Cyber-Claus by William Gibson (The Washington Post Book World, 1991) is set in the near future and begins with a house AI detecting activity on the roof on Xmas Eve. The defences are activated and the owner prepares to confront the intruders.
This very brief piece ends (spoiler) with house AI identifying eight quadrupeds and one biped on the roof—and then the latter starts to come down the chimney . . . .
A lightweight squib.
* (Mediocre). 550 words.
Nicholas Was . . . by Neil Gaiman (Drabble II—Double Century, 1989) is a Drabble (a hundred word long short story) that suggests Santa is a person who is, like Promethus, etc., undergoing a punishment. This is about as forgettable as you’d expect.
– (Poor). 100 words.
The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #99, October 1960) opens with Powers reflecting on the suicide of his colleague Whitby, and the strange grooves the dead man cut on the floor of an empty swimming pool:
An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons. Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket. After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half-filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution. p. 91
This is just the first piece of strangeness that we are introduced to in this story, and we soon learn that Powers is one of a number of people who are beginning to sleep for increasing periods of time (a number of “terminals” are already in permanent comas). We also are introduced to an ex-patient of Powers’ called Kaldren who, after a recent operation, never sleeps at all, and who intermittently stalks Powers to pass on a series of decreasing numbers (the first one we see is 96,688,365,498,721, scribbled in the dust on the windscreen of his car). Kaldren also has a girlfriend called Coma (quite apt given the situation with Powers and the other narcoma sufferers).
There is more of this kind of thing when Powers spots a creature trapped at the bottom of the empty swimming pool, a frog that has grown a lead carapace, one of a number of organisms that have started growing shells for radiological protection. Later on, when Powers shows Coma round Whitby’s laboratory, we see even odder creatures (an intelligent chimp, a mutated anemone, etc.), specimens that have been irradiated to switch on their “silent pair” genes, in the belief that that this will trigger a massive move up the evolutionary slope.
This is all intriguing stuff, but many of these ideas are never fully realised, and the remainder of the story focuses on Powers’ decreasing periods of wakefulness, as well as his creation of a mandala (presumably similar to Whitby’s design) on a target at an Air Force weapons range. During this period Powers also visits Kaldren’s house, and we learn about the latter’s bizarre preoccupations which, among other things, include the series of decreasing numbers mentioned previously. We discover that they are being received from deep space, and may be a countdown to the end of the Universe.
The final section (spoiler) sees Powers irradiate the laboratory specimens and himself with the X-ray machine. When he goes outside afterwards he can sense the age of the landscape and then, when he reaches the mandala, he tunes into the “time-song” of the stars above him:
Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them. Moving slowly, the forward direction of its majestic current almost imperceptible, Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself. As it passed him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, let himself be drawn into it, borne gently on its powerful back. Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outlines of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel sweeping him onward, beyond hope now but at rest, down the broadening reaches of the river of eternity. p. 121
This is a story that has some striking ideas and impressive passages, but they never really click into place—other than in Ballard’s head,1 I guess, or perhaps as some sort of entropic tone-poem. So an ambitious piece then, but not an entirely satisfying one.
I’d also add in passing that I think this work presages the likes of The Terminal Beach and his other “concentrated” stories, in that it presents a number of core images or obsessions unconnected (or largely unconnected) by conventional narrative links.
*** (Good). 12,700 words. Story link.
1. Although I generally admire Ballard’s writing (and would put The Kindness of Women on my top five novels list), I occasionally get the feeling I’m reading about the obsessions of a psychiatric patient.
The Thirteenth Trunk by Vida Jameson (Saturday Evening Post, 8th February 1947)1 starts with Lynn, who is working as a switchboard operator for a New York company called Courlandt Coal on a busy winter’s day. During the rush she gets a call on a disconnected line—but nonetheless hears a strangely accented caller called Van Kieft saying that he wants coal from Riven Hill. She quickly passes him on to a salesman called Jack Blake (who she has a crush on).
Later, Blake arrives at the order room with a coffee for Lynn, and he tells her about the conversation with the “screwball” that she put through to him. Apparently Van Kieft told Blake that he arrived in New York with a shipment from Riven Hill (an anthracite mine in Pennsylvannia) and that he needs a piece of that coal to get home. Blake concludes his story by saying that Van Kieft is obviously a drunk, a homesick miner . . . or a lost gnome!
The rest of the story develops two subplots: the first is a problem at the local hospital, which has been sent the wrong kind of coal and is having a problem with its heating, and the second is Lynn’s discovery, after another call with Van Kieft, and then having him turn up at the office, that he really is a gnome.
