I, Bigfoot by Sarina Dorie (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with a sasquatch called Bigfoot removing pictures of Jane Goodall (the actress who played Jane in Tarzan) from the tribe’s cave wall. As the females of the group ridicule him we learn that the pictures belonged to another male called Squeaker, who was banished by Old Grey Face for risking the tribe’s discovery by humans.
After brooding for a time Bigfoot goes out foraging, eventually ending up at a set of dumpsters. As he searches through the garbage for food he sees a magazine in the moonlight with what he thinks is a picture of Jane Goodall but, before he can examine it more closely, he hears a woman who is being chased by men. He jumps into in the dumpster to hide, and the woman joins him shortly afterwards. After a period she notices him, and at that point the story flashes back to Squeaker’s visit to a library—the one that got him banished—to hear Jane Goodall speak (this section is rather clumsily located at this dramatic point in the story).
Bigfoot eventually scares the men away and then, when she the teenage girl tells him she is a runaway, he takes her home. In return she tosses him a bag of things—which includes a tin opener to replace the one that was broken by the tribe, and without which they can’t open their store of canned food.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Bigfoot return to his tribe of sasquatches, where he is initially lauded for the goodies he has brought back. However, when Old Grey Face realises Bigfoot has been with a human his future looks in doubt—until one of the other males works out how to use the new-fangled can opener (Bigfoot failed), and then confesses that he learned from being near humans. Others join in with their confessions of proximity to humans and the subsequent argument splits the tribe in two.
This story has a rather unlikely premise but, if you can swallow the idea of hide-out sasquatches in the wilds around us, then it’s a pleasant enough read.
*** (Good). 8,750 words.
The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser
The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with two eight-tentacled creatures (we later learn they are evolved squids or octopuses) examining a human hip-bone discovered long after an far-future extinction event for humanity. The dominant one of the pair, Mottled-Brown (they communicate by skin colour changes) is worried about the prospect of his archaeological dig being shut down, and he is due to appear before the Ruling Octet who will decide whether or not this will be the case.
When Mottled Brown appears before the Octet his female nemesis, Blue-Ripples, is also there. During their testimony Blue Ripples states that—despite the human hip-bone Mottled-Brown has just found—his theories are ridiculous, and that the dig is a waste of resources and should be shut down. The Octet decide to have further debate and analysis the next day.
After the adjournment Blue-Ripples approaches Mottled-Brown and tells the archaeologist of her further plans for him:
“One fossil won’t save you,” Blue-ripples said. Her words were tinged with black. “And your conclusion is ridiculous. Two arms indeed.”
Mottled-Brown concentrated on keeping his skin a neutral gray-brown. He wouldn’t let her goad him into a confrontation again. “Well see the words tomorrow.”
He turned to leave, but Blue-Ripples stopped him. “I’ve filed a reproduction claim on you,” she said.
He froze in place, his arms writhing. He felt his skin turn black. “It’ll never be approved. I’m still at the height of my career.”
“And if the octet closes your dig?” Her words shifted blue. “A fossilized historical scientist with little hope of any further contribution? They’ll give you to me before your third heart can finish a beat.”
“Slug slime! My contributions have been—”
“In the past. The only thing you have left to contribute to the next generation is your flesh. Our eggs will grow strong on it.”
He involuntarily pulled himself into an upright fighting posture, an instinct remaining from the presentient past. “The Ruling Octet will see the value of my dig. History is on my side.”
“The writhing tentacles of history have slashed many of your kind,” she said. Her arms began slipping through the port and out of the hall. Her mantle flashed one last thought. “You will be delicious.”
As the last of her mantle slipped through the port, he saw her skin turn bright blue. pp. 135-136
The rest of the story sees Mottled-Brown talk to his assistant Gray-Ring about the day’s events—and the sexual encounters of his youth. Then, the next day, he appears again in front of the Octet where (spoiler), in an extended debate, he manages to use Blue-Ripples’ own mathematical models against her to suggest that humans may have been tool users and are therefore worthy of further research.
Most of this piece is talking heads (in some respects it’s a bit like an Isaac Asimov story), but the clever debate and conversation between the various players is well done, and I found it an engaging read (having one of the characters threatening to lay their eggs in the other is a novel type of jeopardy!) The only thing that slightly spoiled this for me is the last section, where Mottled-Brown and his assistant Gray-Ring discuss the extinction events that caused the demise of the humans and the reptiles before them. The closing mention of an asteroid impact is obviously meant to mean something, but I couldn’t work out what the point of the comment was. The story is better than my final rating for the most part, and probably would have scored higher but for this.
