A pleasant well written tale about an anthropologist who starts receiving emails from what appears to be a time traveller studying the neanderthals. I mostly enjoyed the in between present day reactions, more so than the actual emails, as it is clearly written with an audience of science fiction readers in mind. With some jabs at the eternal debate between “sci-fi” and “science fiction”, and the meta layer of the characters expecting these email to just be a science fiction story that got lost somehow on the internet.

Read in Year’s Best SF 10, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Originally published in Sci Fiction, January 28, 2004
Rating: 3+