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{\large ``Medley'' by Sharon Ho}

While I think there was a good idea behind this story, it felt too
flat, and the tense of the entire story prevented me from ever really
being drawn in.  I also would've liked to know more about what exactly
Nadia is; the reader doesn't know if she's alien, or just a human so
far in the future she can't relate to ``ancient'' humans.  Also, the
insertion of thoughts and feelings into Nadia's mind during the
sessions seemed a bit forced, especially since what she's putting on
is described as a visor.

I didn't get any real feeling of accomplishment at the end of this
story.  You declare that Nadia understands what's going on, but I get
no feeling of it.  I still don't care about Nadia at that point, and I
don't know why it matters if she ever understands humans.  Basically,
I read through the entire story going, ok this is cool, this thing is
trying to understand human emotions.  But I get to the end and I don't
feel that I've discovered anything about the alien, about humans, or much
of anything in particular.  There's got to be a bigger goal here, or a
flashier ending.

The continuous use of ``Nadia does foo'' and ``She does bar'' gets
extremely repetitious by the end of the story.  It really felt like
this story needed to be told in another tense.  This would also help
with the first problem by tying the reader in with somebody; who is
this anonymous narrator that is flatly describing what's happening?  
This also ties in with what Nadia is.  Nothing major here, just give
the reader a feel if this is an alien or what.

Finally, if the visor thing is going to be inserting thoughts into
Nadia's mind (ie, ``She is tired, hungry, thirsty; all she wants is to
go home''), then describe it as something that is accepted to be
inserting thoughts.

These comments are going to sound really harsh, but I did like the
idea behind the entire story.  It just needs a fair amount of work
making it read better before I really get drawn into what's going on
inside of it.

\newpage
{\large ``Control 157'' by Lorraine Hertzog}

Aside from a couple technical problems and the ending, I was very
impressed by this story.  It was flowed well, had an interesting
premise, and was of good length.  I've seen very similar stories about
simulacrum, even being used for similar research, but the
psychological aspects brought into this one made it new and
interesting.  A couple of technical details bothered me, such as the
amount of room required for 7500 mites, problems with scaling of
living organisms and the blind hopefullness of the mass public, but
overall I found the premises of the story believable.   Finally, I
thought the ending needed to be redone, the Haldeman nod didn't hit me
very well.

You say that each mite is 3 inches tall, so about $1/24$th the size of
a real human.  Even at this scale, a human city is extremely big, and
if you want each mite to have identical, non-overlapping surroundings,
you'll either need a {\it really} big space to project the holograms
into, or some really fancy tricks.  Either way, the way in which a
full surrounding is created for each of the mites needs to be discussed
somehow.  You're handling of just doing young women at one time makes
sense, but it's gonna take an awfully long time to examine all of
society at that rate; wouldn't it make more sense to create a full
society, and have different people assigned to tracing a few mites?
Anyways, just some minor points that struck me.

I'm not certain on all the technical issues, but in general fitting
human intelligence into a brain $1/24$th the size of a human brain
would be extremely difficult, as would getting muscular structures to
work out correctly at that scaling.  I've seen handlings of this,
usually involving non-biological components and brains actually being
located outside of the bodies.  I'm not certain if you want to address
this, it's a tough problem.

Finally, the second ending wasn't needed; I agree the first ending was
a bit clich\'{e}d, but I think fixing it slightly (and I don't think
much is really needed) is far preferable to adding the Haldeman part.

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