Category: Ray Nayler

The Empty by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Empty by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2022) opens with Sal seeing a motionless red dot on her screen—one of her remotely supervised self-driving trucks has broken down.
The rest of the first half of the story describes Sal’s uncertain unemployment (she is continually assessed by Amazon-like metrics and there are lots of other people waiting to take her job), her location (she works in a portacabin complex in the car park of an abandoned Wallmart carpark in the middle of nowhere, presumably because of the tax breaks), and her possible future (when she goes to see her supervisor about the breakdown, she learns she is about to be promoted).
When Sal subsequently uses the truck’s remote bee- and monkey-like drones to remotely inspect the damage, she sees that the truck has hit a drone:

There really wasn’t much left of that thing. Her truck must have been the third or fourth one to hit it. Something that small, it would barely register on their sensors.
The trucks weren’t going to slam on the brakes for every jackrabbit that launched itself into their grills. Sal heard the stories from the drivers who had worked their way up from the service depots: You power-washed a lot of gore off these things. Blood, bits of bone, quills, hooves, and antlers. At two hundred kilometers an hour, at least it was over quickly for the animals.
The trucks were failsafed to spot humans near the road and brake—but she’d heard things. And they weren’t going to stop for anything, human or otherwise, out here on U.S. 50. This was the Empty. Population density below the safety threshold. The trucks automatically turned the failsafe off. Whoever lived out here (did anyone live out here?) knew you’d better look both ways when you cross these roads. And look again.
White paint, though. She’d never seen that.  p. 68

Then, while she waits for the repair truck to arrive, she walks the monkey over to a deserted diner—and sees “HELP” written on the one window that isn’t boarded up, with a handprint pointing into the desert.
The rest of the second half sees Sal go to investigate, all the while worrying about the cost that she is incurring (after she has used the allotted amount of time for inspecting the damage, Sal’s company starts charging her). Eventually (spoiler), Sal finds the remaining survivor of a nearby, unattended retirement settlement (we learn that the drone the truck crashed into is actually the settlement’s medical bot).
The story ends with Sal calling for a rescue drone, and later being let go by her employers. She subsequently gets a thank-you message from the woman she saved.
This story has a very convincing near-future setting—there is a wealth of throwaway, Heinleinesque detail about this increasingly automated society—but the capitalist excesses (paying for a SAR drone, being laid off for saving someone’s life) almost stretch credulity to breaking point, as does the rescued woman’s comment about never being able to repay Sal. Well, the woman could say she was going to leave her estate to Sal for saving her life—but, of course, that would ruin the tale’s miserablist finger-wagging about dystopian capitalism. This latter spoils the story somewhat.
(**+) Average to Good. 5,600 words. Story link.

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #175, April 2021)1 opens with the narrator, who has had a copy of his mind beamed into a “blank body” on a far-flung alien planet, recording in his log that he is the only one who has made it—all his colleagues’ downloads were scrambled and their blanks recycled. Worse still, he finds the planet is a polar wasteland that appears inimical to human life.
He subsequently decides to try and make it to a depot that is thirty clicks away, even though he is hampered by problems with his suit’s battery draining faster than he can recharge it (the surface of his suit doubles as a solar panel). During his journey he sees thermal vents (a sign of heat sources under the ice) and feels the vibrations of glaciers moving beneath him. Then he finds signs of alien life, the brittle chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals which he scans and photographs. During this process he realises he may be the first human to discover alien life, but that he has no-one to share it with.
Then, shortly afterwards, he makes an even more profound discovery:

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.
There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high.
Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.
That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?
Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning. It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.
Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.
And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.
Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees him working his way through the maze while he appears to be stalked by the alien—which, at one point, when he partially falls into a crevasse, he throws an axe at to scare away. Then, when he reaches the depot and finds an alien burial cairn nearby, he examines the body and sees that it appears to have the kind of impact damage caused by a crash.
The last pages see the narrator’s tent blown over in a storm, a concussion, and him waking to find that he is being dragged through the snow by the alien. He ends up in a warm cave with the creature observing him. Then, when he attempts to communicate with the creature, he discovers it is actually the sentient EVA suit of the buried alien—and it finally opens up so he can climb inside.
The strengths of this story are its cracking beginning and The Thing-like polar setting and suspense. Unfortunately it drags a little in the middle (the story is probably a little longer than it needs to be) and the ending verges on the far-fetched (i.e. the idea that the alien/suit would be able to provide life support to the narrator—although it must be said that the dead alien may have a similar biochemistry to humans or it probably wouldn’t have been sent to that planet). Overall, a good piece.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story Link.

1. This was joint seventh place in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories. Another of Nayler’s stories, Yesterday’s Wolf, was the winner.