*** (Good). 5,050 words.
Rover by A. T. Sayre
Rover by A. T. Sayre (Analog, March-April 2020) opens with an AI rover prospecting on Mars: we learn that it hasn’t had any instructions from Earth for some considerable time and that it has been evolving during that period:
It had changed somewhat since its creation, as it had needed to take parts of other machinery left on Mars to keep going. A new wheel from the Russian probe, an optic lens to replace its own cracked one, a processor from another to subsidize its own when its performance had started to lag. It had taken solar panels from a Chinese machine with more receptive photovoltaic cells and mounted them alongside its original array to improve energy collection. It added another set of arms from an Indian rover, much better at gripping than its original four, connected by an extension of its chassis that it took from an American probe at the edge of the Northern ice cap.
And as always from the probes, landers, other rovers, it took the processors and data storage units, to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of its system. It grew smarter, more resourceful, capable of more and more complex problem solving and decision making. The rover had learned so much, had grown so much, it was barely recognizable as the simple machine that had touched down on the red planet so long ago. pp. 171-172
While later traversing a ridge the rover falls over and damages a strut. After the vehicle reboots, it then decides to proceed to a location 90km away, where it hopes to find a replacement part on an abandoned vehicle. During this slow and arduous journey, the rover picks up a signal from what it thinks may be a human-manned ship and diverts course, but when the rover finally arrives at the site it finds a damaged ship and the body of one of the crew. The rover eventually manages to hoist itself up and into the vessel.
The last section of the story (spoiler) has the rover repair itself in the ship’s well-equipped workshop; it then contacts Earth, only to find that all Mars missions have been permanently suspended. Now that it is free to do as it wishes the rover converts itself into a drone, and the final scene sees it launch itself out of the ship to endlessly fly over the surface of Mars.
This is a well enough done piece, but I got the vague feeling that (for me, anyway) there was something missing. Maybe I just prefer stories where there is more focus on the personality of the AI.
*** (Good). 6,100 words.
The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen
The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (Analog, September-October 2020)1 has as its protagonist a lab technician called Lucian, and who gets a request from a psychologist called Alice Marshall to make a wearable device for Leo Hawker, one of her patients: Hawker apparently sees a naked water nymph whenever he goes near bodies of water. Lucian subsequently constructs a portable electroencephalograph for Hawker to wear but, against Marshall’s express wishes, he also includes a concealed camera to record what Hawker sees when he is having his hallucinations.
The next part of the story details a test run of the device and also gives us more information about the three characters. Then, when Lucian and Marshall are out for dinner one night, Lucian gets a notification that Hawker has gone out on one of his regular runs. Lucian leaves Marshall and goes back to his lab to watch the camera, and subsequently hears Hawker talk to someone who isn’t visible on the video feed. Lucian then sees Marshall fall face first into the pool and rushes to the location to save him, whereupon he briefly sees a woman dressed in a lab coat standing waist deep in the water. Later, when Lucian examines the ECG and the film, he sees no sign of a woman, and realises that what he saw does not match what Hawker has described seeing.
Four weeks after his near-drowning Hawker resigns from his job, sets up an investment consultancy, and starts associating with a more glamourous set of people; he also refuses Marshall’s requests for further brain scans. This change in Hawker’s behaviour (spoiler) prompts Lucian to speculate that there was another personality lying dormant within Hawker—one that revealed itself by the nymph hallucinations, and which was born during the period of oxygen starvation. This prompts Lucian go back to the pond to meet his own lab-coat dressed “nymph,” which he believes will birth, as it did with Hawker, the dormant chrysalis within him. However, Lucian turns away at the last moment, and nevertheless becomes successful anyway.
The problem with this story is that Lucian’s speculation about the chrysalis idea isn’t convincing, it is introduced too late, and ends up essentially unrelated to his concluding personal development (although there is a note of ambiguity at the end). That said, Lucian—a sly, unethical, and slightly chippy character—makes for an interesting narrator. So, in conclusion, a well told story based on an unlikely and/or unconvincingly framed idea.
** (Average). 6,450 words.
1. Rather surprisingly this story won the 2020 Analog Readers’ Poll (Analytical Laboratory) for Best Short Story. Or maybe not a surprise, given SF readers’ penchant for latent supermen stories (Slan, etc.)
Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl
Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl (Asimov’s SF, January 1985)1 opens in the TWA terminal at JFK airport after a maritime military exchange leads to an imminent nuclear war. Initially the story focuses on a young boy called Timothy, who has lost his parents in the crowds trying to flee New York, but we are soon introduced to another character, Harry Malibert, a SETI astronomer sitting in the temporary island of calm that is the Ambassador Club. The two are flung together in the increasing chaos at the airport and, when Malibert gets the offer of a flight to Iceland just as the nuclear attack warning sounds, he takes Timothy with him.
The central part of the story sees the two arrive and settle in Iceland (just as Reykjavik is accidentally nuked by a bomb meant for the US airbase at Keflavik), and details, in graphic and precise detail, the nuclear winter that encompasses the globe—killing off nearly all of the remaining survivors:
The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled.
The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.
And the darkness stayed.
The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.
The missiles went off on the 11th of June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race. p. 87
During this period Malibert parents Timothy and works as a geothermal engineer (Iceland’s constant supply of hot water provides its survivors with heat and electricity, which means artificial light for crops), and Malibert later has time to run an informal SETI club—this is where the “Fermi” of the title enters the story, from Fermi’s Paradox: if there are aliens out there, why haven’t we met them?
“One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up. p. 92
Shortly after this the story—which had been interesting, detailed, and well developed—comes to an odd ending where Pohl goes all meta, stating in an authorial voice that in one ending sunlight returns too late to save the Icelandic survivors, but that in another ending they survive and, generations later, aliens finally arrive. (“But that is in fact what did happen! At least, one would like to think so.”)
An irritating finish to an otherwise good story.
*** (Good). 6,200 words.
1. Pohl won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Story for this, an achievement which hugely overrates the piece. Perhaps 1985 wasn’t a particularly strong year in this category—the other Hugo finalists, which I haven’t read but haven’t heard of either, were: Flying Saucer Rock & Roll by Howard Waldrop; Snow by John Crowley; Dinner in Audoghast by Bruce Sterling; Hong’s Bluff by William F. Wu.)
Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro
Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, September-October 2020)1 is the sixth of his ‘John Draiken’ stories but one which features another character, Delia Stang, a physically imposing woman with golden skin. She starts the story as a prisoner undergoing interrogation, partially paralysed by a device attached to her neck:
The voice of her interrogator could be old or young; male, female, or any of the other associated genders; human, or some representative of several possible alien races. The golden woman has her suspicions. All she can determine of its character is a total lack of empathy.
“Your name is Delia Stang.”
“Yes.”
“Is that your actual name or just some alias you’re using?”
“Yes.”
“I would advise you not to play games with me.”
“I’m not playing games. It’s both my name and my alias. These are two different things.”
“Explain the distinction as you see it.”
“I was not born Delia Stang. It is the name all my associates know, the name I use when I think of myself. I could give you the one my parents gave me, but you are not interrogating a child with no choice over who she chooses to be. You are interrogating a grown woman who can be anyone she wants to be. I have used other aliases, but this is the only name I recognize.”
“If it suits me, I will call you anything I like and train you to accept it.”
“That would be exerting your techniques pretty early in the conversation, I think. I’m being cooperative enough. “
“Very well. Your name is Delia Stang. “
“Glad we have that settled.”
“Restrain from sarcasm.”
“That wasn’t sarcasm.” p. 173
This intermittently amusing cat-and-mouse conversation makes up about half the story; the other half is concerned with what Stang was doing in Hallestagh (a dreary town of algae-eaters on the backwater planet of Garelagh) before she was taken prisoner. This latter thread begins with her beating up and seriously injuring a local strongman because of what he did to a young woman called Naline, who Stang then takes under her wing.
The rest of this part of the story oscillates between Stang interacting with Naline (mostly in a rented room above a bar where Stang has her sleep pod) and Stang tramping about the desolate local area (during which she sees an anomalous one hundred metre square indent in the landscape).
Meanwhile the interrogation thread dribbles out a steady stream of backstory, including the revelation that Stang killed Draiken because he asked her too (Stang says that Draiken had grown weary of hiding from the unnamed organisation of which the interrogator is part). Later, Stang is also asked about another man called Jathyx, who Draiken and she earlier freed from a space station.
