Author: Paul Fraser

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee

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The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #298, 27th February 2020)1 has a title that pretty much describes the story: a mermaid called Essarala wants to travel among the stars but lives in a planet-bound culture. Then, when an interstellar trading ship arrives in orbit for the first time, Essarala thinks she may have found a way off-planet—until she realises that the ship has no water for a mer to live in. Her sister Kiovasa suggests they should visit the witch beneath the waves for help.
After arriving at the witch’s lair, and discussing the matter with her—during which the witch gives warnings about the dangers and difficulties that will lie ahead—she says that she can give Essarala two legs like the humans. Essarala is determined to go and, even though she doesn’t understand everything the witch has warned her about, asks what the price is. The witch replies that one day Essarala will want to come home and, when she does, she should visit her again. Then the witch gives her a knife that will cleave her tail into two legs.
Later, after Essarala has cut herself and been accepted onto the crew, she is given to an alien called Ssen to be mentored. We see her develop as a crew member, and learn about some of her adventures:

Essarala learned to fly in skysuits in vast and turbulent gas planets, some of which had corrosive atmospheres. She saw twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nighttime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once a millennium. And she kept her promise, too: for every world she visited, she sang her sister’s name.

Someday I will go back and tell her of the things I have seen, Essarala thought again and again. But not yet, not yet.

Then, towards the end of the story (spoiler), Ssen teaches Essarala about special relativity, and she realises that time will be passing much more quickly for her sister on her world. Essarala begs the captain and crew to take her back home, and they generously do so. As soon as they arrive Essarala visits the witch as promised, to be told that the old woman will shortly die and that, given the wisdom she has gained on her travels, Essarala will replace her . Then the witch tells Essarala that her sister is still alive but that she doesn’t have long left. Essarala goes to find her, and the story ends with the two sisters together.2
I thought the idea of telling an SF story as a fantasy tale worked very well here (it’s possible to view the severing of her tail to become two legs, etc., as unexplained superscience), and it is an enjoyable and original piece. I also thought Lee’s elegant and concise writing style added to the story. The ending is perhaps not as strong as the rest of it, but that is a minor quibble.3
***+ (Good to very good.) 5,950 words. [Story]

1. This is a finalist for the Sturgeon and short story Hugo Awards for 2021.

2. There is a dedication at the end of the story to Lee’s sister.

3. Some of the commenters in one of my (private) FB groups (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction) thought that the lack of foreboding at the end of the story was a weakness. I thought that the uncertainty about her sister provided that.

Stranger Station by Damon Knight

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Stranger Station by Damon Knight (F&SF, December 1956) opens with Paul Wesson arriving at a space station built far from Earth for the purpose of interacting with visiting members of an alien species whose proximity causes humans mental distress.
For the first month of Wesson’s six month stay he is alone, apart from an AI/computer network he calls “Aunt Jane”, who he quizzes about various matters while he waits for the alien to arrive—What do the aliens look like? Can he see a picture of them? How did the previous incumbents of the station cope with their tour of duty, etc.? But Aunt Jane won’t answer most of his questions, saying that it isn’t permitted. The computer does, however, read to him an account of the first contact with the aliens on Titan:

We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening . . . The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia . . . Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading . . . We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it this was later forwarded for analysis . . .  p. 6

The rest of the month sees Wesson become slightly stir-crazy but then, one day when he is on a spacewalk to the much larger sector two of the station (built to house the alien), he starts to feel fearful, and then there is a booming sound—the alien visitor has arrived. Wesson now feels the same distress as the original contact team:

It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face. . . . It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota . . . wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold. . . .
With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around in slow circles.  p. 11