These two threads resolve in the remainder of the story (spoiler), which sees Blake identify the problem at the hospital (too fine a grade of coal is falling through the grates of the boilers before it can burn) and organise a replacement shipment of coal for them. The company can’t deliver, however, partly because of a carbon monoxide incident that puts several drivers out of action, and partly because the streets are snow- and ice-bound. Step forward Van Klieft, who says he is an elemental being and—if given a piece of his native Riven Hill coal—will be able to “do anything in the earth”. When Van Klieft finally gets the coal he needs, he takes Blake and the shipment directly to the hospital:
Five minutes later a truck was on the scales, loading for the hospital.
Ginger, seeing Lynn’s uneasiness, relieved her at the switchboard. Lynn seated herself with a good view of the window, pretending to sort orders. She saw Jack come out and climb into the cab. He saw her and blew her a kiss.
A few seconds later a tiny brown-and-green figure scuttled past and sprang up beside Jack. Lynn saw with relief that Van Kieft was too little to be seen, once in the truck.
At that, it turned out to be impossible to fool the yard laborers completely. The truck rolled off the scales and turned down the street. Presently an excited and gesticulating group of workmen was gathered out in front of the office. Grant strode out and restored order. But all that afternoon the gossip filtered into the office. One of the men swore that “t’at crazy salesman, he jus’ drive across Lenox Avenoo and disappear into t’at hill. So help me. Miss Dawson, I saw wit’ my own eyes!” p. 123
The hospital get their coal, Blake gets a promotion from sales to engineering and, presumably, Lynn gets her man.
Although this sounds like a fairly lightweight Unknown-type fantasy, I’d make two observations: first, it’s an amusing and polished piece, especially for a debut story and, second, it has a very realistic setting (Jameson must have worked in this kind of office at some point in her life). This latter not only grounds the frothier fantasy part of the story, but it’s also pretty interesting account of a lost time and almost lost trade.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link. Saturday Evening Post Archive Subscriptions.
1. I ended up reading this story as the result of a daisy chain of links and comments, which started with a review of the Summer 1950 issue of F&SF by Rich Horton. This led to a discussion of some of the contributors, one of whom was Cleve Cartmill: when I looked up his Wikipedia entry, I discovered that he was at one point married to Vida Jameson, the daughter of SF writer Malcolm Jameson. I recognised her name as Vida was mentioned by Alfred Bester in Hell’s Cartographers, where Bester stated that, at informal writer’s lunches he attended in the late 1930s, “Now and then [Malcolm Jameson] brought along his pretty daughter who turned everybody’s head.” (Malcolm Jameson’s ISFDB page is here, and I recommend reading his fantasy story—later turned into a Twilight Zone episode—Blind Alley).
My comment about Cleve Cartmill and Vida Jameson led to the posting of another link, which not only had a photo of her, but also provided the information that, while she was temporarily living with Robert and Virginia Heinlein, she published a story in the Saturday Evening Post (the same issue that published Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth)—which led me to finding that copy on the Internet Archive.
I also note in passing that Malcolm Jameson’s wife, Mary McGregor, also published a fantasy story, Transients (Unknown Worlds, February 1943), which is also worth a look.
Finally, there is a Jameson genealogy blog here, maintained by Wendy McClure, Malcolm Jameson and Mary McGregor’s great-granddaughter.
At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes (F&SF, October-November 1995)1 is the seventh published story in the “Kevin Grierson” series, and begins with his “Shadow”, a doppelgänger, or perhaps more accurately a secret double who normally exists inside Kevin, getting dressed and going to work instead of him. Most of the rest of the story involves the scrapes and encounters that the drug-using Shadow has with the other people at his place of employment (his boss warns the Shadow not to come in late again; he goes to an outdoor fashion shoot with Les; he meets a woman called Sarah who has a boozer/druggie husband, etc.)
Dropped into all of this mostly scene setting description and verbal back and forth, is a short flashback scene where we see Kevin working as a male prostitute (I think) and waking up to find his drill sergeant client is dead.
At the end of the story the Shadow returns from a drug deal to find Kevin has been drafted.
It was hard to keep track of what was going on in this slice-of-life, and I have little memory of what I did read. I’ve no idea what the editor saw in this (at best) borderline fantasy story, and wonder if it got taken on the strength of its prequels.
– (Awful). 6,750 words.
1. The ISFDB page for the Richard Bowes’ “Kevin Grierson” series.
Sector General by James White (New Worlds #65, November 1957) is the first of a long series of stories,1 and it gets off to a pretty good start with an alien spaceship coming out of hyperspace beside the Sector Twelve General Hospital:
The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub-critical, and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.
