Author: Paul Fraser

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld #174, March 2021)1 opens with a women being told about the death of her grandfather by her “instance”:

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

So, the basic situation here is that (a) the woman receiving the call in America is the peaceable doppelganger of the woman in Korea, and (b) the instancing process is widespread in this world, most particularly among emigrants. Of course, this is all just an unexplained gimmick/metaphor (it might as well be magic) that lets the writer do a lot of identitarian hand-wringing over the next twenty or so pages:

America assumes instances will stay forever.
Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.
Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

Mixed in with this agonising, and the narrator’s trip to Korea for the funeral where she meets her duplicate family, is a related fairy tale about a fisherman who spends a night with the mermaids, doesn’t realise that thirty years have passed, and goes home to find himself in bed with his wife. When the fisherman stabs the man in the bed, he switches to the man being stabbed. (The myth of Odysseus makes an appearance later on in the story as well.)
At the very end of this piece the subject of de-instancing surfaces, and (spoiler) this is what eventually happens—possibly against the American instance’s wishes—when the other woman takes her hand (I assumed it wasn’t what she wanted from the fact that the story cuts to a final line from the fairy tale about a knife in the heart).
This is (as is probably obvious from the title) mostly a literary tale about immigrant identity, and only tangentially an SF story. I had zero interest in its concerns, and am truly baffled as to why anyone would waste a moment of their lives thinking about this sort of thing—who wants to be defined by where they come from or the country they live in?
* (Mediocre). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. This was fifth equal out of eight finalists in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys (Galaxy, December 1961) opens with Sollenar, a media mogul, receiving an unexpected victor from the Special Relations Office of the International Associations of Broadcasters. The visitor, a man called Ermine, tells Sollenar that a competitor called Cortwright Burr may be about to threaten his broadcast monopoly by introducing a device (created by Martian scientists) that will render Sollenar’s technology—which creates “complete emotional rapport between the viewer and subject matter”—obsolescent.
After this rather technical and business-heavy (or data-dump) beginning, the second chapter changes pace completely, and sees Sollenar enter into a bizarre life and death struggle with Burr. This begins with Sollenar in a helium-filled plastic drifter (invisible to radar) gliding down towards the roof of Burr’s tower block. Sollenar breaks in and finds Burr, who has a sphere of orange-gold metal in his hands. Sollenar shoots Burr, but when he goes over to his body he sees Burr is still alive and holding onto the ball. Sollenar fires again and again, but he can’t seem to kill Burr and—even when Sollenar flees and returns to the balcony of his own tower block—he is just in time to see Burr climbing over the edge of the parapet. Sollenar beats at Burr’s hands, and he finally falls into the water far below. Even after this Burr isn’t finished though, and Sollenar meets him at a TV ball where Burr reveals a cadaverous body beneath his costume.
Also at the ball is Erimine, who demonstrates his incorruptibility to Sollenar when the latter tries to bribe him:

Ermine bared his left arm and sank his teeth into it. He displayed the arm.
There was no quiver of pain in voice or stance. “It’s not a legend, Mr. Sollenar.
It’s quite true. We of our office must spend a year, after the nerve surgery, learning to walk without the feel of our feet, to handle objects without crushing them or letting them slip or damaging ourselves. Our mundane pleasures are auditory, olfactory and visual. Easily gratified at little expense. Our dreams are totally interior, Mr. Sollenar. The operation is irreversible. What would you buy for me with your money?”

Sollenar quickly leaves the Ball and gets on a flight to Mars, but Ermine appears and points to Burr a few seats away. Then, when they land, Sollenar stuns Ermine and flees. At this point (spoiler) Ermine phones Earth and confirms what will already be obvious to most readers about the fantastic events that have occurred so far:

“Sollenar is en route to the Martian city. He wants a duplicate of Burr’s device, of course, since he smashed the original when he killed Burr. I’ll follow and make final disposition. The disorientation I reported previously is progressing rapidly. Almost all his responses now are inappropriate. On the flight out, he seemed to be staring at something in an empty seat. Quite often when spoken to he obviously hears something else entirely. I expect to catch one of the next few flights back.”