During this part of the story we also learn that the alien’s golden fluid provides humans with increased longevity, and that Wesson’s bosses want him to ask the aliens if they intend continuing their twenty year visits. Then Wesson realises he can sense the position of the alien, and realises that it may be suffering too. Eventually he pressures Aunt Jane into showing him a video image of the alien, which precipitates a realisation (“When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate.”). Wesson concludes (spoiler) that, while he and the alien are in close proximity, his mind is being changed so that he (and others like him) will be able to peacefully co-exist with them. When he explains all this to Aunt Jane however, he discovers that he can no longer understand her or speak, read or write English.
The last section sees Wesson decide to resist the emanations coming from the alien, which then causes it such pain that it breaches its sector and wrecks the station. There is a long description of the death throes and, before Wesson dies, his final realisation is that his actions will cause humanity to come into conflict with the aliens.
If the plot of this story sounds like it doesn’t makes much sense, that is because it doesn’t: I think Knight was writing a brooding psychological horror here, and hadn’t really thought through the internal logic. Now, if readers are happy to just immerse themselves in the descriptive writing and atmospherics, they will probably enjoy it—if you have an analytical mind, however, you will be distracted by many questions (Why does Masson have to be unconscious when he arrives at the station? Why does he spend a month there on his own before the alien arrives? How does humanity manage to get enough immortality fluid for everyone if the aliens only visit every twenty years? How did they discover that the fluid could be used for this purpose in the first place? Why do the aliens think they can affect humanity as a whole if they only “convert” one station keeper every twenty years? Why must the two races have a love/hate relationship, can’t they peacefully co-exist or ignore each other? Why does the last sentence have Aunt Jane sounding as if it loves Wesson?) Also on the debit side of the story is the fact that a lot of the writing is long-winded description (whereas the conversation Wesson has with his boss about a possible fluid shortage—and why he doesn’t have a cat on board with him—isn’t even that, it’s just padding). The final nail in the coffin is that a couple of major plot developments come from Wesson having realisations or intuitions about things, always a weak way of advancing a story.
Not one for the left-brained (analytical/methodical).
** (Average). 9,400 words.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod

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Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) is set in the world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (now out of copyright), and takes place five years after Winston Smith’s interrogation, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Thought Police. The story opens with Smith drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, and watching a news program about Number One (the leader of the enemy state Eastasia). Then he recognises a man sitting behind him, and realises it is Syme, who previously worked with Smith in the Research Department until Syme was unpersonned, disappeared. Syme begins talking to Smith, and tells him that he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Shetland but was released early.
During the pair’s subsequent conversation Smith finds out that Syme is going back to his old job (Syme notes his ex-colleagues are still working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary), before they are interrupted by events on the screen, which shows Eastasian people protesting against Number One—an unprecedented event. Smith, Syme and the rest of the café’s patrons join in with shouts of “Down with Number One!”, cries similar to those they would normally make during the Two Minute Hate.
After Syme leaves, Smith starts walking home, only to be accosted by the Thought Police and bundled into a car. Sitting in the back is O’Brien, the man who tortured and psychologically broke Smith in Room 101. Smith tells O’Brien to get it over with (Smith expects to be executed, and has done for the last five years) but O’Brien says a worse fate awaits him: Smith subsequently spends several days in a rubber cell withdrawing from his alcohol addiction.
O’Brien then sends for Smith (spoiler):

‘Why have you brought me here?’ Winston asked.
O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose, and looked at Winston with the intense, unspoken sympathy of their first exchanged glance, long ago. It was as if the arrest, the torture, the long interrogation and indoctrination, and the room that Winston could—with some effort—avoid thinking about, had never happened.
‘I am engaged,’ said O’Brien, ‘in a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the Party in Airstrip One, and hopefully in the whole of Oceania. You have a small but important part to play in this conspiracy. Will you join me?’
Winston’s mug rattled as he put it down. A cold sweat broke from his every pore. It was possible that this was a test of his loyalty. It was also possible that O’Brien—the manipulator, the torturer, the inquisitor, the provocateur—was after all an enemy of the Party! In either case, it was best to play along. If he did not, he was unlikely to leave this place alive. He could always gather what information he was able to, and denounce O’Brien to the Thought Police at the first opportunity.  p. 22