The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship captain—and crew—energised its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.
“This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly. “We have casualties and require assistance. Our classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM….” pp. 4-5
After this the story continues with Dr Conway, a medic who has recently arrived at the Sector General. As he wanders around its corridors, we learn that (a) all species are described by a four letter codes, (b) there are doctors from a variety of species in the hospital (c) the hospital has multiple treatment environments, and (d) the pacifistic Conway does not like the Monitors, the “military peacekeepers”, who run the hospital.
The rest of the tale is a fairly episodic affair. Conway is summoned to treat the Telfi, but first has to go to the tape room, where he will be programmed with an alien physiology learning tape. When Conway sees the Chief Psychologist in charge of the process, O’Mara, is a Monitor, Conway’s attitude shows. O’Mara subsequently tells Conway that he wants to talk to him after the tape programming is removed.
Conway then goes to treat the Telfi, later dodging the interview with O’Mara by not getting the programming removed. Instead, he goes on his rounds but, after dealing with his first patient, a hypochondriac crocodile-like being called Chalder, Conway starts to feel cold and lonely. This turns out to be a side-effect of the learning tape, which is making Conway act like a Telfi, and his symptoms develop to the point that he leans against the dining hall oven and scorches his clothes. When he eventually recovers consciousness he gets a dressing down from O’Mara for not mentioning it was his first tape (which made him more susceptible to what happened).
The next part of the story sees Conway encounter a large number of Monitor troops who have arrived at the station; they have been in combat and need treatment, and this causes the doctor to do more brooding. Before he can consult another doctor about the way he feels, more troops arrive needing attention. As he treats them Conway learns that they have been intervening in a human-DBLF (a caterpillar-like alien) war, and that the Monitor who is telling Conway about this looks as disgusted as he does. Eventually, Conway learns the Monitors aren’t the warlike people he thinks they are, and that his own social group is a “protected species”:
Conway said, “What?”
“A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata—on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth—come practically all the great artists, musicians, and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilisation, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behaviour are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the galaxy truly civilised, truly good.” pp. 26-27
At the end of this lecture/data dump (spoiler), a spaceship crashes into the station, and a blundering alien patient runs amok in the gravity control section. This sets up an extended final act, which sees Conway make a perilous journey into the area where the alien is rampaging. There he undergoes a crisis of conscience when he is told to kill the alien to stop the catastrophic casualties that the fluctuating gravity field is causing. (Conway eventually, and reluctantly, does so, but the author bottles out of his Trolley Problem2 by having Conway later discover that the alien has the sentience of a dog).
This story has some pretty good parts (the multi-species hospital, the interesting aliens, etc.) but it is (a) overlong (the couple of thousand words after the climax are largely redundant, not to mention Conway’s overdone—and at times somewhat unconvincing and ill-informed—pacifistic agonising), (b) uneven (the gobbets of exposition and moralising), and (c) generally gives the impression of a writer who is trying to run before he can walk. The later stories were better, but this is a promising start.
**+ (Average to Good). 17,700 words. Story link.
1. The ISFDB page for the Sector General series is here.
2. The Wikipedia page for the philosophical conundrum of the Trolley Problem.
Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first “Gunbelt Highway” passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6 (2052), Orbit 2 (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which in turn describe a stretch of road, two different songs, a space traffic route, a piece of malware, a TV movie, an account of the Biafran War, and a western adventure novella. As you read through these wikis, there are inconsistencies in the history they describe, something that is developed when the next wiki discusses a sentient meme:
Bentley (and others) also stress that the Gunbelt Highway Effect is far more insidious than the other described phenomena, in several key ways. One, its effect is often scattershot and piecemeal, rather than revolving around a single articulable fact. Two, it not only acts to change or invert verifiable historical details, it often seems to function retroactively, altering, mutating and even cross-pollinating the ‘prior strata’ of axiomatic information upon which any verification of said details depends. As such, the effect seems to possess an acausal property, which Bentley variously calls ‘quantum memetics’ or ‘memetic relativity’, behaving contrary to chronological or linear progression, with meaning and significance shifting depending on the objective position of the observer. Three, it not only affects a modification of collective psychology, but also of hard (usually digital) data. p. 15-16.