Then, when Sollenar finds the Martian engineers’ quarters, he too realises that he has been living a storyline generated by Burr’s device. However, when he sees Ermine outside with a rifle, he gets the Martian engineers to build another of the devices.
The story concludes with Sollenar going out to confront Ermine, and is apparently shot. The last scene has Ermine pick up the device that Sollenar has had manufactured—at which point he realises that he can feel again. Ermine is delighted but, when he later gashes his foot, he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. At this point the reader realises that Ermine is also experiencing his own reality.
This is a bizarre and tricksy piece that is interesting more than it is successful. Some of the setup is contrived (Ermin’s lack of senses to make him incorruptible), and I was unsure whether Sollenar is actually killed at the end of the piece. It is also one of those reality-shifting stories that, after you have finished, you want to go back and read again to find out exactly what was going on. A story I found impressive or notable more than I liked, perhaps.
On reflection, this struck me as the kind of thing you would expect from Philip K. Dick (and I’d be interested to know if this predates Dick’s use of multiple reality states). Also, in some respects, it feels like a proto-New Wave story, with its unrealiable narrators and/or protagonists, and its focus on the “inner space” of its characters (that said, it has the form of a pulp adventure). I also note in passing that the very powerful man setup at the beginning recalls his 1976 novel, Michaelmas (if I remember correctly from my reading of it over 40 years ago).
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld #173, February 2021)1 begins with the female narrator going to a restaurant and munching her way through bread rolls while she savours the various food scents. She doesn’t have anything else to eat because she has been told by her internship supervisor that she should wait for eighteen hours after returning to Earth before exposing herself to strong aromas and tastes.
After this (largely irrelevant start) she meets an older version of herself, and we learn that the narrator was cloned from this person, Diana. Part of the explanation about this makes no sense:

“[Our parents] speed incubated the cells from the eyelash up to when you were thirteen, so I would have a wide memory base and they would only have to worry about raising me through high school and college. It’s a method that took them—”

How do you clone someone’s memories?
After this the older Diana launches into a parental issues diatribe (which, in one form or another, is what the story is):

“But I wasn’t—” I start.
“A disappointment?” Original Diana says, her lips tugging at the seams. “Yes, you’re now the same age I was when I ruined things for everyone and drove my life down the gutter. I was a selfish brat who got into Pitt instead of Carnegie Mellon, switched my major from galactic finance to art history, dropped out when I was twenty-one, and haven’t been seen since the screaming match with my parents about wanting to be a chef. All they ever wanted to do was look out for me when I had myopic dreams that would never take off. I was just some spoiled brat like all the white children whose parents didn’t know how to raise them.”

And:

 “There is no version of us that will ever make our parents completely happy,” she says. “There are only versions of us that have done our best to make ourselves happy.”

Diana then tells the narrator that she is the fourth clone the parents have created in an attempt to have a daughter who will have a prestigious career and be someone of who they can approve. Then, when the narrator, the original Diana, and the other clones meet up later, the narrator finds they have become, variously, a chef, tattoo artist, etc., instead of the career in cosmocurrencies that their parents wanted them to pursue—and for which the narrator is currently interning on the Moon. Eventually, at the end of the story, she too gives this up to become a parfumier.
I note that, despite the original Diana and the first three clones having gone on to do their own thing, they are co-dependents who perversely keep squabbling with the parents rather than just moving on (they regularly send their parents samples of their DNA along with a cheque for a large amount of money, stipulating they can have one but not the other).
Those readers with their own unresolved parental issues may get something out of this solipsistic moanfest; others will, as I did, start skimming.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint fifth place out of eight in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for stories published in 2021. There must be a lot of disgruntled children out there.

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) starts with a wealthy businessman called Bronson Van Vogel deciding that he needs to one-up an acquaintance:

Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus.
He had mentioned it at breakfast.
“Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”
“Not especially. Why?”
“I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”
“A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”
He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Hartmann was around the club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund—must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha—me landing on the Club ’copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”
She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband. She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear.  pp. 46-47