In the rest of this long section, O’Brien unveils a conspiracy which involves many of the Thought Police, and he also provides Smith with an account of what life was like under Socialism at the end of the WWII. He then reveals that Smith is one of the Windrush generation (a black immigrant from Jamaica). O’Brien finally adds that there are other people who can remember what it was like at the end of the war, and takes Smith to meet some soldiers.
The last part of the story sees O’Brien and Smith go to an underground shelter where members of the military are in the process of mounting a coup. During the visit a black officer called Haynes gives Smith an account of the various flash points and insurrections in Oceania before the pair ask him to be the Minister of Truth in the new provisional government (“political reasons in the Americas [mean] that at least one of the Ministers in the new [Airstrip One] government should be a Negro.”) Then, during this conversation, there is an attack on the bunker by forces that are still loyal to Oceania. After the shoot-out Haynes is dead, and Syme appears from the smoke as the leader of the rebels who have saved Smith and O’Brien from the loyalist attackers. The revolution succeeds, and Smith then becomes Minister of Truth.
The first half or so of this is quite well done, but the later insertion of contemporary political issues (Windrush, racial strife in America) completely derails any suspension of disbelief, and seems like little more than a facile black-washing of Orwell’s novel (racial conflict is mentioned in the story but is not addressed in any meaningful or significant way).
A game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,000 words. ParSec website.

Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen

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Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) has as its narrator a woman called Mercedes, who lives beside a stargate on a future Earth:

This part of the world is a landscape of steps, a white stone hill two miles wide and one mile high. Eight thousand steps with a hundred flights and platforms. At the bottom lies a human city, a ramshackle shanty thing.
At the top are the sky-high silver pillars of the Tannhauser Gate, the beautiful gate, the one we Earther soldiers tried so hard, so very damned hard, to reach.
How I hate that gate. Yet here I am, living in its shadow. Most visitors climb the centre regions of the steps. The aliens come down and the replica men go up, because now they are free they can do what they want. Them, but not us.
Cytheran guards keep everything peaceful, which is nice of them considering they made us rebuild the place when the war was over.  p. 4

The story opens with Mercedes meeting a woman called Riay coming back through the gate (we later find out she is physically altered, two elbows on each arm, three fingers on her hand, etc.). She tells Mercedes she has come back to help, and Mercedes refers to her as a “priestess” at one point. We also get some back story about the war against the aliens, and some detail about the Cytheran guards that now patrol the Tannhauser gate (such as the fact they float just above the ground as they move around). We also learn that few humans are allowed to use the gates, although this does not stop many travellers coming to petition the aliens.
We later learn more about Mercedes and Jonni’s relationship (including that she is emotionally dependent on him) before three aliens arrive to see the site of the battle at the gate. Mercedes is on the point of telling them that she was a combatant when a man called Blascard arrives demanding a minnesang from the aliens—a key that will let him use the gate and travel to the thousand worlds on the other side. When he continues to make a nuisance of himself, and subsequently gets too close to the aliens, a Cytheran guard teleports him away. When Blascard later returns to the gate, he demands a key from Riay instead (one of the few humans who has been allowed to use the gate), but she offers him only the chance to learn from her.
The penultimate part of the story (spoiler) sees Jonni offer water to a group of petitioners making their way up the steps to the gate. Mercedes speaks to the group and identifies herself as Sergeant Mercedes Gantl, the last survivor of the Fighting Ninth, the military unit that attacked the gate. Then she realises that the group are Neos, ex-military who intend doing the same. Mercedes and Jonni watch their attack: Jonni gets caught in the crossfire and is badly wounded. After all the Neos are killed, a Cytheran comes over to Mercedes, who is holding a dying Jonni in her arms:

I heard a furious static burst and a hundred voices spoke in my mind.
—this was never our intent
Never.
Unforseen
—we know the difference
Unwished
Unwanted
All our <untranslatable> weep with you
He was never—
—he would ever have been—
Welcomed
A final Cytheran slid aside like a leaf on the wind and I was at the gate. The pillars went up forever, the space between a silver-grey curtain like soft rain. Beyond it lay everything we had been denied and now they were letting us through. Jonni was his own minnesang, and today, somehow, he was mine too. If I wanted, I could go through.
—no, he is only himself—
You are your own song—
Changed now.
—each becomes their own minnesang.
If you want— p. 9

The Cytheran then takes the dying Jonni out of her arms to take him through the gate, and tells her to come back when she is ready.
The last section of the story shows a changed Mercedes, no longer resentful but someone who now helps others. A year later she goes back to the gate and passes through. She spends a thousand years travelling on the other side of the gate before returning to find she has been gone for three days. She discovers that Blascard is really a teacher, helping those left behind to get through the gate. Mercedes and Blascard and Riay team up to work to that end.
There isn’t really much of a story here—it is more a series of events—but it has an intriguing setting, convincing description and characterisation, and a transcendent ending. Stock stuff maybe, but well put together. I thought this was a pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Parsec website.