Later on in the story this meme is traced back to science fiction in a droll passage:
In “The Primate Pool” (2098), Bell controversially traces the ideas of skeuomophic resonance and quantum memetics back to the pulp fiction mass produced during the 20th century. He suggests that the “heavy lifting” of human cultural development has occurred, not in the deliberate field of philosophy, with its “scrupulous laboratory condition”, but “in the wild”, without oversight or adequate containment, in works of science fiction and speculative fiction. While a significant portion of science fiction has been “purposefully prescient” and has often accurately predicted many aspects of what was deemed ‘the future’, Bell argues that the vast majority of works in the genre have been produced “like wildfire, almost at random, without peer review, and usually with a throw-away or wilfully disposable intent. Words were a base currency, squandered with spendthrift glee, with no thought for the exchange rate, or the infinite variations of idea they could generate”. Bell describes the authors of the genre, often producing frantically on demand to meet publishing deadlines and pay-by-the-word counts, as “toiling like the aphoristic infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, generating incalculable quantities of ideas purely for the purpose of escapist entertainment, without regard for the pernicious durability or half-life of those ideas”.
Bell draws a clear distinction between the small coterie of “responsible speculative authors” who conscientiously pursued the development of prescient scientific and sociopolitical concepts, and the “now largely anonymous legion of hacks and jobbing writers” who wrote “with flagrant abandon” to mass-manufacture prodigious quantities of consumable entertainment, the equivalent of “fast food giants churning out food substitutes that favoured short-term gratification over nourishment, or pre-regulation plastics manufacturers overstuffing cultural and mental landfills”. p. 16
This idea of a changing or tampered-with history is examined once more using the biography of the previously mentioned Biafran War writer but, by the time I finished the story, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. The central conceit, and the changing events, are also buried under far too many words—the story would benefit from being shorter and more focussed (especially at the beginning, where it takes far too long to get going).
** (Average). 7,600 words. ParSec website.
Nackles by Donald E. Westlake (F&SF, January 1964) begins with the narrator discussing the characteristics of gods, and whether Santa Claus is one, before he goes on to talk about his sister and brother-in-law. We learn that the latter assaulted his wife on one occasion, but was convinced by the narrator (with the help of a baseball bat) not to treat her like that again. Later on, however, the brother-in-law reverts to verbally and emotionally mistreating his wife and kids, eventually inventing the idea of a satanic anti-Santa, Nackles, to keep his three children out of sight and earshot—he tells the kids that Nackles doesn’t leave presents, but comes up from his underground tunnels to capture and eat children who have been bad. Frank also tells other fathers about his invention, so the idea spreads and belief in Nackles increases.
In the final section (spoiler) Frank’s behaviour becomes worse than usual one Christmas Eve—with the expected results for someone who behaves like a spoiled child.
There isn’t much of a story here, but it is a neat, well-developed idea, with a good last line from a well-known Xmas Song (“You’d better watch out”).1
*** (Good). 3,050 words. Internet Archive.
1. Santa Claus is Coming to Town (not the original, but a version I like) at 00:49.
A Christmas Tale by Sarban (Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, 1951) opens with the narrator’s description of a group of ex-pats in Jeddah donning fancy dress before they go out carol singing on Christmas Eve. After several recitations they eventually end up in the house of Alexander Andreievitch, a displaced (Imperial) Russian who now runs the Saudi Air Force.
There, after the group have sung their carols, the narrator and the Russian start drinking their way through a bottle of Zubrovka. When the narrator notices that there is a drawing of a bison on the label of the bottle, he asks the Russian if he has ever seen one, perhaps in the wilder parts of his home country. Andreievitch says no, but adds that he once saw something even rarer.
So begins a story which takes us from the sticky heat of a Saudi evening to the cold beyond the Arctic Circle, where Andreievitch was once the observer of a two-man crew tasked to fly a seaplane from a navy ship to a distant settlement. After the pair got there and dropped their message, they turned for home—only to be caught out by worsening weather. Just before they ran out of fuel, the pilot force-landed in the marshes. The pair then struggled on their own for a number of days, before they came upon a small group of Samoyed hunters.
The natives feed the two starving men, but the meat makes them both sick—and the next day they discover that it half rotten and is covered with unfamiliar red wool or hair. The pair angrily quiz the natives about the source of the meat and, when they cannot understand the Samoyed’s replies, demand that are taken to the nearest settlement. Later, however, when the weather closes in, they find themselves taking shelter at what would appear to be the partially uncovered (but still frozen) burial grounds of an unknown creature—the source of the meat which provided their meal.