The next part of the story takes place at the ranch, where the couple see a variety of bio-engineered animals. However, after a long lecture from one of the company’s scientists about how a flying horse is an impossibility without massively changing its shape and metabolism, Van Vogel settles for one something that will look like a Pegasus, but will not fly (although this is only settled on after the scientist consults with a Martian alien called B’Na Kreeth). Meantime, Van Vogel’s wife Martha buys Napoleon, a midget elephant that can write with its trunk. Then, as the couple leave the complex, they pass through the breeding laboratories that produces the “apes”, anthropoid workers that are used for labouring.
Towards the end of their visit the couple pass an enclosure of old apes, and some of them crowd the wire and beg for cigarettes. The supervisor apologises, but Martha goes over to one of the apes and gives it a cigarette anyway. The ape thanks her and tells her it is called Jerry. Then, when Martha asks it why he looks sad, Jerry replies that it has no work, and therefore can’t get any cigarettes. Subsequently, Martha learns that the apes in this enclosure are either old, senile, or have medical conditions (Jerry has cataracts) and, when she asks the manager why other work can’t be found for them, her husband, irritated by her concern, tells her that old apes don’t retire—they are liquidated and then used as dog food.
At this point the story pivots in a couple of ways. First, the focus of the story completely switches from Van Vogel to Martha and, second, we find out that (as hinted at the end of the quoted passage above) she is the one with the money. Further to this latter fact, when the manager of the facility doesn’t agree to her request to give her Jerry and to stop the killings, she calls her business managers and begins a hostile takeover of the company.
Martha’s attempt to buy the breeding ranch eventually proves abortive (by making the call in front of the manager she has tipped her hand and others have bought up stock) and Martha ends up having to employee a “Shyster” called McCoy. He decides, after seeing Jerry sing (and lie to Napoleon), that their best bet is for Jerry to bring a lawsuit against Workers Inc. (During all this, Martha also discovers that her husband is working against her, and unceremoniously dumps him.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees Jerry in court. At the end of the trial he is declared a man because (among other reasons) the Martian who appeared earlier in the story is also considered a man due to an Earth-Mars treaty. The story concludes:

“We are exploring the meaning of this strange thing called ‘manhood.’ We have seen that it is not a matter of shape, nor race, nor planet of birth, nor of acuteness of mind. Truly, it cannot be defined, yet it may be experienced. It can reach from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry—will you sing your new song for the judge?”
“Sure [Mike].” Jerry looked uneasily up at the whirring cameras, the mikes, and the
ikes, then cleared his throat:
“Way down upon de Suwannee Ribber Far, far away; Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber—”
The applause scared him out of his wits; the banging of the gavel frightened him still
more—but it mattered not; the issue was no longer in doubt. Jerry was a man.  p. 60

This is an entertaining piece, if not the most convincing one, this latter perhaps partly caused by its kitchen sink quality (apart from uplifted animals used in a labour economy, we also have Martians, and some sort of dodgy legal system that requires the use of “Shysters”, etc.), and partly due to its rationale for Jerry’s humanity (he can sing, lie, and appears less monstrous than the Martian who testifies).
I’m also not sure what to make of Jerry’s song at the end of the story: I assume this, and the fact that Jerry calls everyone “Boss”, is a reference to pre-Civil War slaves and their lack of civil liberties—or was Heinlein thinking about the situation of minorities at the time he wrote the piece?
Finally, I note that this story has a powerful and rich female character at its centre, which is unusual for SF of this period (and I suppose that the reason that Heinlein started with the husband as the main character and then switched was to wrong-foot his readers).
*** (Good). 9,150 words. Story link.

The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt

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The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt (F&SF, January 1971) opens1 with the narrator completing a task in space outside what we later find is a generation spaceship. He is the only inhabitant, essentially the slave of the controlling AI, which keeps him in line by the use of electric shocks.
The story later sees the narrator repair one of the modules in the ship’s intermind (where he hears voices—I can’t remember if this is ever adequately explained) so the ship can lower its “defractor shield” (shades of Star Trek) and dock with one of the other ships in the fleet (there is some backstory about a Starfighter revolt before the AIs took over the various ships in the fleet).
After the narrator completes his task, a female from one of the other ships comes on board to mate with him (the humans on the ship only live until their thirties—his father dies when he was fourteen, and his father’s father likewise).
Eventually, (spoiler) the telegraphed revolt occurs when the narrator goes to the control room and fights the AI (which fights back by accelerating and decelerating the ship). He wins—then the woman reveals that she is free too, and they should free the others in the fleet. However, after further discussions, they decide to go and settle on an alien planet instead.
Interesting start but, even though the individual scenes are competently enough done, the rest of the story never really convinces or coheres, especially the intermind/talking voices part. And the final section, where they land on the alien planet and meet the natives, seems like it belongs to a different story.
** (Average). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. There is a short note before the story:

[To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters’’: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]

Pretentious twaddle like this doesn’t improve your clunky space opera.

