Author: Paul Fraser

The Handler by Damon Knight

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Handler by Damon Knight (Rogue, August 1960) sees a TV actor called Pete go into a bar and glad-hand all the people who have just finished work on a successful TV show, ending with these individuals:

“Sol and Ernie and Mack, my writers, Shakespeare should have been so lucky—” One by one, they came up to shake the big man’s hand as he called their names; the women kissed him and cried. “My stand-in,” the big man was calling out, and “my caddy,” and “now,” he said, as the room quieted a little, people flushed and sore-throated with enthusiasm, “I want you to meet my handler.”  p. 11 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

At this point Pete becomes motionless, and a dwarf—his “handler”—climbs out of Pete’s body. The party cools, and everyone drifts away. The dwarf is called Fred and he tries to chat to people but is either ignored or rebuffed (as well as his physical appearance he is nowhere as extrovert a personality as Pete). Then, while Fred is having a beer and trying to be friendly, one of the writers bluntly suggests that he gets back inside Pete. When Fred does this Pete comes to life, and the party restarts.
After his initial appearance Fred is variously described as “little man”; “was a very small man, almost a dwarf, stoop-shouldered and roundbacked in a sweaty brown singlet and shorts”; “had a perspiring brown face under a shock of black hair”; “was about forty, with a big nose and big soft brown eyes”; “his voice was cracked and uncertain”. Fred also has “knobby hands”; “sad hound-dog eyes”, etc. If Knight was trying to make the wider point that people react to our outer selves rather than our inner ones, he rather buries this idea under a mass of description that appears to make the piece about little more than people’s reaction to other’s physical attractiveness (and possibly manner).
The whole idea struck me a bit silly.
* (Mediocre). 1,600 words.

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) is one of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words. Story link.

Mayor for Today by Fran Wilde

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mayor for Today by Fran Wilde1 (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) begins with its narrator, Victor, being offered the job of Mayor of Danzhai in China, but only for one day. His GigTime app tells him that the job is well paid and includes travel and accommodation so, as Victor needs the money, he accepts.
After half a dozen pages of setup (we learn a lot about the future gig economy and Victor’s financial and life circumstances) he finally arrives in Danzhai and joins a queue at the municipal office to sign on for the job, only to find a massive queue of mayors-for-a-day. It then materialises that one of the previous mayors has refused to quit and, as the other mayors subsequently can’t sign on and complete their jobs, the GigTime app won’t give them their tickets and visas to fly home. So they are all stranded in Danzhai. Then, after his second night there, Victor ends up in the same situation when he loses his room at the hotel and has to share with a group of the other mayors.
The remainder of the story shows us the economic and social ecosystem that has evolved around the hundreds of stranded mayors, and there are also a few set pieces as well: drone footage of their plight appears on the news, Victor meets the incumbent Mayor and discovers he is an alien, and so on. Eventually (spoiler) Victor and the others manage to trick the alien Mayor into planting a tree, which completes his job and also that of all the others.
There is the seed of a half-decent story here but this takes far too long to get going (Ron Goulart would have got to the queue of mayors in about 800 words, not six pages), and making the trouble-making mayor an alien is over-egging the pudding. It also has an overlong and weak ending. I struggled to finish this, which is not surprising given that it is a 6,000 word story crammed into 10,000.
I’d also add that this latter aspect of the story seems fairly typical of the current generation of writers, who seem incapable of writing concisely or pacing a story, and who think that endless prattle about the character’s job or personal concerns will be of obvious interest to readers. Personally, I’m not interested in thinly veiled descriptions of the writer or their friends’ problems with the gig time economy, student loans, housing or other family and domestic trivia. When did SF become about this?
* (Mediocre). 9,900 words.

1. There is this under the title of the story: “The author acknowledges the support of the Future Affairs Administration, Danzhai SF Camp, and Wanda Group.” Do we really need mini-Oscar acceptance speeches at the start of stories?

Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery by Ted Kosmatka

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) starts off with a woman called Sarah arranging an encounter with a fan called Ames at a baseball match. She sits in the seat next to him after a supposed ticket mix-up (his girlfriend has been delayed by the rest of her team) and, after a certain amount of pretence and social chit-chat, she eventually introduces the idea of sabermetrics (statistical analysis of baseball results), and also that teams want particular fans—superfans—because they positively influence the outcome of their matches.
After this we see Sarah with her bosses, who quiz her about the suitability of Ames as a “candidate” and, later on, she arranges to bump into him. They go for a walk, and she tells him about her job:

“It works like this,” I say. “Most people are normal, but one out of a hundred is different. They have some kind of talent that’s hard to explain. For me it started in childhood—crippling shyness, the obligate side effect. I was sent to see specialists.
My parents thought it was therapy, but the specialists had their own ideas. In reality, they were conducting a search.”
“Search for what?”
“For children like me. Who could help them with people like you.” I glance at him.
“The real prospects.”
“So you’re saying I’m one of these prospects?”
“That you are. A certified, top-tier, can’t-miss prospect, and no going back now. But don’t blame me; it was the spreadsheet cowboys who found you. I just gave the final nod.”
The Walk sign flashes and we cross the intersection.
“Found me how?”  p. 130

She goes on to tell him more about the world of “shies,” “ply-mouths,” “daykeeps” and “latents.” And of “prospects,” fans like him whose luck rubs off on the teams.
The rest of the story shows us a draft meeting where Ames is discussed by various corporate types and sold to a team in Texas (all of this without his attendance or knowledge). We also see Sarah telling Ames of a much wider conspiracy that involves the drafting of people into various other jobs (valets, blackjack dealers, cashiers, Uber drivers, etc.), which may be in locations they do not want to live (there is also a crack about only untalented people being allowed to become bankers and lawyers). She finally advises him that when he gets an upcoming job offer he should accept it—or he will experience unpleasant consequences.
The story ends (spoiler) with Ames missing the flight to his new job, and Sarah tracking him down and telling him she wants him to help her fight the system.
This is a readable enough story but I wasn’t convinced by the Sabermetric conspiracy gimmick, and I’m not that interested in baseball stories (or the author’s infatuation with “knuckle ball throwers”). Finally, I’m getting a bit bored of stories with simplistic anti-capitalist subtexts, most of which never amount to much beyond conspiracies and/or smash the system endings.
* (Mediocre). 8,250 words.

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2021), is the second of his ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories,1 and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a “terraplane” and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:

“So, you’re the girl that talks to dead people,” the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren’t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you’re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
“Sir, I’m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that’s what you mean.”
Maybe that would help him sort the word “girl” out of his speech.
He didn’t even blink.  p. 16

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as “The Fisherman”, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos’s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man’s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:

“There is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so—but we cannot be sure. We don’t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he’s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are”—he paused, considering his words—“compromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.”
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
“And then?”
“And then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.”
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man’s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains, and then as he floats in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her—something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read—and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos’s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer—as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos’s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I’ve read recently in Asimov’s) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer—and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants—and squeezed them all into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won’t be.2
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words.

1. The first published story of Ray Nayler’s ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ series is The Disintergration Loops (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios first.

2. This probably won’t be on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn’t available free online. And because it is also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books (and book voters outnumber short fiction voters). Among other things.

Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) is one of her ‘Diving’ series, although a peripheral piece I think, and it starts in the wreckage of a spaceship bridge, with Lieutenant Jicha as the only survivor:

He watched it happen in real time, gloved hands gripping the console, the small fiery thing still glowing, as if it was waiting for the oxygen to return. The small fiery thing seemed to be gloating, its redness pulsing, taunting him.
He had watched it zoom inside, then burrow into the floor, not too far from his boots. The boots that had their gravity turned on, so he wouldn’t get pulled out of the bridge with the atmosphere, like so many others had.
But he had risked getting hit by that small and fiery thing, and somehow, it had missed him.  p. 102-103

There is then a long flashback (almost two pages of italics, so good luck to the dyslexics among you) where we learn about a group of alien “fireflies” surrounding the ship, and of Jicha’s hunches. These latter mean that most of the story development is driven by him intuiting matters (which also means the author does massive amounts of telling rather than showing).
Jicha’s hunches include the realisation that the “small and fiery” thing is causing multiple system failures, and that he needs to get it out of the ship. By the end of the story he (spoiler) has managed to put it into a box and throw it out of the hole it made on the way in.
If this sounds a uselessly reductive description of the story, I can assure you it is not, and that most of the piece is spent in Jicha’s head watching him make guesses about what is going on. This produces a grossly padded sub-Star Trek story and one which, by the way, is partly written in a highly irritating telegraphic style:

He wasn’t on his own.
He opened a communications link to engineering. He identified himself, and then—the link cut out.
He re-established it, saw that they were trying to respond but seemingly were unable to.
Which meant they knew the problems existed; they just didn’t know what the problems were.
Communicating with them, though, wasn’t going to be dangerous. Not to them, not to him.
He just had to figure out how.
He glanced at that hole again, space glinting out there—or maybe the fireflies, the light. Surely engineering would notice that the nanobits weren’t functioning right.
But no one had come to the bridge yet. No one had come to see if anyone was alive here, or injured or in need of rescue.
Did they think everyone was dead?
He opened yet another screen on his console, saw the environmental system still trying to reboot and nothing else. He couldn’t see any locations of crew personnel.
That system was never supposed to fail and it had.
Or maybe the Izlovchi was going through cascading failures.  p. 107

– (Awful). 7,650 words.

The Deeps by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Deeps by Keith Roberts (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a short data dump that describes an over-populated future Earth where the cities have spread towards the coasts and moved under the seas.1 The rest of the story concerns two undersea residents, Mary Franklin and her daughter Jennifer,2 and begins with the teenager going to a party (“And for land’s sake child, put something on . . .”)
There is really not much plot after this (spoiler): we follow Jennifer to the party and get some description of the undersea colony before the narrative cuts back to her mother, who later becomes increasingly concerned when Jennifer doesn’t return on time, eventually going out to search for her. The story ends with both mother and daughter floating underwater above a deep, dark void, and her daughter telling her to listen to the sounds of the Deeps. Mary does so, and almost becomes hypnotised to the point she runs out of oxygen:

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary firmed reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled; Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.
The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it. Just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.  p. 191-192

Although there is not much in the way of a story here, the description of the settlement is pretty good, probably Arthur C. Clarke level stuff, and Roberts skilfully generates enough atmosphere and mood to make up for the not entirely convincing idea of sounds luring people to the Deeps (scattered through the text there are rumours about the phenomenon, and recalled conversations with Mary’s husband about how there may be a racial memory drawing humanity down there).
It’s an effectively  hypnotic story.
*** (Good). 7,000 words.

1. In his early period Roberts worked through a number of conventional SF themes before doing his own thing: alien invasion in his first novel, The Furies; psi powers in his third, The Inner Wheel, and in some short stories, Manipulation, The Worlds That Were; time travel in Escapism; androids in Synth; and post-nuclear holocausts in many others.

2. Roberts used the name Jennifer in another undersea story called The Jennifer, (Science Fantasy #70, March 1965) although that one is about Anita, a teenage witch, being taken by a mermaid to see a gigantic sea serpent. Still, it’s worth a look, if you can cope with Granny Thomson’s Northamptonshire accent (it gives them the vapours on one review site). His cover painting for that story appeared on another issue.

