Author: Paul Fraser

The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, January 1958) concerns Roberta and Robin, an old couple who live in an automated factory in the year 2388 (Roberta is forgetful, and Robin is the mostly bed-ridden caretaker). When Roberta realises it is Xmas day she goes downstairs to invite three tramps up to the flat (the tramps have an illegal home on the factory floor, but have to block the door every day to avoid being evicted by the “Terrible Sweeper”).
When the four of them arrive back to the flat, Robin is up and about—and not at all happy to find that Roberta has invited the tramps to spend the day with them. Then a Xmas card arrives for Robin but addressed to “Factory X10”. This causes Robin to become quite agitated because he is the caretaker of SC541, so he orders his wife and the three tramps to go and check the factory’s name on the output gate. On the way there, and back, the four of them discuss the factory’s change of output from television sets to strange metal eggs.
The group eventually return and confirm to Robin that the factory is now called X10. Jerry also reveals that he has bought one of the eggs back with him:

“I brought it because I thought the factory ought to give us a Christmas present,” Jerry told them dreamily, squatting down to look at the egg. “You see, a long time ago, before the machines declared all writers like me redundant, I met an old robot writer. And this old robot writer had been put out to scrap, but he told me a thing or two. And he told me that as machines took over man’s duties, so they took over his myths too. Of course, they adapt the myths to their own beliefs, but I think they’d like the idea of handing out Christmas presents.”  p. 73

Jerry’s thoughts are met with further belligerence from Robin, and Jerry responds by saying that New Father Christmas will come for him (New Father Christmas apparently takes old people and machines away).
When the egg later hatches Roberta becomes alarmed, as it looks as if the egg is going to build another factory in the flat—so she stamps on it. Then the group realise that the egg is wirelessing for help, so they flee, only to be caught on the stairs by . . . .
This is a little on the slight side, but the robot factory setting (with its interstitial humans, and the new myths that have arisen) is captivatingly and amusingly done.
*** (Good). 2,100 words. Story link.

The Gift by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gift by Ray Bradbury (Esquire, December 1952) opens with a couple and their son boarding an emigration rocket on Xmas Eve. As they only have a limited baggage allowance, the parents have to leave behind a little Xmas tree with candles, and the present they have for their son.
After they take off the boy asks to go and look out the one porthole on the ship, but his father says no, before adding that it will soon be Xmas: the boy asks if he’ll get his present and his tree, and his father says yes (much to the dismay of the mother). Then the father leaves their cabin on a short errand.
The story closes with the father taking the family up to the porthole. They enter a dark cabin and see the porthole before a number of unseen people start singing carols. Through the porthole the boy can see “the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles. . . .”
This is okay, but it’s minor Bradbury. And the idea of non-flickering stars in space resembling candles on a Xmas tree is a bit of a stretch.
** (Average). 780 words.

The Santa Claus Compromise by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Santa Claus Compromise by Thomas M. Disch (Crawdaddy, December 1974) opens with the Supreme Court giving children of five and older full civil liberties. Various societal changes ensue, including the ability of children to work as reporters: this leads to Our Own Times’ Bobby Boyd and Michelle Ginsberg running a story stating the there is no Santa Claus!
We learn about the evidence that the pair have uncovered to support their story (Bobby finds receipts for items similar to the gifts Santa brought him, etc.) and, when the news starts breaking through to other youngsters, opinions change; eventually there is a serious economic impact when people don’t buy Xmas presents and other merchandise.
Eventually (spoiler), the President has to take the two intrepid reporters to the North Pole to restore the status quo ante:

What they saw there, and whom they met, the whole nation learned on the night of January 24, the new Christmas Eve, during the President’s momentous press conference. After Billy showed his Polaroid snapshots of the elves at work in their workshop, of himself shaking Santa’s hand and sitting beside him in the sleigh, and of everyone—Billy, Michelle, Santa Claus and Mrs. Santa, the President and the First Lady—sitting down to a big turkey dinner, Michelle read a list of all the presents that she and Billy had received. Their estimated retail value: $18,599.95. As Michelle bluntly put it: “My father just doesn’t make that kind of money.”
“So would you say, Michelle,” the President asked with a twinkle in his eye, “that you do believe in Santa Claus?”
“Oh, absolutely, there’s no question.”
“And you, Billy?”
Billy looked at the tips of his new cowboy boots and smiled. “Oh, sure. And not just ’cause he gave us such swell presents. His beard, for instance. I gave it quite a yank. I’d take my oath that the beard was real.”