The 1st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade by Bogi Takács

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The 1st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade by Bogi Takács (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on a future Earth that has seen three waves of alien visitors. The first destroyed everything, the second came to scavenge, and then the third (comprising a number of different races who have also been attacked by the first) come seeking allies. Against this background we watch the travels of the narrator and a floating containment sphere which carries an alien called Lukrécia.
As they pass through various regions of Hungary we see them interview various people to see if they would be interested in working in extra-terrestrial communications, but most are not interested as they fully occupied with their hard, agriculture-based lives (the pair do, however, manage to recruit a 72 year old ex-social worker while staying at an old summer camp site).
After this minor success the pair decide to detour round the nearby (and supposedly dangerous) city of Győr and enter it from the southern side. En route they talk to a trans person named Lala, who takes them to the city and, when they arrive, they find it is in pretty good shape (they suspect that the rumours that it is dangerous have been deliberately spread to protect the city).
The final part of the story is partly description of the city and the people who live there (it seems remarkably untouched by the invasions), and partly an account of how the pair try to organise a Pride parade to bring everyone in the city together—although this quickly morphs into the Interspecies Fair in the title. The event is large and disorganised, but is a great success with both the human and alien visitors.
This gets off to an intriguing start but it ends up rambling on too long, and by the end it seems more like a thinly veiled mainstream story about current-day Hungary:

‘I thought an apocalypse would finally get us to give up plastic,’ someone my age in a sparkly dress grumbles next to me. I shrug apologetically. I’m looking around for Lala. I spot him with a very tall person handing out signs. Lala gets one saying ‘FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY’ in rainbow letters above what looks like a very complicated version of the trans symbol.
I remember that slogan from somewhere—for a moment I feel something go crosswired in my brain as I dredge up the right memory from an age gone by. ‘The three Catholic virtues, huh?’ I nod at him, half-yelling in the noise. The unknown sign-maker must have been missing the march of St. Ladislas.
He looks at the sign in puzzlement. ‘Are they?’ He glances around, but the person has already been carried away by the crowd. ‘You know I’m Jewish, right?’ he yells back.
I shrug. ‘I guessed. Here, I’ll take it.’ Not that I should be carrying a large sign. It looks like a recipe for injuring others.
‘Are you Catholic?’ he asks.
‘I was baptised…’
He shrugs, too. ‘I was also baptised.’ He chuckles at my confusion. ‘My great-grandma said you needed to have the right documents.’
‘Even in an apocalypse?’ I look around. A cream-coloured butterfly lands on my shoulder, then another.
‘Especially in an apocalypse.’ But we don’t get to think about the grim moments of Hungarian history, because a large metallic sphere rolls past, the size of Lukrécia’s, but with a brass tint.

** (Average). 8,650 words.

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw (Analog, August 1966) begins with Garland and his pregnant wife, Selina, driving in the West of Scotland when they see a sign: “SLOW GLASS—Quality High, Prices Low”. Garland stops to inquire, much to the irritation of his wife (she is pregnant, neither of them are pleased about the matter, and it is causing significant friction between them).
After the couple go up the path to find the owner, they come to a cottage where they see the proprietor of the slow glass farm, Hagan, sitting on a wall. They also see, through the cottage window, a young woman holding a small boy. Hagan doesn’t invite the pair inside, but instead brings out a blanket so they can sit on the wall beside him.
Hagan then talks to them about the slow glass he has for sale—10 year in-phase material which has a view of the spectacular landscape in front of them, and which costs £200 for a four foot window. Garland is impressed by the 10 year specification, but the price is not as cheap as he hoped. Meanwhile, his wife Selina is shocked at the cost:

“You don’t understand, darling,” I said, already determined to buy.
“This glass will last ten years and it’s in phase.”
“Doesn’t that only mean it keeps time?”
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further necessity to bother with me. “Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs. Garland, but you don’t seem to appreciate the miracle, the genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass through it.”

When Hagan’s explanation about the time delaying properties of slow glass suddenly tails off, Garland looks away from the view he is buying and sees that Hagan is looking at the young woman and child, who have once again appeared in the window but seem to be paying no attention to what is going on outside.
After a few more clues are dropped (spoiler), the story resolves when Hagan goes to get a pane of slow glass for the couple. Selina takes the rug back into the cottage and—before Garland can stop her from going in—they discover the inside of the cottage is “damp, stinking, and utterly deserted”. There is no woman or child there, and the couple realise they have been looking at a pane of slow glass. When Hagan returns he sees what has happened and, before the couple go, tells them that his wife and child were killed by a hit and run driver on the Oban road. . . .
I think that this story would be better without its final line (“He was looking at the house, but I was unable to tell if there was anyone at the window”) but this is a very minor quibble about what is an excellent piece, a deserved classic, and something that should have been that year’s Hugo & Nebula winner (it lost against Larry Niven’s Neutron Star in the Hugo ballot, and Richard Wilson’s The Secret Place in the Nebula one).
***** (Excellent). 3,150 words. Story link.