These two threads merge at the end of the story (spoiler) when Stang is approached by an old man who tells her that she is being “talked about” in the wider population. We learn at the end of the story that this is Draiken in disguise, and he is passing on a warning that the shadowy organisation is about to attack her room and take her prisoner. The attack scene, with the exploding gel mattress that immobilises many of the attackers, is excitingly done, even though Stang is eventually captured.
The climax of the story (which occurs after Stang is once more visited in her cell by the disguised Draiken) sees Stang tell her interrogator that she is a decoy, that there is an attack vessel in orbit commanded by Jathyx’s mother, and that Draiken is alive—after he “died” a medical team immediately revived him (this was all done to give Stang a cover story that would stand up against a lie-detector).
At the very end of the piece, after the organisation’s hideout has been taken, Stang tries to get Draiken to return with her to Greeve (they have romantic history), a tropical planet where Draiken used to live—but he elects to continue pursuing the shadowy group that has been hunting him.
This is a pretty well done piece of SF adventure, and one that stands alone quite well considering that it wraps up a plot arc that has spread, presumably, over the previous five stories. That said, I’m not sure that this is really an SF story—more like a story with lots of SF furniture, and you could probably transplant the whole thing into a contemporary Mission Impossible movie. Still, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,200 words.
1. This story won the novella section of the Analog Readers Poll’ (The Analytical Laboratory) for 2020.
Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg
Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg (The Arcanist, June 2021) opens with this:
The ticks dropped down from the trees thick as sleet. I’d been out hunting with my brother, Paul, when it happened. They fell in great heaps, burrowing into us, tangling themselves up in our hair, our clothes. We had to shake them from our boots. Out they spilled, endless grains of living sand scouring our toes for blood. We found them days later under our armpits, the backs of our knees, the crannies of our earlobes. And then the telltale bullseye would emerge, hot and red. I’d gotten tick bites before, but never like this. I was a feast for an entire generation.
Subsequently the brothers are repelled at the thought of eating meat (or diary), and their similarly affected father—who persists—ends up in hospital due to a physical reaction.
We then see that ticks have spread all over the world, as has the condition that has affected the narrator’s family. The resultant rejection of animal products causes the collapse of those industries and a forced shift to a vegan diet.
The story finishes with the two brothers at the local creek. When they hear a rustling noise they don their ponchos as they think it is an approaching swarm of ticks, but (spoiler) it turns out to be a female moose and her calf coming down to drink—the first time that animal has been seen in the area for decades.
This is quite good as far as it goes, but it’s a very slight piece—an if-this-goes-on SF story compressed into a literary vignette. If this idea had been used in an genre SF story it would probably have been much longer, had multiple point of views,1 and would telescope through time from the beginning of the change to the end.
**+ (Average to Good)
1. The Grand Guignol version would have a thread which has an abattoir worker killing animals, being laid off, hitting rock bottom, and then returning to the factory to shoot himself in the head with a bolt gun.
Sandkings by George R. R. Martin
Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979) is one of the standout stories I remember from my early magazine reading and a piece I went back to recently after I read Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020). I did this as I wanted to read other Microcosmic God-themed or related stories to see how they handled the same subject matter.1
The opening, which limns the story’s main character, Simon Kress, presages everything that will follow:
Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself. The little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Finally Kress just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat one another if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him. p. 1 (Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Ninth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1980)
By the time Kress returns all the fish are dead, as is the carrion hawk (which was eaten by the shamble after it climbed up into the belfry). So Kress takes a trip into Asgard, Balder’s biggest city, and he eventually finds himself in Wo and Shade, a shop selling imported artefacts and exotic lifeforms. Kress soon makes his requirements clear to Jala Wo, the co-proprietor (“I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals.”) and underlines the point by telling her that he occasionally feeds his shambler unwanted kittens. After perusing her stock he leaves after ordering four differently coloured colonies of Sandkings, insect-like hivemind creatures that have rudimentary telepathy and, if kept in a terrarium and fed limited food, will fight wars against each other that involve truces and alliances.
Three days later Wo arrives to install the Sandkings in the terrarium, and fit a plastic cover with a feeding mechanism (“You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping”). Kress settles down to watch:
The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours they had been incorporated into the castle walls.
The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate, seated on the couch so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.
He was disappointed. Days passed, the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and to answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war.
He was getting upset.
Finally he stopped feeding them.
Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.
Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.
When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners.
After that, war followed war. p. 7-8, Ibid.