A droll story about the mercantile aspects of Christmas.
*** (Good). 2,000 words.

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop (F&SF, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, Danny hears what he thinks may be a burglar coming down the chimney; eventually, a grungy looking man in a heavy red coat and khaki trousers appears.
Danny challenges the intruder and, after ducking an ornament thrown at him, shoots. His mother hears the altercation and comes downstairs, taking the shotgun from Danny and reloading. But by the time she is ready to shoot, the man is almost at the top of the chimney—so she goes outside to get a clear shot:

Unless [Danny] was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who’d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it—“Up, Blitzen, up!”—to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.
“Stop!” Mom shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.
“No, Milly!” the man on the roof pleaded. “Don’t!”
“Clifton?” Mom murmured. Then, louder: “Clifton?”
The compact little buck (a courser, Danny thought, like in “The Night Before Christmas,” which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.
The deer—the courser—drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.
“Here’s something for you, Milly!” And the stolen ornament—a second one, Danny realized—shattered on Mom’s forehead.
“Ouch!”
“Merry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni—”

Danny’s mother shoots, and (spoiler) the man falls off. The reindeer then crash-lands into a barbed wire fence. Both die. The mother subsequently takes her ex-husband’s body to the dump and burns it, while Danny butchers the reindeer for meat.
After this captivatingly bizarre start the story leaps forward thirty years, and we find Daniel in hospital. He has just finished telling a man called Philip about the incident, and goes on to tell him about what happened on the tenth anniversary of the altercation in 1967, when he was camping alone in the wilds: Danny was visited by the ghost of his father, and his sleeping bag and tent disappeared (presumably his father’s doing) while he was following the apparition. He almost died from exposure.
Danny then recounts what happened on the twentieth anniversary in 1977, when his father’s ghost came and took the soul of his terminally ill mother.
After listening to all this, Philip gets up to leave. He kisses Danny on the forehead, and notes that it is the thirtieth anniversary that day. Daniel then asks Philip to get Gary to visit him, but Philip has to remind Danny that Gary is “gone” (there are hints in the latter section that Danny is gay, and presumably in hospital with AIDS). Philip leaves.
The story ends with this:

Outside Daniel’s window, faint icicle music. The glassblower’s panpipe hanging from the cornice had begun to melt, releasing long-pent melodies.
“Come on,” Daniel murmured. “Come on.”
He couldn’t wait. He wanted his father’s bitter ghost to get a move on. If it materialized in the room and stole his soul, that would be a welcome violation: a theft and a benediction, the first Christmas present his daddy had given him in over thirty years.
Come quickly, Father. Come.

This is an odd and very dark Xmas story but it works, and I suspect it’ll stay in reader’s heads for some time.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words.

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with Oobleck being accosted by a partner from a recent heist: Oobleck has swindled Manzello Lorikeet of his share, and he takes her sigil and a copy of her Kirlian aura (to unlock it). Lorikeet then shoots transposon particles at Oobleck, which sends her to the Second Aether, a multidimensional nexus that sends her to various other timelines over the course of the story:

For an infinitesimal moment after she was shot, a period that was all time and none, Nova Oobleck saw the essence of the Second Aether, with its hyperdimensional moonbeam roads twisting to infinity. And then she was jarringly reembodied in a new brane.
Stable once more, however temporarily, Nova felt her insides still shimmering from the invisible massless bundle of transposons that had burrowed into her gut at the impact point of the blast from Lorikeet’s Tegmark gun. It seemed almost as if the active particles were writhing like snakes inside her. Now and then, it struck her that she could sense an individual transposon dart away from its fellows, radiating outward and losing contact, thus bringing her that much closer to the end of her unanchored status and a permanent renewal of solidity. She sensed that when the knot of transposons achieved a certain phase-state, she would again be ejected from her place in this merely eleven-dimensional reality and sent randomly across the Second Aether. And there was nothing she could do to prevent it.  p. 51

Oobleck ends up in a timeline where she is the bombardier on an aircraft that is (according to the pilot) en route to bomb the Sultan’s Palace. At the same time as she drops the bomb the transposon particles energise to shift her to another reality, but the decoherence effect of the weapon sees the pilot and the plane come with her. They force land, and Nova gets out. When she is attacked by three trolls the pilot (a hive being) disassembles and attacks them.
When Nova shifts again she does so alone, and finds herself on a desert planet called Spalt. Eventually she comes upon the house of a self-exiled scientist called Barxax. He manages to stabilise her but, when he dies a year later, she shifts again. This time she ends up back in the Second Aether, where (spoiler) she is finally rescued by a multiverse ship commanded by Ona Von Bek. They then set off to retrieve Oona’s sigil.
This is a readable and engaging piece—there are touches of Vance and Moorcock—but ultimately it is a series of loosely connected episodes with a deus ex machina ending. Pleasant enough, just no real plot.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,050 words.

The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour

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The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) starts off with an alternative take on the Three Little Pigs story that ends (spoiler) with the pig beating the wolf to death. The other two fairy tales are also different versions: the second is a long and rambling Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Goldilocks is a ferret, and we get far, far too much family backstory about the bears; the third is an overlong and overwritten Aladdin story.
I initially thought this one must have come from the slush pile but apparently the writer is a World Fantasy Award finalist. You would never guess from the likes of this incontinent blather:

Mid, uh, Mama Bear knew more than she let on. She knew what he was doing, but sometimes this life was all too much for her who was now just a low-class sneaky nomad, by, she reminded herself, compassionate choice.
For after all, what did she need him for? Or any him? She’d always been as independent as her mother, and her mother’s mother, and all mama bears from the first to, as proper time would have it, eternity.
But she was a soft touch, and when he came a-begging with no malice in his eyes about her cub, she let him graze beside her in the blueberry patch.
And by the time she heard bushes rustle behind, and saw him chuffing the cub along in protective panic, it was almost too late.
When he told her his story in her all too easily found den, it was too late. Her compassion, that thing more useless to a mama bear than plastic wrap for freshness—that extraneous to needs and able to damage you if you don’t throw it away thing—that thing compassion had snuck into her heart and lodged there.  p. 47

Oh dear. The indignity of being rummaged (and the pathetic, hopefilled thrill). Lifted up high, my spout scoops air laden with fragrances—oatmeal soap, some supermarket shampoo; ohh er! a whiff of Terre d’Hermès perfume for men but always in a place like this, worn by a woman who wants to be seen as casually rich and certainly independent; its price is not just for the name but the story that it’s been created by a ‘great nose’. But trust me. My nose says—and do I have a nose!—it’s a mix of citronella candle and spray-on insect repellent with added pepper for irritation. The smell physically hurts my nostrils, tingles on my skin, and if I had a dog it would make my dog sneeze and run from me. And I’m quite convinced it would ward off swarms of bugs. No one should wear this, especially if you love dogs.  p. 48

Less is more.
– (Awful). 4,600 words. ParSec website.

