Category: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the narrator watching three-armed alien Ashtenga play basketball. After this we find out that the narrator has been brought in to report on whether the Ashtenga should be admitted into the professional leagues on Earth (there are conflicting views on the matter).
The rest of the story is a rambling and starry-eyed description of people and aliens playing the game, its history, and all of this is intermingled with a lot of what can only be called simplistic and patronising messaging about inclusion. This latter begins with the narrator doubting his own views:

I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.
I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.
I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that moment a younger person looks at me, already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.
I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.
An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball—that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming. p. 39

There is a caricature in that passage for sure, but it isn’t the one suggested.
What the story is specifically about is eventually made explicit (although this is telegraphed pages earlier):

Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional.  p. 42

Mmm, goodbye women’s sports then. I’m not sure that these matters are going to be resolved in such a straightforward manner—see the recent troubles in American swimming and British cycling.
Finally, after more interminable detail about the game, and a match where the Ashtenga trounce a human team, the story finally equates the idea of transgender inclusion with the desegregation of basketball in the middle of last century:

Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after?  p. 45

In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.
Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins And Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.
He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.
I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever.  p. 46

I particularly dislike sports stories, and “message” stories even more, so this piece was a double fail for me. I’d also add that what makes most message stories so irritating is that (like this one) the complexities of the issues raised are never addressed (and in this case we have the bonus of people who have concerns about trans inclusion in women’s sport being likened to racists).
I wonder why it is that writers think their ability to string a sentence together means they are possessed of a some particular wisdom.
In conclusion I’d also add that, even putting the facile message of this story to one side (although that is probably the only reason it got published), this is a flabby, meandering, and tedious read.
– (Awful). 6,450 words.

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, September/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship:

Rumors floating around Ciudad Orilla promised vast stores of untold wealth inside that crater on Madreperla, from sea creatures with bones made of the finest glass to minerals needed for every single engine. The water that filled part of the crater, the stories went, contained healing properties, and had more nutrients than anything that humans had concocted thus far.
The Maria Segunda, a ship that had land-to-sea-to-space capabilities, set out to learn which of those rumors had a basis in fact.
She arrived on the rim on a Thursday, set down on what her crew thought was an ice shelf, and by Friday morning, found herself in the midst of what the crew later described as an ice storm.
Only it was unlike any storm they had ever seen. A massive wind swirled around them, and they were caught in the center of it. But that didn’t stop ice pellets, rock, and other materials that seemed harder than rock from hitting the outside of the ship. The Maria Segunda had defensive shields, but they were rotating shields, built to stave off laser weapons. The normal heat and weather shields that any land-to-space ship had were not up to dealing with this particular anomaly, whatever the heck it was.
In the space of an hour, the damage to the ship’s exterior was so severe that there was a good chance the ship might not make it out of the relatively weak atmosphere of Madreperla.  p. 15

This passage, with its Star Trek tech (“rotating shields”, “heat and weather shields”), flabby prose (“whatever the heck it was”), and tell-instead-of-show approach (all of it) illustrates the overall quality of the story.
And, after this section, matters do not improve when the daughter then interviews one of her father’s one-time crewmates in an over-described space pub called the Elizabeta—we get a page and a half about its skanky surroundings, and the owner, before the daughter asks about her father and the ship.
Then, later on, we are back at the pub—again—with other characters:

So, on that final Sunday, she slides her whisky back to Beta, and walks out of the bar in search of Ferguson. Imelda finds him sitting in an “outside” table along the so-called promenade.
Most commercial districts of star ports have several promenades. On the exclusive levels, the promenades are designed to make patrons think they’re outside in some exotic natural environment, complete with expensive water features and fake sunlight.
On most levels, the promenades resemble city centers of faraway famous places, with some replicas of the cultural icons hovering nearby. Or, if the displays aren’t permanent, there’s a rotating spectacle of VR images that show the tourist highlights of the planet below.
But the promenade outside of the Elizabeta is nothing more than chairs and tables and some gambling booths. The ceiling is as brown as the walls that are as brown as the floors. There’s nothing special or even “outside” here, just a place to be away from the bar’s noise, while still receiving the bar’s service.
Captain Giles Ferguson is sitting out there alone, his fingers wrapped around a stein of a particularly skunky local beer called Ragtop. He drinks nothing but Ragtop at the Elizabeta, but unlike some of his shipmates, he never had the beverage delivered in quantity to the ship.  p. 21

I can see the point of the first and fifth paragraphs, but do we really need a lot of vague blather about what would normally be seen on the promenade outside of the pub? This is a writer thinking out loud about background details rather than reducing them to a pithy line or image.
These interviews are followed by accounts of (a) the corporate shenanigans behind the trip (it seems that tech triggers the storms but the insurers were content to underwrite the trip); (b) her father’s marital backstory; (c) the recruitment of another captain to act as a rescue ship should the need arise; (d) what might have happened to the Gabriella when it arrived over the crater (three scenarios where the second-hand speculation about what may have occurred is about as riveting as you would expect); and, finally, (e) the findings of the inquiry.
It is bad enough that this is all told in mind numbing detail, is set in the thinnest of space opera realities, and that there is no plot progression whatsoever (at the end of the piece we are in exactly the same place as we were when we began), but throughout the story it is blindingly obvious that that the maelstroms are caused either by aliens, or by some current or leftover defence tech (the narrative grudgingly has one of the crew of the Maria Segunda state late on in the story that it felt like they were fighting a “live thing”). This idea, however, is almost completely unexamined: whether this is because the writer couldn’t come up with an intriguing explanation or whether it’s because there is another twenty thousand words to be milked out of this idea remains to be seen.
– (Awful). 21,450 words.

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.