Kress subsequently invites his friends and acquaintances over to a party at his house where the main attraction is watching the Sandkings war. The gathering is a huge success, but there are a couple of discordant episodes, first when a former lover, Cath M’Lane—whose puppy was eaten by the shamble when she and Kress lived together—tells him he is disgusting before walking out, and secondly when Jala Wo asks if he is feeding the Sandkings sufficiently. When Kress tells Wo to mind her own business, she says she will discuss the matter with Shade, and leaves, telling him to “look to his faces”. When Kress later looks at the castles in the corners of the tank, he sees that the images of his face the Sandkings previously created on the walls now have a slightly malicious expression on them.
The parties continue to be a success, and the guests start betting on the various castles; then other alien animals are introduced into the terrarium to (unsuccessfully) fight with the Sandkings. During this there is the first sign of a coalition between the various castles when three of them wait for an invading sand spider to emerge from the fourth castle.
While all this is going on Kress’s ex-lover M’Lane reports him to the authorities, and he has to bribe an official to bury the complaint. Then, as payback, Kress puts a puppy (similar to the one M’Lane lost previously) into the Sandking terrarium, films the result, and sends it to her.
It’s at this point where matters (spoiler) start spiralling wildly out of control. Kress notices the Sandkings have changed the faces on their castles to look malevolent and leering, and punishes them by sticking a sword into the maw of one the castles. Then Cath M’Lane comes to his house, furious at the film he has sent her, and attacks the tank glass with a hammer. Kress tries to stop her stop her causing any damage to the terrarium, but ends up stabbing her with the sword which is lying nearby. In her death throes she smashes the glass, and the Sandkings escape. Kress flees.
The rest of the tale sees Kress trying to clean up his various messes, which variously involve an attempt to kill the Sandkings in the garden and cellar with insecticide (but the latter only after he chops up Cath’s body for them to dispose of), his recruitment of “cleaners” with flamethrowers (who destroy two of the colonies but are either eventually overrun or pushed into the cellar by Kress), and invitations to friends so he can feed the hungry creatures (one wonders why he didn’t just open an account with the local butcher). Eventually he contacts Wo, who tells him that the remaining maw is becoming sentient and birthing second generation “mobiles”.
Eventually, Kress flees into the desert and, when later suffering badly from dehydration, runs towards a house in the desert only to find it has been built by the missing orange Sand Kings . . . .
This is very good, near excellent piece of SF horror and, even if a couple of things are slightly far-fetched, it has a relentless, over the top ghastliness that makes it a compulsively readable piece.
I note in passing that, although this has some similarities with Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, it is more about man’s appalling treatment of other species (something that Martin would return to again in his contemporaneous series of ‘Haviland Tuf’ stories) rather than the idea of man-as-god. That said, you could liken Kress’s boy-burning-an-anthill sadism with that of a capricious deity.
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 16,000 words.
1. Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) sees a man accelerate the evolution of a colony of creatures (by repeated genocide among other techniques) to produce inventions which he then sells. You could say that the protagonist essentially converts their pain and suffering into money. Reviewed on my other blog here.
Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken
Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:
Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting. p. 174
This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
**** (Very Good). 23,350 words.
The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler
The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler (F&SF, January-February 2021) opens with the narrator recounting a childhood memory of the day that the king and queen came through his village; the narrator’s sister was given a disk with the king’s symbol, a red dragon, on one side.
The story then moves to the current day, where we get some brief information about the village and the narrator’s marriage plans before learning that the king has gone to war. The army subsequently passes through town, and the narrator and his friend Henry are recruited.
The pair endure a long, hard march to the sea and at one point the company shelter in a cave. When the narrator goes to relieve himself he finds a passage that takes him back to the surface. He sleeps there and, when he wakes the next day, he sees the skeleton of a dragon (“the king’s dragon”) embedded in a nearby rock face. The commander sees it as a sign.
When they finally arrive at the coast (spoiler) the narrator decides to desert and go back to his village. En route, he wonders what he’ll tell his family and neighbours on his return:
I would have to explain to the village why I was back and everyone else gone, and it couldn’t be a story that made me a coward, a deserter, and a man who didn’t love his king. I wasn’t yet sure how this story would go, but I wasn’t really worried about that. I had twelve whole days to work it out and I could already see its bones. p. 256
I can understand why a departing editor (who is off to write his own tales) might use this as the final piece in their last ever issue, but the arc of this story seems pointless: young man goes to war, changes mind, goes home. Littering it with dragon images doesn’t much improve that.
* (Mediocre). 3,000 words.