Invisible People by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Invisible People by Nancy Kress (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) gets off to a lively start with a couple dealing with their two young kids at breakfast time. After an amount of porridge slinging from the younger of the two, the house system tells them there are two strangers of the front porch.
These visitors turn out to be FBI agents, and they tell the parents that their adopted daughter Kenly has come to their attention as part of a RICO investigation into an adoption agency. They then tell the confused parents that her genes were tampered with before she was placed with them.
The next part of the story sees husband (and lawyer) Tom go to his office, where he has to deal with a wife who wants a punitive divorce from her cheating husband, the commander of a nuclear submarine in the Arctic. After this appointment (the wife’s hostility is obliquely relevant later on in the story), he briefs his (sexually transitioning) PI George about his problem, and orders a “no expense spared” investigation into the adoption agency.
The next major event occurs weeks later—and after a period of Kenly being kept at home because of possible risk-taking behaviour associated with the genetic changes—when the couple’s upset babysitter comes home from the park with Kenly. She gives an account of how Kenly ran to the homeless camp in the park and started giving away toys. Then, when one of the men grabbed her and asked for money, the babysitter used a concealed weapon to fire a warning shot. The couple scold Kenly, but she insists she would do the same thing again, as the camp has “kids with no toys”.
The rest of the story sees George the PI discover that there are a group of international scientists in the Cayman Islands behind the adoption/gene-modification scheme, and that the alterations include a “gene drive”, which means that the changes will be more widely passed on to any descendants. After Tom tells his wife about this at home, the very rich Kathleen McGuire turns up and tells the couple the same thing happened to her (now dead) six-year-old boy. She suggests that the affected parents should band together to have their children’s DNA/genes scanned so they can find out what changes have been made, and why.
This all comes to a head (spoiler) when Kenly rescues a baby from a dog, and Tom realises what the modifications are, and why they have been done: he later tells McGuire that the genetic changes were to increase empathy, not risk-taking.
Apart from the main story there are other sub-plots/elements that will allow readers to guess what the genetic changes are intended to do—such as (a) the fragments from an essay written by Kenly about leopards which show she sympathises not only with the baboons they kill, but with the leopards too, or (b) the account of the nuclear submarine stand-off in the Arctic that rumbles on in the background throughout.
The final section sees the couple offered gene therapy for their daughter, a procedure that will reverse the changes the adoption centre made. They discuss the matter: do they choose the increased risk that comes with increased empathy, or not? We don’t find out what their decision is, and the story finishes (like C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl’s The Meeting) with Tom picking up the phone to make a call.
This is a pretty good piece overall, but the quality varies from the okay/good (e.g. the more formulaic and preachy elements) to the very good (e.g. the revelation of what the genetic modifications mean).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,900 words.

Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass (Interzone, September-October 2020) begins with the narrator winding multiple timepieces in a house:

We kept them on the old kitchen table: two alarm clocks and an old pocket watch. We were lucky: we had enough to have a set in every room. We even had a couple spare, up in the attic. Some people have just one set for the house. Some people have just one clock, which means you can tell when it isn’t safe, but can’t work out which way to run. Two is better. Four is too many: you can’t distinguish their sounds clearly enough. Three is best. Time, and time, and time again. That’s what people say.

Later on we learn that differences in the speed of the ticking clocks are used to warn of time distortions that are life-threatening, something that subsequently happens to the narrator and his wife Ginny, who then flee their house:

The protocol was simple enough. First, we were supposed to get out of the immediate vicinity, and find a place that seemed safe. People said higher ground was better, for some reason, though that might have been a myth; and anyway, nowhere was completely free of danger. If there were injuries, we should get them treated, not that there was much the doctors could do, generally. Without meaning to, I found I had brought my good hand up to touch the scar on my face. I forced it back down.

