Kora is Life by David D. Levine (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with Kestrel Magid practicing for an air race on the alien planet Kora. He is the first ever human to fly in this particular competition:
A roar off to my right caught my attention. A pure white practice wing like mine, but with struts painted in red and blue . . . it was Skeelee. Of course. She gave me a roguish salute as she passed me, climbing fast. My patrons were the Stormbird clade, their colors yellow and black. The Sabrecat clade, red and blue, was Stormbird’s longest-standing and most hated rival, and the loathing was mutual; Skeelee had given me nothing but shit since I’d arrived here last month. I had tried to maintain a professional, sportsmanlike attitude in the face of her provocations . . . but this was no competition, not yet. This was only a practice session. So maybe I could rag on her a little without betraying my principles. I squeezed the throttle and surged upward after her. p. 29
This passage illustrates the personal and clan rivalries that run through the remainder of the story. Skeelee gets the best of Magid in this duel (his Earth-built jet engine flames out on short finals to their landing zone on the beach), and (spoiler) she goes on to do the same again in the two formal practice runs before the final race. In between these contests we see: Kora’s planetary and inter-clade politics at work; internal tensions in the Stormbird Clade that Magid represents (later on in the story their engineer commits suicide because the Stormbird Clade’s engine isn’t being used); and Magid generally acting like a fish out of water (getting into trouble with the aliens when sober, and also when drunk). The story comes to a climax in the final race, during which Magid has to cope with not only the murderous Coral Clade, but also the stormy weather and the knowledge that, if he wins, the culture of Kora will be changed forever. Needless to say, Magid wins even though he crashes short of the finishing line (his engine runs out of fuel this time, but the nose piece of his wing crosses the line first). This piece has pros and cons and, as it happens, most of the pros are noticeable when you are reading the story, and most of the cons occur to you afterwards. So, the pros: it is a good light adventure story (verging on YA) which is well paced, generally well-plotted, and is concisely and transparently told (oh, the joy of not having to hack through endless MFA verbiage). The cons: this is essentially a non-SF story about jet powered hang-gliders which has been moved to an alien planet; the bouncing nose-cone ending is weak and unconvincing; and the aliens are sketchily drawn (apart from the fact they have fur, we find out little else about their physicality). I’d also add that Magid starts off the story as a fairly callow sort, and ends up pretty much the same despite everything that happens to him. Notwithstanding the latter reservations, this is an enjoyable and easy read.1 *** (Good). 18,050 words. Story link.
1. In some respects, this story reminded me of the kind of thing that used to appear in the George Scithers-edited Asimov’s Science Fiction (or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as it was then) of the late 1970s. I think there is probably a gap in the current magazine market for a publication that emphasises lighter, entertaining, and more traditional work, and which avoids political division and lectures, solipsism, apocalyptic fiction, and MFA-inspired writing in general.
The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan,1 translated by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gives the narrator’s account of his researches into Xijin Guang Hansheng, the author of Ascent to the Moon: Travel Notes of Guang Hansheng (an incomplete Chinese newspaper serial from 1905-1906):
It wasn’t the content of the fiction that drew me in, but the small, blurry illustrations accompanying it. Ratlike humanoids stood on the cratered surface of the Moon. They were rigging up a crude, concave reflector like a present-day satellite dish, using a crater rim for support. I knew it was a reflector because in the far corner of the image was the Sun, shining a beam of light onto the Moon, which the dish redirected at Earth. Black smoke rose from the focal point on Earth. This gave me pause. Someone from the Late Qing knowing the Moon was cratered? Then again, it made sense. Part of the ether fantasy propagated back then was a notion that the fabled substance might fill the Moon’s craters, so that from Earth, the Moon would appear smooth. But my brief doubt caused me to linger on this newspaper, originally no more interesting than the other exhibits. Serialized novel chapters, each with a summarizing couplet, were the main form of fiction in the Late Qing. This sheet of newspaper featured the ending of the seventeenth chapter of the novel in question. pp. 70-71
The rest of the story isn’t much more than an account of the narrator’s obsessive and detailed research (mostly of the library’s microfilms), but his commentary on what he finds paints a interesting picture of China at the turn of the century. As various leads go cold, others turn up and, along the way, we also learn a little more about the narrator (he isn’t an academic, but won’t reveal his social status to the librarians he chats with). Eventually, the narrator finds what he thinks is Hansheng’s last article (most of the rest of Hangsheng’s work is popular science), and his research ends. He concludes with an observation about the writer (and, perhaps unwittingly in the final part, himself):
I like to imagine an awkward, cantankerous savant possessed of scientific insight transcending his epoch, but unable to communicate it effectively. Understanding much that others can’t, proud yet distracted, getting no approbation, insignificant, at the end of his rope, nowhere to go, nowhere to vent, and not even knowing himself clearly—and suddenly, death is coming. He has squandered his rare smidgeon of talent, while watching others advance while he stays where he is. Alone. Just like countless literati of the time, and now, and even the future. pp. 82-83
I suspect that this will be a Marmite piece—some will be engrossed by the detail of the library detective work, and amused by the narrator’s occasionally mordant observations (“Self-important people cannot abide silence or anonymity”, “I’d heard the PhD student looking for Reunions in the [vast ocean of the] microfilm archive had ended up with detached retinas”), while others will be bored witless. Even those in the former camp (such as myself) may find that, ironic ending or not, it rather fizzles out. Still, an interesting piece if not a totally satisfying one, and I’m glad I read it. **+ (Average to Good). 5,500 words. Story link.