With Clean Hands by John Rackham

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With Clean Hands by John Rackham (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens on a planet called Malin, where a planetary Governor called Ingersoll is hosting two anthropologists who have been living among the natives. The setting, though, is pretty much like the 1950’s British Empire in space, as can be seen from comments that Ingersoll’s wife’s Martha makes to one of the visitors later on:

“If you’re going to try to talk shop, Robert, take them into your study,” Martha got up. I’ve got work to do, as always. Stay single, my dear,” she shook her head archly at Olga. “Once you marry, well, you can’t really do anything else, afterwards. Children, housework, meals—it’s never ending. . .” and she went to the door to ring a hand-bell for servants.  p. 89

After Marta leaves, Ingersoll and his two visitors discuss a native plant called Gleez, the basis for a sought after fabric which also has a special place in Malinese society and religion. Then, when one of the Malinese servants brings in a native version of coffee, Ingersoll learns that the native’s “cough”, a normally untreatable and eventually fatal disease, has been cured by another native he refers to as The Healer. Ingersoll later phones the Chief of Police asks him to investigate.
At dinner that night Ingersoll and his guests discuss the natives’ evensong before Daniels, the policeman, gets back to Ingersoll and tells him that has tracked down the healer. He reports that his preaching “sounds like a cross between Christianity and Socialism”, and adds that his ideas are catching on, something which has led to labour problems in some areas. Daniels also says that he has bugged his accommodation.
We later see Ingersoll’s son develop a cough, initially assumed by the parents to be a normal, human one until Martha comes and shows Ingersoll blood on a handkerchief—when it appears that their son has caught the native disease. Finally, in the middle of all this drama, Olga (one of the anthropologists) visits Ingersoll one evening and sits on his lap! They have a conversation about interdependence before kissing.
The second half of the story sees all these plot elements merge together (spoiler) and, after further unrest on the planet, the native chiefs demand to see Ingersoll. When they are let in, Ingersoll sees that they have brought the healer before him and say they want him crucified (they need Ingersoll’s permission as he has banned public executions). Then, during the meeting, his son bursts in and is cured by the healer.
Ingersoll later questions the healer in private about his activities, and tells him that he can’t continue causing the same level of disruption. Ingersoll adds that he will be left alone to teach if he tones down his message and stops causing trouble for the native chiefs. The healer refuses.
Later, when the pressure to have The Healer crucified becomes overwhelming, Ingersoll once more meets the chiefs, this time asking for a bowl of water and a towel before consciously doing a Pontius Pilate act. After the chiefs take the healer away to his fate Ingersoll tells Daniels to slip the healer something that will help with the pain of crucifixion—and arranges for the native’s body to be spirited away afterwards.
Ingersoll later tells the anthropologists that he has arranged for the removal of the healer’s body from its burial place as he wants to help spread his message on Malin. Later, of course, Daniels finds the body has vanished. The story ends with Ingersoll telling Olga that he is going to send his wife and son back to Earth; Olga says she will stay on the planet with him.
Most of the first half of this story is an amalgam of colonial and social clichés from the 1950s, but the last part is an engagingly weird, if predictable, alien Messiah/crucifixion variant1—with an atypical side helping of adultery and marital breakdown.
** Average. 11,500 words. Archive.org link

1. One of the most famous of these alien crucifixion stories is Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, published in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds a year earlier (#122, September 1962). One wonders if Rackham saw Harrison’s story before writing his own.