As the couple wait by their house for the time distortion to pass, a man called Lukasz, the famous inventor of the Ragnorak Drive, turns up with his team. He ignores their warnings about the house, and tells them he is there because of the event. After he leaves them to survey the property, we learn that the narrator came by the scar on his face and his withered hand in a previous event; however, on that occasion, the couple didn’t get away in good time, and the narrator got caught in the margins of the time distortion. This caused his hand to age much more quickly than the rest of him (their dog, who didn’t escape with them, was reduced to a skeleton and fur).
The rest of the story has Lukasz describe his theories to the couple (spoiler), and he explains that the time distortions are living creatures which appear in our time to reproduce. Lukasz subsequently goes into the house to trap the creatures, but disappears. The story ends with the narrator’s wife leaving him, and an account of the narrator’s theories about Lukasz (who he thinks is a time traveller), and the event that caused the creation of the creatures.
I found the last part of this story a little confusing, alas, but for the most part this is a conceptually engaging piece, and one that reminded me of work by the likes of Barrington Bayley or David I. Masson.
*** (Good). 5,200 words.

How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15th January 2020) opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobučar, a piece of art, from a gangster called “Quini the Squid”. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set in a cyberpunky/implants future; (b) Nat is Quini’s ex; and (c) the narrator, a former employee of Quini’s, is doing this for revenge.
We also learn about the Klobučar:

I’m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobučar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobučar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.

Once the narrator convinces Nat to help, they realise that they’ll need to provide a sample of Quini’s DNA to fool the scanners which protect the safe room where the artwork is stored. We learn that they’ll also require something else for the job:

Having Quini’s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat’s fits the bill, in large part because we’ve got implants that are definitely not Quini’s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist.
It’s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea—someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible.
Ergo, the ghost part.

The narrator then goes to meet a Nigerian called Yinka—the prospective Fleishgeist—on Shiptown, a floating migrant settlement off the Barcelona coast. Then, after hiring him, all three meet up at a sex house to practise various robbery scenarios in virtual reality. Eighteen hours of run-throughs later, the narrator suggests one more to finish, only to be told by the others that they are not in VR anymore but in the real world. The narrator realises that they have pod-sickness from the VR sessions, and concludes that it must be a side-effect of the sex-change hormones they are taking (and which were mentioned previously).
This isn’t the only problem the three encounter and (spoiler), when they start the job, they only just manage to hack the robotic guard dog before it saws the narrator and Yinka into bloody pieces. Then Yinka learns he will need to have his arm amputated to match Quini’s body shape. Finally, after Yinka gets into the safe room, the narrator discovers that the time stamps of video footage showing the guards playing cards is faked, and that have been discovered. At that point Anton, the new chief of security at Quini’s house, points a scattergun at the narrator’s head and takes them prisoner.
The final section has Quini return from a nightclub with Nat (who has been relaying Quini’s personal signal to help the other two fool the security scanners), and start an interrogation. During this we learn how he got his “Squid” nickname, a violent anecdote that involves the amputation of this brother’s limbs for telling made-up stories. When Quini is finished questioning the three, he tells the narrator he is going to do the same to them but, before he does this, he opens the pod (recovered from Yinka) to show off the artwork—and finds it empty.
This is just the first of two final plot twists that complete the tale (although there is also a short postscript to the action where the narrator tells Nat about their pending transition from male to female, and why they wanted revenge—a sexual slur from Quini).
This is a continually inventive, tightly plotted, and well done caper story that feels, in parts, like a Mission Impossible movie on steroids. The only weakness is that, despite all the hardware and gimmickry and feel of a hard SF story, there isn’t any central SF theme or concept here, and the human tale that is here instead is the weakest part (I wasn’t particularly convinced of the narrator’s motivation, and I’m getting bored of stories where trans characters struggle with their transition—it’s becoming a cliché).
Still, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,450 words. Story link.

Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson (Twilight Zone, February 1982) starts with the narrator on holiday at a Bermudan beach when another tourist, a fat man with white hair and a rosy complexion, starts talking to him. After some chitchat the man says his name is Santa Claus. The narrator humours the man (who he thinks is a nut), and asks why he didn’t get an autographed photo of Joe DiMaggio when he was a kid. Claus mutters an excuse, and they briefly talk about other matters until Claus says he has an early flight to catch, and leaves.
This is okay I guess, but the ending isn’t really a surprise.

** Average. 1950 words.