1. This was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Supplemental issue, 2016.
An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants. In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story). Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement. Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material). Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:
Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest. “Nepenthe?” As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.
The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone. This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going). **** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.
The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer (Worlds of If, November 1967)1 opens with a woman rescued from a wrecked spaceship barricading herself into the engine-room of the experimental FTL craft Sleipnir. She then accelerates the Sleipnir beyond light speed. When Grettir, the captain of the ship, learns that the woman will only talk to him, he goes down to speak to her. He gives instructions to MacCool, his engineering officer, to blast his way in if he is incapacitated or killed. Grettir then talks to the woman, during which she confuses Grettir with her dead husband Robert (she has been delusional since she has been rescued) before shooting at him. When Grettir recovers consciousness he discovers that MacCool has blasted his way in, and that the woman stripped off all her clothes and went out the airlock. Grettir also learns that they are now in a strange, unknown zone of space. After this fast-paced and Van Vogtian start to the story, it becomes something much more weird and trippy. Grettir sees that they are in a grey space filled with grey spheres and, after much speculation, he concludes that they have entered a “super universe”, and that the sphere behind them is their universe (there is some 1930s-ish atom-and-electron-worlds hand-wavium at this point). As they manoeuvre back to where they think they entered the super-universe, they fly past the woman’s now huge dead body. The next part of the story sees the various attempts made by the Sleipnir’s crew to re-enter their own universe, during which, on one failed attempt, they have burning coal-like objects shoot through the bridge:
Grettir picked up his cigar, which he had dropped on the deck when he had first seen the objects racing toward him. The cigar was still burning. Near it lay a coal, swiftly blackening. He picked it up gingerly. It felt warm but could be held without too much discomfort. Grettir extended his hand, palm up, so that the doctor could see the speck of black matter in it. It was even smaller than when it had floated into the bridge through the momentarily “opened” interstices of the molecules composing the hull and bulkheads. “This is a galaxy,” he whispered. Doc Wills did not understand. “A galaxy of our universe,” Grettir added. Doc Wills paled, and he gulped loudly. “You mean . . . ?” Grettir nodded. Wills said, “I hope . . . not our . . . Earth’s . . . galaxy!”
The story becomes even more bizarre when they later fly into the woman’s body, start overheating, and only just make it out again (you get the impression that in a more permissive age they would have been birthed out of her womb/vagina, but, if I recall correctly, they come out of her mouth). After this they prepare for a final attempt to get back into their own universe. This has a fast-paced start, but the bulk of the story, although sometimes entertaining, is arbitrarily bizarre and goes on too long. The ending also fizzles out. ** (Average). 10,200 words. Story link.
Farmer tried to sell this as a possible Star Trek episode (before the show ever aired I think). He later decided that it would not have worked. Just what is waiting for us at the edge of the universe?
A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees(Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:
Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her. “Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.” Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces. “Where’s the place?” Harafat asked. “See for yourself.” Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around. Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view? pp. 88-89
The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there. When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps. Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:
More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted. p. 93
Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps). This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings have too long titles, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action). I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles). * (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.
