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Commencement Address by Arthur Liu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Commencement Address by Arthur Liu,1 translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is a very hard to follow story that appears to be (a) partly an extended message from a father to his daughter, composed as he plummets to his death in an airplane accident (he uses the VR space in his head to stretch the time available to three days); (b) partly a series of their family’s stored memories; and (c) partly an account of the technology that allows the latter (and the rise of “Dream Architects” who invented it). The accounts of the memory storage technology are mostly detailed in italicised data dumps.
I almost gave up on this piece two pages in, when I hit this passage:

On Tomb-Sweeping Day, conciliation commenced in the rain. Two girls shook hands in forgiveness by a headstone. Four months ago, one had rallied a crowd against the other and called her a “bastard.”
At your classmate’s mother’s funeral, I saw two versions of you. She who represented you from the past was in anguish. When she saw you, panic colored her tear-stricken face.
Your teacher was the one to extend the invitation. During one of her home visits to us, she learned of my role in the research and development of Erstwhile. I said yes, so the girl’s mother might appear once again with the vivacity of her lifetime. I brought a beta test augmented reality device and gave the girl a chance to bid farewell to her mother.
The spirit of the dead shall eventually rise. Now that they had finally parted ways, the father clasped his daughter, while she burst into tears.
Then, she saw you. Standing face-to-face, your eyes alighted on each other.
At that moment, you stepped forward and pulled her into an embrace.

What on Earth is going on in that passage?
– (Awful). 3,500 words. Story link.

1. According to a note at the end of the story, this was “originally published in Chinese in the 2017 Science Writers Hunting Project (Ranked as Outstanding)”. Lost in translation.

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm—the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we have a near-future society that is sophisticated enough to fit high-tech prosthetics to injured people, but where they are still doing manual labour in factories that apparently have no concept of health and safety. In short, the arm is from the 2050s, the factory setting from the 1970s.
Jacob then returns to his home town for his father’s funeral. He is greeted by his brother, to whom he hasn’t spoken for years, and then learns that that his mother has turned into a bed-bound vegetable:

Ma, who was only fifteen years older than me, but whose hair had already turned gray. Ma, who joined the plant soon after she had me, where she got a job at the head table. They called it that because that’s where pig heads ended up. After noses and eyes and ears and cheeks and jowls and snouts were removed, the brains got scooped up. The Company sold the slurry to canned goods producers. It made soups thicker.
Back then, it used to be that one had to work through the skull with a meat saw, and then cut the brain out. One day, the Company figured it was faster firing compressed air into the skulls, then siphoning the remains.
Ma inhaled pig brain for years. Her own body, going into overdrive, started destroying itself. Who knew pig brains and human brains shared so much biology? Not something they taught at my school. Built and paid for by the Company.

The rest of this piece is an equally miserabilist, anti-capitalist tract that has (spoiler) the brother try to convince Jacob to come back to work in the company-run town. Jacob refuses (obviously). Then, after their father’s funeral, Jacob’s brother reveals his plan to keep his father’s prosthetic arms and have them attached to himself after having his arms surgically removed (the company are looking to recycle the—ten, fifteen-year old?—prosthetics onto another maimed worker, but the brother has a plan to trick them). Jacob becomes complicit with his final words, “Let’s talk to the doctor tomorrow.” This latter development doesn’t really flow from what has occurred previously, but it is maybe suggesting that “you take the boy out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the boy”.
As I’ve suggested above, this is a rather backward looking story (and the arms plot at the end makes it an unlikely one too), and I couldn’t help but think that this would probably have worked better as a straightforward literary small press piece—where the writing and characterisation wouldn’t have been hobbled by the unconvincing premise.
Finally, even if factories like this are still around today (it’s hard to believe such appalling Health & Safety would be tolerated in Western countries), the robots are coming.
* (Mediocre). 5,000 words. Story link.

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as “Deadwife” for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.
The story alternates between Sandra’s dream therapy sessions—she is suppressing memories about Deadwife—and her time in the facility. Although the story generally has a brooding atmosphere (Sandra is troubled, and it has been raining for days), some of the snarky interactions between the residents and the robots are quite droll:

Annabel shakes her head. One of the service bots is clearing the table. She reaches over and thumbs the sticker from her banana peel onto its head, where it joins the hundreds of other stickers Annabel has been plastering it with since she got here.
“Is that my tip?” the bot asks.
“No, this is your tip: Electricity and water don’t mix. Whatever you do, stay dry on the inside.”
“Useful information. I’ll keep it in mind for the robot uprising. Gotta work on our weak points.” It totters off with our trays.
“I like that one,” Annabel says. “Of all the things in here that talk, I think it has the best sense of humor.”
“I’m taking that personally.”
“You should.”