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #180, September 2021)1 opens in what later appears to be a remote tribal area of a near-future post-war Central Asian country. There, a father and his daughter Elmira find one of their lambs has been savaged by wolves on their summer pasture. The brother of the family says to Elmira (who we later discover is tech wizard) that it is a pity that she can’t reprogram their old and partially blind sheepdog.
In the days following this comment Elmira gets a chance to do something similar to her brother’s suggestion when her father brings back an inactive robodog found on his neighbour’s pasture. She starts working on this abandoned weapon, and eventually manages to get it reprogrammed and working again—in a way that will help her family:

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the karaitter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb.
The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.
She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.
Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.
“No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.”

After this set-up, which sees Batyr successfully scare away but not kill the wolves, a couple of other sub-plots begin. One concerns Elmira meeting a friend called Jyrgal in town and discovering that she has been kidnapped, raped, and forced into an arranged marriage—a common custom in Elmira’s society. Elmira then learns from her father, in an extended conversation on their way home, that her mother was also kidnapped and raped when she was young but was rescued by him before she could be married.
The other sub-plot sees another kara discovered by Jyrgal’s family but (spoiler), when they power the robodog up, it attacks them. After Elmira is told by her father about this, she reprograms Batyr before they go to help the family. When they arrive at the other family’s settlement Batyr tracks down and fights the other robodog, putting it out of action. During these events Elmira and her father find that Jyrgal is still alive but that her husband, father- and mother-in-law (i.e. the ones involved in the kidnapping) are conveniently dead.
The story closes with Elmira and her father returning home to see off a government official, his son, and a marriage proposal/demand.
This is a well done piece but it struck me as rather glib, at least in its treatment of the forced marriage aspects. First, the main character is atypical in that she is both young and highly capable,2 which makes the story more of a wishful feminist fable than a convincing SF story. Second, although many readers will be tutting in disapproval at what happens to Jyrgal, I doubt many will have a reaction beyond that as the true horror of her terrible experience is never explored (it is all related second hand, and is very safe-space). Finally, just as in the superhero movies, there are no real world solutions or suggestions as to how to curb this terrible practice. Although this looks like a story about forced marriage (at least in part), I don’t think it is.
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.
2. This is the third Nayler story I’ve read in recent months that has an uber-capable young female protagonist—the other two are Eyes of the Forest (F&SF, May-June 2020) and Muallim, Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021). The latter story also has a remote Central Asian setting and young cyber-whiz daughter.
I find these characters unconvincing and uninteresting, and I wish that male writers using female leads would default to more complex protagonists, like the mother in Rich Larson’s You Are Born Exploding (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021)—or even the ageing woman in Nayler’s own Rain of Days (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022).

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as “Deadwife” for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.
The story alternates between Sandra’s dream therapy sessions—she is suppressing memories about Deadwife—and her time in the facility. Although the story generally has a brooding atmosphere (Sandra is troubled, and it has been raining for days), some of the snarky interactions between the residents and the robots are quite droll:

Annabel shakes her head. One of the service bots is clearing the table. She reaches over and thumbs the sticker from her banana peel onto its head, where it joins the hundreds of other stickers Annabel has been plastering it with since she got here.
“Is that my tip?” the bot asks.
“No, this is your tip: Electricity and water don’t mix. Whatever you do, stay dry on the inside.”
“Useful information. I’ll keep it in mind for the robot uprising. Gotta work on our weak points.” It totters off with our trays.
“I like that one,” Annabel says. “Of all the things in here that talk, I think it has the best sense of humor.”
“I’m taking that personally.”
“You should.”

The story ends (spoiler) with the alarms going off in the middle of the night and Sandra awakening to find the Lifter robot picking her up. She is taken through the pouring rain to the refuge of a nearby lighthouse. There she reunites with the other residents, and they watch a tsunami hit the facility. During this cataclysm, Sandra remembers walking through tropical rain to the hospital and discovering her partner, finally named as Josephine, dead.
I liked this, but it is essentially a mainstream story about a woman triggered into remembering a traumatic memory—albeit one pepped up with snarky robots and a disaster movie ending.
*** (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:

It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand.  p. 78

Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):

“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.”  p. 87-88

I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
*** (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

Muallim by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Muallim by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with Irada, the blacksmith of an Azerbaijani village, repairing Muallim, the robot schoolteacher:

“I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate, Muallim. It will take some work to repair. In the meantime, I can trade it out for your spare chest plate. I still have it here in the shop. But I haven’t had time to fix it. That one is more battered than this one is.”
“How long will it take to fix these dents. An hour?” Muallim asked.
“No. More like an afternoon. I can’t do it now. Can you come back after school? You can wait in the house. You can help my father with his Ketshmits grammar. You know how he loves that.”
“I am scheduled to chop wood for Mrs. Hasanova.”
“Tell her you will chop wood tomorrow.”
She watched Muallim consider this. They must have programmed this gesture into the robot, the way it tilted its watering can of a head to the side and slightly down, just like a human.
“Yes,” Muallim said, “I think that will work. I will stop by Mrs. Hasanova’s and tell her I will come tomorrow.”  p. 36