The Lichyard by Harrison Valley

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The Lichyard by Harrison Valley (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with a man called Emil carrying the corpse of a man called Taff to the Lichyard. They squabble along the way:

“Why’re you complaining? You paid me to get you to the Lichyard as fast as possible!”
“I didn’t realize I’d be staring into the sun the whole time.”
“What do you want from me? It’s evening, and the Lichyard’s in the east.” There are two voices but one set of footsteps. “Besides, the sun can’t hurt you. You don’t even have eyes.”
“Yet it is blinding.”
“And?”
A man walks from an alleyway, talking over his shoulder.
Lashed to his back, a grey and dusty burden bounces limply with each step. A human skull lolls over toward the man’s ear, and from between decayed teeth come the words, “I’m dead. Don’t I deserve compassion?”  p. 29

En route Emil loses the three coins he needs to put on Taff’s eyes and mouth when he buries him, and so he comes up with a plan to steal those from another corpse when they get to the graveyard. However, when they arrive, matters play out differently (spoiler): Emil buries Taff without the coins but, when the undertaker arrives, he changes his mind. However, when Emil digs down to retrieve the body he finds it has disappeared. Then the undertaker is shot by an old person in a tree, and Emil is told to take the corpse back to where he lost the coins.
There are a couple of good images and scenes here (the quarrel at the beginning, the Lichyard, etc.) but these haven’t been turned into a coherent whole.
* (Mediocre). 2,500 words. Parsec website.

Tesla on the Grass, Alas by Esther M. Friesner

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Tesla on the Grass, Alas by Esther M. Friesner (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) appears to be about a man who talks to a woman called Gertrude before (spoiler) turning some sort of ray gun on himself—but I’m not entirely sure (it is written in prose that, from the opening paragraphs, verges on the impenetrable):

What there was in her that was beautiful was what I saw. No ray that I could make could be her elegant equal yet I knew the one I made would be the equalizing force that was forced between us, between her and me. She was my taunting point of equilibrium, reached and unreachable. Her mass obeyed the Newtonian law that thus far in my life I had risen above in all things except the shackling demands of gravity. It drew me to her, helpless once I wandered within her field and found that I was drawn despite me to that quality in women which I previously found myself unable to stomach, their stomachs, the rolling terrain of mountainous flesh that offered me the threat of avalanche–inspired entombment with each embrace.  p. 40

– (Awful). 1,050 words. Parsec website.

The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann

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The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is, like nearly all of Swann’s work, a mythological fantasy. This one is set in Cretan times, and tells of a young man called Bear and his travels around the Mediterranean and Africa.
The story itself opens with Bear asking the captain of the ship he is travelling on to let him visit a passing island. After Bear swims ashore he explores, and later discovers a deserted palace. Then, while swimming back to the ship, he is accosted by a playful triton (merman) called Astyanax. When they start talking, Astyanax asks Bear if he was searching for Circe—the goddess who used to live there a long time ago:

A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits gathered to say good-bye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”
“Did the bear get back to shore?”
“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” [Astyanax] hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”
“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”
“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”  p. 6

After learning more about Circe, Bear decides to set off to Libya to search for her, and he convinces Astyanax to come with him.
The passage above is a good example of the kind of material that follows, which is mostly a series of gentle, episodic adventures with a growing band of companions—but there are several setbacks en route, beginning with Bear overhearing a sailors’ plot to sell himself and the triton into slavery. The pair dive off the ship to escape, and Astyanax cuts loose the dinghy for Bear’s use. However, an albino dolphin (who Bear noticed at the island) appears and overturns the dinghy, and the boat’s crew quickly recaptures them.
When the pair eventually arrive at the slave market, Astyanax is quickly sold but, before his new (and scary) female owner can take possession, the triton is stolen by two brothers. Bear escapes during the confusion and quickly manages to track down Astyanax, who has been taken by two northern brothers called Balder and Frey. The two turn out to be innocents but, as Bear negotiates Astyanax’s freedom, they are found by the sailors who were trying to enslave them. A fight ensues and then, after they see off their attackers, Bear, Astyanax and the brothers approach a young man called Arun with a view to buying his boat, Halcyon. Arun decides instead that he wants to go with them on their quest, so they all set off together. They are joined by Atthis the albino dolphin, who, Astyanax says, only meant to surface near their dinghy not underneath it.
A month later they reach Artemis, reprovision, and set off for The Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). During this journey a comradeship develops, and Bear becomes increasingly infatuated by the thought of Circe:

Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and the loveliest of the will-o-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the colour of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and the birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home.  p. 24

More adventures ensue when they pass out of the Mediterranean: a Carthaginian vessel warns them not to go further south, but they continue anyway. Later they see a phoenix on the beach, and go onshore to investigate, and see if they can maybe get a feather. Frey wanders off and is captured by two harpies, who fly off with him. The rest of them catch a third harpy and force her to take them to their nest. They eventually rescue Frey, but only with the help of the harpy they captured, who ends up dead like the others.
Later they begin close in on Circe, or what remains of her, when Atthis brings a Cretan sword up from the depths. Bear’s exploration of the wreck—with Atthis’s assistance—provides a passage that illustrates Swann’s ability to combine reality, history, and myth:

I straddled her back and held [Atthis’s] dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths.
Then she dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight. Diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.
The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savour its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped.  p. 36-37

After this underwater expedition Atthis leaves: the dolphin is upset that Bear brought back presents from the wreck for the boys but not for her and, more than that, she is jealous. However, when the ship is pursued by female pygmies she returns with a pod of dolphins who help them escape by pushing the ship. Bear makes amends:

I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as friend; indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious. With love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or women’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.
Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight (and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror). Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.
Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder.  p. 41

There is one more short adventure before Bear finally finds Circe, when a siren lures Astyanax away. Although they go ashore and free him, they are finally captured by the female pygmies.
When Bear and Circe finally meet she appears before him as a corn maiden, and asks why he has come. Bear says it is because of her, but she says he is in love with a dream. Later, after they talk of love and friendship, she tells him that if he wants to stay with her he must send his friends away. After some agonising he says he cannot, and the goddess tells him that he has made the right choice—if he had chosen her she would have killed him: “You have chosen the dolphin and not the deep.”
She goes on to tell him about the long line of men that have pursued her, before telling him she “could have loved him once.”
When Bear goes back to the ship he finds that Circe has changed Atthis into a young woman, and that Astyanax has been changed too. When Bear looks back at Circe he sees an old woman leaning on a cane, waving a slow farewell.
This story is, for the most part, an episodic and sometimes sentimental tale that places its characters in little real jeopardy (and the boy-gets-dolphin ending won’t appeal to everyone)—but I think it is a charming piece with some wonderfully descriptive passages. I also thought the ending, where Bear chooses friendship over infatuation, lifts the story to a higher level. If you like Swann’s work, you’ll love this one.
**** (Very Good). 20,150 words.

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (Infinity, November 1955)1 consists of the chief astronomer of an expedition to an ancient supernova give an account of their completed mission. Their key discovery is that the solar system around the star was home to an advanced civilisation and, before the latter were destroyed, they managed to build a vault on the outermost planet of their system—a memorial to their species. This provides a wealth of information to the expedition.
The discovery also sees the chief astronomer—who is also a Jesuit—struggle with his religious faith from the very start of the story: why would God destroy a whole people in this way? Is this a question a religious person should even ask, etc.?
The story’s final twist (spoiler) comes when the expedition’s calculations reveal that the supernova was the star that shone over Bethlehem over two thousand years ago.
The brooding thoughts of the priest, which are set against the cosmic background of the supernova remnants, make this much more than what would otherwise be a clever gimmick story. That said, and however well done the character study, it is the surprise ending that provides most of the impact—and that’s obviously less effective on re-reading. Still, I wouldn’t quibble with this being described as one of the genre’s classics.
**** (Very good). 2,450 words.

1. This won the 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story (against what looks like a fairly weak list of finalists).

The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money—but doesn’t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible’s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:

A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls.
“What happened to what’s-his-name—Charon?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
“Of course, you’ll have to replace this by a bridge.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crucible looked thoughtful.
“A ha’penny for them.”
“I am thinking,” said Crucible, “about the water that is lapping about my ankles.”  p. 70

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors’ jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it’s neatly and amusingly done—and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.1
** (Average). 3,650 words.

1. Yes, joking: Terry Pratchett’s ISFDB page. I got about twenty books into the Discworld series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.