause to roll my eyes a little at the literary device used in another story in the June Asimov's.
(But I should start with a disclaimer: my reaction here is to a particular technique used in a particular story; I haven't read the author's other work, but I've heard good things about it, and even this particular story looks like it's going to be filled with interesting ideas. And the technique in question is an interesting experiment; it just doesn't work for me. Disclaimed enough?)
Part I of the story is about 2000 words long; of that, a 1000-word chunk is devoted to an infodump. That in itself wouldn't be a problem for me (it's an interesting infodump), but the author has decided to present the infodump by prefacing each sentence with some variant of the phrase "[The protagonist] doesn't care so much anymore that . . ." Like this (making up my own examples for "facts"): "He doesn't care so much anymore that in 1281 A.D., Yuri Ilyich Raskolnikov invented an improved form of gunpowder. And he doesn't care so much anymore that in July of 1293, Raskolnikov was killed by a mysterious assassin. Nor that five years later, Raskolnikov's notes turned up in the hands of a Crusader in Jerusalem. And he no longer cares that meanwhile, dark forces were massing on the other side of the world. He once cared, but can no longer bring himself to care, that these forces were an ancient evil capable of destroying life as we know it. Also, he doesn't care so much anymore that . . ." and so on. This goes on for what would in the printed magazine be about two full pages, and on my Palm is 14 screens. Not a storytelling technique that I recommend.
Oddly, a paragraph or so of this infodump is devoted to describing, without naming, Paul Linebarger, better known in the sf world as Cordwainer Smith (one of my favorite authors). The author of the story at hand appears to have taken one of the standard one-paragraph bios of Linebarger and inserted the phrase "He doesn't care so much anymore that" at the beginning of each sentence. It'll be interesting to see whether Linebarger figures prominently in the rest of the story.