This opening passage contains a number of hints about various happenings that occur in the story that follows, which alternates between the point of view of Irada the blacksmith, Muallim the robot, and Maarja, an NGO worker who is writing a report on the educational efficacy of the robot in this remote location. In the ensuing narrative we learn that Muallim is being used inappropriately (the wood chopping referenced above, which is causing undue wear and tear); that Muallim is stoned by the village children when it goes to cajole them to go to school; and that the village is generally quite a dysfunctional place where the robot (when it isn’t being attacked by an aggressive rooster) is seemingly making little progress. We also see various aspects of village life, mostly centred on Irada and her widowed and one-armed Mayor father.
When Maarja finally finishes her report it becomes clear that Muallim is going to be taken from the village but, before this happens, she gets an urgent message from one of the children that something has happened to robot. She goes to a local ravine and sees it smashed to pieces two hundred meters below, presumably an act of vandalism.
After Maarja leaves (spoiler) it becomes apparent that the locals have faked Muallim’s destruction using the removed chest-plate (see the passage above) and various scrap metal so they can keep the robot in the village.
This has some nice local colour, but it’s essentially a well done “yokels put one over on the city folks” piece.
*** (Good). 4,950 words. Story link.

Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) takes place in the author’s ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ series, and opens with the narrator, Himmet, taking an injured sparrow to an android vet called Sezgin. Himmet later gets a call from him saying they need to talk and, when they meet again, Sezgin says that Himmet has found “a hole in the world”.
At a later meeting with a group of androids, at a safe house a ferry trip away from Istanbul (and after Himmit has been approached by a shady scientist from the nearby Institute enquiring whether he has picked up any injured sparrows recently), Sezgin tells Himmit that the sparrow contains a human consciousness. Moreover, it is a duplicate consciousness, not the original (something that was thought to be impossible in this consciousness-downloading society). Then someone knocks at the door, and Himmet is told to hide in a priest hole. By the time he gets out he is partially paralyzed.
This latter event is explained in a subsequent doctor’s appointment, where we find out that Himmet is a human who was downloaded into a blank android when he was badly injured in the war and who, when he is stressed, suffers partial paralysis in his new body (throughout the story, Himmet agonises about whether he is really himself, or a copy). We also learn about societal hostility towards androids, and how Himmit got involved with Sezgin when he started paying for deformed sparrows to be mended (replacement legs, etc.).
The story concludes (spoiler) with another, more menacing, visit from the Institute scientist, during which he demands the return of the sparrow. Himmit does not want the consciousness in the sparrow to be returned for illegal experimentation, and he reluctantly goes back to Sezgin to get the sparrow to give to the scientist. We later find out, however, that the woman present at that latter meeting is the freed consciousness (the “connectome”) from the sparrow, and that the androids have put a flawed replica in its place (something, they think, that will keep the scientist occupied for months).
This piece may seem to be a heavily plotted tale but it is actually much more of a slow burn than the synopsis above would suggest, and the main attractions are the setting, the writing (people who feed sparrows will appreciate the descriptions1 of their behaviour), and the character’s epistemological agonising.2
I suspect Nayler is becoming one of those writers who you can enjoy regardless of whether there is a story being told or not.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,500 words.

1. The description of the sparrows:

The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten.
Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.
No harm, in the end, was done. p. 27

2. The Institute scientist archly says to Himmet at one point, when he is holding forth about the various connectome experiments the Institute conducts, “I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme”.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe1 (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.2)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
**** (Very Good). 5,650 words.

1. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

2. Mauled can’t be a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas; there is just too much going on in this short piece.
** (Average). 7,250 words.

Father by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,1 and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic “father unit”; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar—the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie—who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot—does a low-level fly-by in his aircar and hits father with a baseball bat:

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie’s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie’s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: “Home run!” and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?” I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful—his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you’re hungry for dinner.
“That’s the first time you called me Father,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.”
“We should call the cops,” my mom said.
“I doubt they’ll do much,” Father said. “And that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.”
“I’ve said the same myself, many times,” Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father’s head with a kitchen cloth. “What did they get you with?”
“A baseball bat, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Perhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.”
“Hilarious,” Mom said.
“I’m here all week, folks . . .” Father’s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie’s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot’s head and the second time to visit the narrator’s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that father-robot may be partially or all of Archie’s real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning “sub-routines”.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake—while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator’s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot’s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot’s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity—if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

1. The alternate world pivot point in this story is the same as in Nayler’s two ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories (also published in Asimov’s SF): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the discovered technology.