The story concludes (spoiler) with the group sheltering from the deteriorating weather under an overhanging bank, when they hear a noise in the distance:
Igor Palyashkin and I, we too shrank down against the earth; what we could hear then stilled us like an intenser frost, and I felt cold to the middle of my heart. Through the dead and awful silence of that pause before the snow we heard something coming across the blind waste towards us. All day in that dead world nothing had moved but ourselves; now, out there where the shadows advanced and retreated and the pallid gloom baffled our sight, something was coming with oh! such labour and such pain, foundering and fighting onwards through the half-solid marsh. In that absolute stillness of the frozen air we heard it when it was far away; it came so slowly and it took so long, and we dare not do anything but listen and strain our eyes into the darkening mist. In what shape of living beast could such purpose and such terrible strength be embodied? A creature mightier than any God has made to be seen by man was dragging itself through the morass. We heard the crunch of the surface ice, then the whining strain of frozen mud as the enormous bulk we could not picture bore slowly down on it; then a deep gasping sound as the marsh yielded beneath a weight its frostbonds could not bear. Then plungings of such violence and such a sound of agonised straining and moaning as constricted my heart; and, after that awful struggle, a long sucking and loud explosion of release as the beast prevailed and the marsh gave up its hold. Battle after battle, each more desperate than the last, that dreadful fight went on; we listened with such intentness that we suffered the agony of every yard of the creature’s struggle towards our little bank of earth. But as it drew nearer the pauses between its down-sinkings and its tremendous efforts to burst free grew longer, as if that inconceivable strength and tenacity of purpose were failing. In those pauses we heard the most dreadful sound of all: the beast crying with pain and the terror of death. Dear Lord God! I think no Christian men but we, Igor Palyashkin and I, have ever heard a voice like that. I know that no voice on all this earth could have answered that brute soul moaning in the mist of the lonely taiga that evening before the snow.
That beast was alone in all the world. p. 15-16
The creature never gets close to them, seemingly disappearing into the marsh or the gloom.
The final section sees the narrator’s carol-singing acquaintances get up to leave, whereupon the Russian tells him of the brief glimpse he caught of the creature: the great head, the long red-brown wool, the long curling teeth.
I liked this story—it’s an atmospheric piece with a lot of evocative descriptions (a result of its old-school literary writing). Even if the climax of the story does involve a creature that remains largely (and correctly) offstage, it is nevertheless an effective piece.
Worth reading.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6550 words. Amazon UK Look Inside. Amazon US Look Inside.
Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with an intriguing short hook before becoming a long description of the narrator’s friend Herbert, a childhood prodigy who is blunt to the point of rudeness with other people. We see this play out in various scenes from Herbert’s childhood, mostly at school, from which he eventually gets expelled. Later in life he gets married, but his wife subsequently divorces him because of the many experiments he undertakes at home.
After more than four thousand words of back-story about Herbert (about half the length of this piece) we eventually get to the science fiction, when he visits the narrator’s house and states that he has managed to make one of his mice disappear but can’t replicate the experiment. Then Herbert vanishes while the pair are in the garden.
Years pass. The narrator’s business thrives and his children grow up. One day, while he is looking in an old book, the narrator sees Herbert in a photograph taken in 1913 (fifty years earlier). Further investigation reveals the man in the photograph invented a revolutionary steam engine and wrote a treatise about time as a fourth dimension.
These discoveries drive the narrator to teach himself science and investigate Herbert’s inventions but, eventually, he realises that his intellect isn’t up to the task. Then a young schoolteacher arrives in town and takes an interest but, at the end of the story, he also vanishes.
I was a bit perplexed at why this story was selected for publication—it isn’t structured like a modern work (the long section at the start detailing Herbert’s character and history feels like something from H.G. Wells), the time-travel idea is unoriginal, and there is virtually no story beyond a couple of people vanishing. Or any resolution. Not only is the story set in 1963, it feels like it was written then too. All that said, I’ve read worse in pro SF magazines.1
(Mediocre). 8,200 words. ParSec website.
1. The writer is Ukrainian, so English is perhaps her second language, but the copy-editor should have asked her to get rid of some of those commas and simplify some of the sentences:
That morning when Herbert, a good friend of mine, came to me, again, the third time that week, was the most usual Tuesday morning one could ever imagine. His theories did not let him sleep at night, which happened pretty often, but this time everything was different. This time it was real.
Since early childhood, I was his only friend and the most appreciative listener—in all honesty, I didn’t always understand what he was saying and what he was even talking about, but, unlike other people, I didn’t have anything against it.
I met Herbert on my first day at school. Those huge thick glasses he watched the world through made his eyes look even bigger than they were and a little goggled. But even without them, he looked pretty weird, which did not do him any good in high school. He was different from all the rest of the children, too different to be part of the crowd and remain unnoticed wherever he went. Frankly speaking, it never mattered to him, just like everything else- everything but science. p. 32