Hatching by Bo Balder (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend. The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.). The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:
At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting. Alzey blinked. A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life. p. 27
Aw, bless. The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me. * (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.
Common Time by James Blish (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953) sees Garrard wake up in a FTL spaceship with the thought “Don’t move!” He struggles to open his eyelids, senses that something is very wrong, and does not attempt to move his body. Eventually, after further description of his physical condition and of his observations, Garrard realises that the infrequent “pock” sound he hears is the hugely slowed down ticking of the ship’s clock. He then counts seconds in his head and discovers that ship time is moving much more slowly than his subjective time—and that it will take him six thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. After Garrard gets over the intial shock, he thinks further about the physical ramifications (his body is subject to ship-time, and much slower than the speed his mind is working, so there will be a problem with co-ordination) and the possible mental problems (how will he occupy his time and stave off madness?) Then, as he deliberates, he notices that the clock is speeding up, and that the ship-time is accelerating. Soon, the clock is a blur, and he enters a state of “pseudo-death”. The next stage of the story sees Garrard awake at Alpha Centauri, where he is greeted by aliens who speak to him in a incomprehensible language (although Garrard can make sense of it):
“How do you hear?” the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual. “I . . .” he said. “Or we—we hear with our ears. Here.” His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language. “We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,” the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the deck beside the hammock. “We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.” “With all of love,” Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.
After another page or so of Blish channelling (I presume) his inner James Joyce, Garrard sets off for Earth, and once more he experiences pseudo-death. The final part of the story sees Garrard awake near Uranus, and he soon makes radio contact with Earth. The story then ends with a conversation between Garrard and Haertel, the inventor of the FTL drive, about various scientific and philosophical matters (how personality depends on environment, time flow, etc.). When Garrard volunteers to go out again on a new ship, Haertel refuses, saying that they need to work out why the beademung wanted him to come back to Earth. This story has an intriguing gimmick at the beginning of the piece, and an interesting (if somewhat unintelligible) first contact situation after that. However, all this, and the dull talking heads section at the end, doesn’t really add up to anything, and you very much get the impression that the author was merely playing with a number of pet ideas as he went along.1 There are also a number of matters that don’t make much sense: (a) the interior temperature in the ship is noted as being 37° C, far too hot to be comfortable; (b) the reason he enters “pseudo death” isn’t explained (if time kept on speeding up in the last part of the journey it would appear as if he suddenly arrives at Alpha Centauri; (c) if ship time speeds up so rapidly your normal speed mind won’t be able to feed your body sufficiently, and you will starve to death during the ten month trip. Those who like literary, or more ideational or philosophical stories, may get something out of this, but I suspect many will be perplexed. ** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.
1. The story was commissioned by Robert A. Lowndes to accompany a previously painted cover:
The details of this commission are discussed in Robert Silverberg’s anthology, Science Fiction 101, where the he recounts what the cover suggested to Blish:
Blish, early in 1953, was handed a photostat of a painting that showed a draftsman’s compasses with their points extended to pierce two planets, one of them the Earth and the other a cratered globe that might have been the Moon. A line of yellow string also connected the two worlds. In the background were two star-charts and the swirling arms of a spiral nebula. Blish later recalled that the pair of planets and their connecting yellow string reminded him on some unconscious level of a pair of testicles and the vas deferens, which is the long tube through which sperm passes during the act of ejaculation. And out of that—by the tortuous and always mysterious process of manipulation of initial material that is the way stories come into being—he somehow conjured up the strange and unforgettable voyage of “Common Time,” which duly appeared as the cover story on the August, 1953, issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. p. 282
If Blish were older at the time he would presumably have identified the exploding sun in the background as the prostate. Silverberg adds:
I failed to notice, I ought to admit, anything in the story suggesting that it was about the passage of sperm through the vas deferens and onward to the uterus. To me in my innocence it was nothing more than an ingenious tale of the perils of faster-than-light travel between stars. Damon Knight, in a famous essay published in 1957, demonstrated that the voyage of the sperm was what the story was “really” about, extracting from it a long series of puns and other figures of speech that exemplified the underlying sexual symbolism of everything that happens: the repeated phrase “Don’t move” indicates the moment of orgasm, and so forth. Blish himself was fascinated by that interpretation of his story and added a host of embellishments to Knight’s theory in a subsequent letter to him. All of which called forth some hostility from other well-known science fiction writers, and for months a lively controversy ran through the s-f community. Lester del Rey, for example, had no use for any symbolist interpretations of fiction. “A story, after all, is not a guessing game,” del Rey said. “We write for entertainment, which means primarily for casual reading. Now even Knight has to pore through a story carefully and deliberately to get all the symbols, so we can’t really communicate readily and reliably by them. To the casual reader, the conscious material on the surface must be enough. Hence we have to construct a story to be a complete and satisfying thing, even without the symbols. . . . If we get off on a binge of writing symbols for our own satisfaction, there’s entirely too much temptation to feel that we don’t have to make our points explicitly, but to feel a smug glow of satisfaction in burying them so they only appear to those who look for symbols.” pp. 282-283
Knight’s analysis of the sexual symbols in the story can be found—if, like him, you appear to have too much time on your hands—in Chapter 26 of In Search of Wonder.