The story ends (spoiler) with the alarms going off in the middle of the night and Sandra awakening to find the Lifter robot picking her up. She is taken through the pouring rain to the refuge of a nearby lighthouse. There she reunites with the other residents, and they watch a tsunami hit the facility. During this cataclysm, Sandra remembers walking through tropical rain to the hospital and discovering her partner, finally named as Josephine, dead.
I liked this, but it is essentially a mainstream story about a woman triggered into remembering a traumatic memory—albeit one pepped up with snarky robots and a disaster movie ending.
*** (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, a bioengineer, getting a commission from a client to make a dragon for Chinese New Year:

People had been asking for dragons for a while, but this client—I think he was a hedge fund manager who was starting a new entertainment streaming service, but possibly he was an entertainment streaming service CEO who was starting a hedge fund. Did I mention I’m bad at paying attention in meetings?

The first dragon was about the size of a cat, and since the client had refused delivery, I kept him. I fed him crickets and mealworms, shaved carrots and diced peppers, crunchy cat kibble, and occasional cans of sardines. The dragon grew plump, developed a habit of begging at the table, and shredded my sofa and curtains with his claws. He also liked to lie across the back of my shoulders when I was working, like a tiny scaly heating pad. (Despite the scales, he wasn’t a reptile; I had thought a warm-blooded dragon would have a more interesting personality. There are scaled mammals, like pangolins.) He ran around the house with a little galumphing hop.

After the first dragon is rejected by the client—no wings, no fire, wrong colour, wrong size, etc.—she starts work on a second dragon. This one—larger, with feathers, teeth (although still no fire due to potential insurance problems)—is also rejected. After this, her business partner fires the client. The partner takes the second dragon home while the narrator keeps the first, which she names Mr Long.
Time passes. The dragons prove popular when each of them is out and about, which leads to further work for her and her partner’s company.
The last part of the story (spoiler) has the narrator hear of a fire at the CEO’s company: she realises that he must have found someone to create a fire breathing dragon for him. Then, sometime later, when she hears rumours of a strange creature in the wild (“the Palo Alto Hippogriff”), she realises that she had better go and find it (fire breathing dragons and dry Californian forests are not a good mix). With the help of her dragon she does so. Minor problems with their ex-client ensue.
This has a slight story line, but it is an entertainingly told piece.
*** (Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) is narrated by Paul, the android partner of a young woman called Rebecca:

My heart is at capacity. I’m scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. I don’t have the power to love Rebecca any more than I already do, and it is not enough for her.
I spend the day before my appointment creating economic projections for a developing nation’s STEM investment. Picking up an extra side gig means my upgrade won’t impact our household budget. I don’t want Rebecca to feel that the opening of my heart comes at her expense.
My numbers reveal that this young country will recoup their STEM investment within a generation. There’s a statistical certainty it will bring up their GDP by 5-7 percent in a year or two. My numbers also say that my upgrade will allow me to devote 9 percent more processing power to Rebecca’s needs. We don’t have a GDP-like measurement in our relationship, but my nested flowchart says that if I identify and satisfy a greater percentage of her needs, she will recognize my usefulness and love me more.  p. 131

Of course (spoiler) that latter conclusion (his being more useful will make her love him more) is obviously erroneous, and this becomes apparent during the rest of the story, where their interactions become increasingly suboptimal:

Rebecca kisses me on her way out in the morning, tight-lipped and perfunctory. Not the warm, open-mouthed kisses of our middle days together. I don’t push for more. Nor do I mention the lunch that’s in her satchel. In my experience, explicitly telling a partner what you’ve done for them elicits a negative reaction. Better to work silently and unnoticed than to demand praise that will only be offered resentfully.  p. 133

Paul’s solitary reflections, and his analysis of their interactions—which are acutely observed alternating with entertainingly wonky—occur during the same period he meets and interacts with Ashira, a more basic android partner (“Do you want some feedback?” he asks her after a limp handshake). Through these exchanges we learn more about the androids’ history and their use as human partners.
Eventually, Paul goes to get his upgrade (secretly paid by himself from the odd jobs he does when Rebecca is working or asleep) and, when it is complete, he instantly realises that Rebecca has a new, human partner. After they split up (or, more accurately, Rebecca dumps him) Paul moves on to a new relationship with a male bartender. He still thinks about Rebecca, but is reluctant to delete his memories of her because of the “valuable data mixed in” with them.
This is a smartly observed story that provides an intriguing and witty view of human relationships.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,300 words. Story link.

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with “Asimov was a Bigot” graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:

There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It’d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men’s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn’t dig an escape before their time ran out.  p. 152

One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager’s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB’s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don’t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic—if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom’s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, “What you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung”).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB’s brain isn’t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB’s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don’t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn’t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov’s expense:

If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov’s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his “laws of robotics” that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots—if confronted with such a choice—must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important.  p. 156

Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (“scrofulous”), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don’t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves “human”. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov’s robot stories—didn’t The Bicentennial Man become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
* (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link.

