October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with October, a survey team member on a potential colony planet, taking spare parts to a colleague. It becomes apparent that (a) she (or her stomach at least) has been adapted for life on this planet and (b) that this is her STL exploration ship’s third attempt at colonisation (two previous attempts have failed). When October reaches Jan, her older male colleague, we discover that he lost his legs (and his wife) on the first of those attempts (on a tectonically active planet called Jackpot).
The pair use their “bubble” (an aircar, basically) to travel over the surface of this new world looking for plants that will be edible (they need to find three before the colonisation committee will approve settlement), and it isn’t long before October tries her first native meal:
October smelled the steam before plunging her fork into the soggy mass of boiled leaves.
[. . .]
She advanced her lips as if for a kiss. The leaves were hot, and she blew on them before putting them in her mouth.
The flavor was different from the burnt-hair smell. Her tongue identified no sweet parts, but an acid citrus aroma mixed with a good old lettuce, with a sour peach taste, and a touch of salt. She went through the motions of mastication, finding no abhorrent reaction.
She swallowed, feeling her food traveling down her esophagus, waiting for her stomach to react violently.
It didn’t, despite the acid content of the alien lettuce. She felt the signal for more, more grinding up, and dug again into the green mossy mound. The lens of the drone moved in for a close-up like a dark eye. p. 106
A couple of weeks later they find an edible algae, but then nothing for the next month or so, and then Jan becomes angry when banana-like fruits aren’t edible (he subsequently flounces off on his own in the bubble for a while, as you would when you are part of a two-person team on an unexplored alien planet).
The seasons start changing and then (spoiler), while they are flying to a new destination, the bubble apparently runs out of power, and crashes in a lake. They manage to get out and swim to an island, but have to leave their communications and other equipment behind.
The final section of the story sees October try build a raft, but it rains and gets washed away, and the two of them have to climb a tree to stay above the rising flood waters. A couple of weeks later October is beginning to starve to death (she has an accelerated metabolism as well as a modified stomach) but, when she tries eating some of the bark of the tree they are sheltering in, she finds it is edible. They are saved, and later leave the island on a second raft.
This piece is okay, I guess (the food prospecting stuff is reasonably novel), but it reads pretty much like the old-school Planetary Exploration stories I was reading in the 1970s (and this could have been published in Analog then or at any time since), and has some of the same shortcomings as those thematically similar works, e.g. there is a lot of not particularly convincing description about the planet and its ecosystem. I’d add that the plot of this particular story also seems to depend on unlikely and/or dumb actions or circumstances, such as the idea that the bubble would suddenly run out of energy and fall from the sky without warning, and not have a secondary or triplex system providing redundancy. I also wasn’t convinced about the merits of sending someone with no legs to explore an unknown planet—this is a marvellously diverse of course, but really quite a stupid thing to do. I also wondered why the STL ship was not continuously monitoring the pair’s position, and why they weren’t doing hourly or half-hourly ops-normal checks, etc. etc.
One to read with your brain disengaged.
** (Average). 9,350 words.