Kangaroo Court is by Virginia Kidd

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kangaroo Court by Virginia Kidd1 (Orbit #1, 1966) starts off as a satire about bureaucracy with Tulliver Harms, the First Exec of the Middle Seaboard Armies, sidelining other branches of government so he can deal militarily with an alien landing on Earth. Then Wystan Godwin, the story’s main character, arrives after six months in a Tibetan lamasery oblivious to all of this. Most of the rest of the first part of the story concerns Godwin’s readjustment to society (he buys some depilatory cream to make his hairstyle conform with the times, etc.), and his gradual awareness that he is being kept in the dark:

Still serenely certain that somehow, somewhere, the traditional Liaison packet was on its traditional way to him, Wystan Godwin—lacking even the one or two bits of information that might have triggered an assessment of the true situation—sat and waited for a sheaf of papers to bring him up to date. As Harms had foreseen, he never even thought of demeaning his position by actively seeking data from anyone in the complex. The only man of status equal to his, Harms himself, never spoke directly to him. Their sole contact was via dispute protocol, a procedure as ritualized as the mating dance of the bower bird. Harms’ dictum of later swallowed up fourteen days.  p. 101

This wordy and slightly affected semi-satire swallows up about a third of the story, until the point where Godwin (after a peculiar dispute between Harms and a draughtsman) eventually gets his hands on the briefing documents concerning the aliens. Then the story switches to become a first contact piece, beginning with a data dump of several pages from the liaison packet.
These papers reveal that the aliens are called the Leloc, and they are intelligent marsupial creatures virtually identical to the kangaroos on Earth (we later find that the latter are a devolved colony of Leloc left behind millions of years ago). We also learn about Leloc technology in general, and their Hilbert space drive in particular, which apparently causes temporal distortions (initially, if I recall correctly, the Leloc think they have been away from Earth for six months, not millions of years).
The final part of the story sees Godwin meet the Leloc in their spaceship, where he has to quickly learn their strange movement and number customs (there is a lot of standing up and sitting down, and people and Leloc coming and going with chairs). When the Leloc later learn that Harms is threatening to attack the ship they refuse to go to Australia to meet their descendants, and say they’ll stand their ground. Matters eventually proceed (spoiler) to an ending where Harms is kidnapped by the Leloc, and the latter’s leader is deposed and left behind.
This very much feels like the work of an amateur or neo writer: apart from the fact that it seems to be two stories fused into one, and has a huge data dump in the middle, it is buried under far too many words. And, to be honest, a lot of the incident in the story is of little interest.
It’s not dreadful, but it’s far from being any good; why Knight thought it would be a good idea, after eight months of reading submissions, to devote almost a third of the anthology to this is a mystery.
* (Mediocre). 18,200 words.

1. Kidd was previously married to James Blish, and was better known and an agent and editor than a writer. Her ISFDB page is here, and her Wikipedia page here.

5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a man finding his bride to be has gone, after which he decides to go ahead with the post-wedding party anyway. As the story unfolds we find that she was a bird-like creature of alien origin, and that she has left him 5 eggs to incubate.
At the party we see the narrator greet and talk to a couple of guests and then, towards the end of the event, he can’t find the eggs. Eventually (spoiler) he finds cracked, empty eggshells in the kitchen, and finds a recipe card for Caesar salad (needing a similar amount of eggs). He then realises that the note was left for the cook by his avian fiancée and, at this point, he remembers her hilarity at cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus.
For the most part this is a quirky but enjoyable enough story, but it morphs into a weak and contrived black joke at the end (and not one that is saved by referencing Shakespeare).
* (Mediocre). 2,650 words.

Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a woman in hospital getting a hypodermic syringe inserted between her bottom eyelid and eye. The rest of the narrative is a surreal nightmare-ish piece where she sees things (even though her eyes are bandaged), thinks there is a dog under her bed, learns she was probably in a car accident, and talks to a ten-year-old boy, and a nurse with an odd verbal tic.
The story finishes with her overhearing a doctor’s conversation (spoiler), which gives her the impression she is continually being wounded so the hospital can re-use her for ophthalmologist training courses (I think).
I didn’t get this at all the first time around, and even on reread I’m not sure it is particularly clear, or convincing.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words.