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:

It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand.  p. 78

Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):

“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.”  p. 87-88

I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
*** (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the narrator watching three-armed alien Ashtenga play basketball. After this we find out that the narrator has been brought in to report on whether the Ashtenga should be admitted into the professional leagues on Earth (there are conflicting views on the matter).
The rest of the story is a rambling and starry-eyed description of people and aliens playing the game, its history, and all of this is intermingled with a lot of what can only be called simplistic and patronising messaging about inclusion. This latter begins with the narrator doubting his own views:

I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.
I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.
I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that moment a younger person looks at me, already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.
I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.
An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball—that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming. p. 39

There is a caricature in that passage for sure, but it isn’t the one suggested.
What the story is specifically about is eventually made explicit (although this is telegraphed pages earlier):

Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional.  p. 42

Mmm, goodbye women’s sports then. I’m not sure that these matters are going to be resolved in such a straightforward manner—see the recent troubles in American swimming and British cycling.
Finally, after more interminable detail about the game, and a match where the Ashtenga trounce a human team, the story finally equates the idea of transgender inclusion with the desegregation of basketball in the middle of last century:

Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after?  p. 45

In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.
Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins And Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.
He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.
I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever.  p. 46

I particularly dislike sports stories, and “message” stories even more, so this piece was a double fail for me. I’d also add that what makes most message stories so irritating is that (like this one) the complexities of the issues raised are never addressed (and in this case we have the bonus of people who have concerns about trans inclusion in women’s sport being likened to racists).
I wonder why it is that writers think their ability to string a sentence together means they are possessed of a some particular wisdom.
In conclusion I’d also add that, even putting the facile message of this story to one side (although that is probably the only reason it got published), this is a flabby, meandering, and tedious read.
– (Awful). 6,450 words.

Muallim by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Muallim by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with Irada, the blacksmith of an Azerbaijani village, repairing Muallim, the robot schoolteacher:

“I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate, Muallim. It will take some work to repair. In the meantime, I can trade it out for your spare chest plate. I still have it here in the shop. But I haven’t had time to fix it. That one is more battered than this one is.”
“How long will it take to fix these dents. An hour?” Muallim asked.
“No. More like an afternoon. I can’t do it now. Can you come back after school? You can wait in the house. You can help my father with his Ketshmits grammar. You know how he loves that.”
“I am scheduled to chop wood for Mrs. Hasanova.”
“Tell her you will chop wood tomorrow.”
She watched Muallim consider this. They must have programmed this gesture into the robot, the way it tilted its watering can of a head to the side and slightly down, just like a human.
“Yes,” Muallim said, “I think that will work. I will stop by Mrs. Hasanova’s and tell her I will come tomorrow.”  p. 36

This opening passage contains a number of hints about various happenings that occur in the story that follows, which alternates between the point of view of Irada the blacksmith, Muallim the robot, and Maarja, an NGO worker who is writing a report on the educational efficacy of the robot in this remote location. In the ensuing narrative we learn that Muallim is being used inappropriately (the wood chopping referenced above, which is causing undue wear and tear); that Muallim is stoned by the village children when it goes to cajole them to go to school; and that the village is generally quite a dysfunctional place where the robot (when it isn’t being attacked by an aggressive rooster) is seemingly making little progress. We also see various aspects of village life, mostly centred on Irada and her widowed and one-armed Mayor father.
When Maarja finally finishes her report it becomes clear that Muallim is going to be taken from the village but, before this happens, she gets an urgent message from one of the children that something has happened to robot. She goes to a local ravine and sees it smashed to pieces two hundred meters below, presumably an act of vandalism.
After Maarja leaves (spoiler) it becomes apparent that the locals have faked Muallim’s destruction using the removed chest-plate (see the passage above) and various scrap metal so they can keep the robot in the village.
This has some nice local colour, but it’s essentially a well done “yokels put one over on the city folks” piece.
*** (Good). 4,950 words. Story link.

Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with a sentient toaster (also described as a “toaster oven slash bread machine”) turning up on the doorstep of the Nadia, who runs an orphanage for abandoned, self-aware appliances (which she calls “quirks”).
After trying to communicate with the toaster, Nadia eventually takes it to the basement where she keeps the other quirks. There are then a few more scrambled conversations before the toaster asks Nadia to reset it (essentially commit suicide, as its self-awareness will vanish if it goes back to the default software).
It later becomes clear, after Nadia makes further efforts to talk with the toaster, that it has lost its friends. We then learn that, because of a debilitating illness that restricts her movements, so has Nadia: she resolves to make friends with the quirks.
There isn’t much to this really, but I suspect it will appeal to those who are fond of stories about sad and/or lonely narrators which have a sentimental ending.1
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words. Story link.

1. More SF readers like this sort of thing than you might think—this was one of the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll short story finalists from 2021 (although those stories are, admittedly, a weak bunch).