Judith Berman's "The Fear Gun" is also good, about an isolated county of humans surviving fairly well during an alien invasion. Now it seems the aliens are being fought off, and the Army has reached the county--but are they really welcome? The story sequentially follows several viewpoints, slowly revealing what's going on, and closes quite scarily.

Might it be that the Coyote stories nonetheless serve a purpose of contrast, reminding Asimov's readers of just how acutely other writers in Asimov's do innovate upon established genre models? Consider "The Fear Gun," a long, and brilliant, novelette by Judith Berman. This describes the aftermath of an alien invasion of Earth, in terms instantly recognizable to an SF audience. After desperate effort, the aliens, heavily armed humanoids in massive spaceships, are defeated, but human civilization is shattered, and remnants of the enemy survive in remote locations. For small-town dwellers like the ones vividly pictured by Berman, the temptation is indeed to reassert frontier values: rule by a strong-man sheriff, armed deputies patrolling the badlands, parochial or tribal solidarity in the face of any outside intrusion, even (or especially) by a renascent US government and military. Without endorsing the latter institutions--quite the reverse, a mark of her penetrating irony of insight--Berman employs her expertise in anthropology to analyze in great depth the exigencies of her scenario, implying the purblindness of human political instinct, libertarian or not, the illusory character of both individualism and conformism. She evokes the same libertarian myths as Steele, every bit as grippingly as he, but does not subscribe to them; hers is not only a good story, but a small masterpiece of deconstruction. And its conclusion is remarkable for its audacity and multivalent pathos; it is for such startling revisionist coups as this that Asimov's is to be admired, the finest fiction magazine in SF's history.

I got increasingly frustrated as this story progressed and the number of unread pages left to the end of the book began to diminish--I wanted the story to go on longer! It is a full 33-page novelette, but this feeling is partly engendered by the fact that it is structured like a 600+ page novel, with the story progressing via a series of short sections from the perspective of a number of characters, rather than a single POV. It was also engendered by the story getting its hooks into me.