1. The rest of the stories in the “Slow Glass” series are listed at ISFDB.

Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde

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Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on an island that is overgrown with what appears to be a fast-growing, mutant, and malevolent form of kudzu. The story opens with the narrator cutting back the day’s growth from the seed bank cum greenhouse where she lives and works.
We later learn that she is the third generation of her family to do this job:

It was left to us to tend the seeds because something in grandfather’s genes wasn’t right. That’s what he wrote in the manual. He, and others like him, stayed with the greenhouse, while others, much stronger and better, found safety on the ships. At least that’s what the neat seed-letters say. His young daughter, her genes like his, remained too. She, and we became the promise he made: to stay, to be gardeners.

After some further description of the narrator’s daily routine and backstory (as well as a rare visit to the island from a scientist who she avoids), she decides to build a boat and leave the island.
When the narrator is later picked up by a ship (spoiler), she is kept prisoner, and it becomes apparent that she is a form of mutant plant or semi-plant life herself. At the very end of the story the scientist who visited the island frees her before she dies from lack of light.
This tale starts off as a future eco-disaster piece but appears to turn into something more far-fetched, or perhaps even magical realist.
** (Average). 3,750 words.

Impostor by Philip K. Dick

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Impostor by Philip K. Dick (Astounding, June 1953) starts with the protagonist, Olham, having breakfast with his wife. During this they talk about a permanent war with the Outspacers, aliens from Alpha Centauri, and the recent development of the protec-bubbles that now surround the planet. What is also cleverly inserted into this opening section is the seemingly inconsequential mention of a fire at nearby Sutton Wood, a location that will reappear later in the story.
When Olham is later picked up to go to work by an older colleague called Nelson (they are both high ranking officials at a defence project), Olham sees there is another man in the car. The man identifies himself as Peters, says he works for security, and that he is there to arrest Olham for being an Outspace spy. The car quickly gets airborne and heads for the Moon while Peters calls his boss to tell him about the successful arrest.
The rest of the story is a fast-paced tale that sees Peters explain that an Outspace ship with a humanoid robot containing a U-bomb recently penetrated the protec-bubble surrounding Earth. Peters then states that Olham is the Outspace robot, and that they intend dismantling him on the far side of the Moon. Olham frantically tries to convince Peters and Nelson that the robot must have failed to reach him, and that he is the real Olham. However, when they land on the Moon, and Olham sees he still has not convinced them, he says he is about to explode. Nelson and Peters flee from the car (they have put their spacesuits on before landing), and Olham quickly closes the door and returns to Earth.
The final section of the story (spoiler) sees Olham return home, escape from an ambush, and eventually make his way to Sutton Wood. There he finds the remains of a burnt-out Outsider spaceship. Then, when Peters, Nelson and a security detail arrive shortly afterwards, Olham manages to convince Peters to go over and look at a body lying near the wreckage. Peters and the team look at the body and decide that it is the robot, but then Nelson pulls on what he thinks is the metal corner of the U-bomb in the robot’s body:

Nelson stood up. He was holding onto the metal object. His face was blank with terror. It was a metal knife, an Outspace needle-knife, covered with blood.
“This killed him,” Nelson whispered. “My friend was killed with this.” He looked at Olham. “You killed him with this and left him beside the ship.”
Olham was trembling. His teeth chattered. He looked from the knife to the body. “This can’t be Olham,” he said. His mind spun, everything was whirling. “Was I wrong?”
He gaped.
“But if that’s Olham, then I must be . . .”
He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

This suspenseful and paranoid piece has a dreamlike feel (apart from Olham’s nightmarish predicament there is the quick trip to the moon and back), and you never really know until the final moments if Olham is a robot or not.1 This, and the fast pace of the story, keeps the reader off-balance and lets the writer gloss over one or two things that might have revealed Olham’s true nature (the brief door opening on the Moon; the question of how the robot would get Olham’s memories).
An impressive piece that reflects the Reds-under-the bed fears of the time, and Philip K. Dick’s only sale to John W. Campbell (I note that the story is another exception to Campbell’s supposed Human Exceptionalism rule2).
**** (Very Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. Dick would return to this theme in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was later filmed as Bladerunner).

2. A writer remarked to me, “It’s a story where The Thing wins”.

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.
 
1. A quick skim of ISFDB shows this writer has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.