The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi (F&SF, November/December 2020) opens with Mansour, a woman with terminal cancer, going to the Bahrain Underground Bazaar. There she experiences the deaths of others (these have been harvested by an internet like brain implant called a NeuroLync):
In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer — the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing. The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing — I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me. pp. 7-8
On this occasion she experiences the death of a woman who is leading a donkey down a cliff path, and who either jumps or slips to her death (there is a death-wish moment at the edge, but it is unclear whether the fall is intentional). Then, after the blackness that normally denotes death, Mansour experiences something else:
And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all. And then voices. The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead? But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it. pp. 10-11
This is the seed for the story’s further developments, but Mansour’s desire to find out more about the woman and that post-death experience is derailed when she is intercepted by her concerned daughter-in-law outside the bazaar (“You don’t need dark thoughts — you’ll beat this by staying positive.”). Later that evening Mansour’s son Firaz also expresses his worry, but this doesn’t stop her going back to the bazaar the next day and asking the proprietor to show her the dead woman’s “highlights reel”. Mansour discovers that the women was a Bedouin mother who lived a largely unremarkable life, and then, even though Mansour doesn’t feel any particular connection with her, she impulsively buys a train ticket to Petra in Jordan, the area where the woman lived. On her arrival in Petra (spoiler) Mansour hires a teenager with a donkey to take her to see the tourist sights. First they go to the nearby Treasury, and then she asks to be taken up the cliff-edge path to the Monastery:
“Do people ever fall?” Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline. “It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.” My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story? While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff. “Can we stop for a minute?” “Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge. Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge. “Please, sayida!” Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now. Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there — the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise. But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change. pp. 20-21
They continue up the mountain to the Monastery. There they eat and drink, and Mansour discovers that the boy is the grandson of the woman who fell to her death. She asks him about his grandmother, and listens to what he has to say, but does not tell him about the recording of her death. Then she asks him to use his NeuroLync to call her son (she has left her phone behind so Firaz and her daughter-in-law cannot track her). The last part of the story sees her reconciled with Firaz, and her approaching death (or at least to the extent anyone can be). I liked this story quite a bit. Afifi’s writing style is concise but conjures up a believable world and characters—and there is a plot here too, even though it is essentially a mainstream one (one slight quibble is that the writer went for a mainstream ending—reconcilement, acceptance—rather than doing a transcendent call-back to the post-death experience). If the ending had been stronger (i.e. melded the mainstream and SFnal endings), I would have probably given this four stars. A writer to watch, I think (I had the rare impulse to check out her novel1), and a story that would probably appeal to Ray Nayler fans. ***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,600 words.
1. The Sentient, 2020, first in the “Cosmic” series (the next one, Emergent, is due any day now). “The race to stop the first human clones uncovers a dark secret.”
Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, April 1958) sees a time-travelling Claude Ford hunting a brontosaurus in the past:
You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.
This intensely described and emotionally heightened narrative continues, with descriptions of the scene alternating with Claude’s inner thoughts, until (spoiler) he eventually shoots and kills the creature. Then, as he examines the dinosaur’s body up close, one of the beast’s parasites attacks and kills him. This seems to be more of a dramatic prose poem than a story, but maybe that, and the ironic ending, will do it for some readers. It’s certainly got more depth and vibrancy than the other time travel pieces of the period. ** (Average). 2,400 words. Story link.
Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:
Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.
Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times. After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch). After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again. Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms. Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again). I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal? It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful. – (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.
