Month: December 2020

Who’s Cribbing by Jack Lewis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Who’s Cribbing by Jack Lewis (Startling Stories, January 1953) is one of the short-shorts we’re currently group reading in my Facebook group1 from the 1963 anthology Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Isaac Asimov & Groff Conklin. I’m not sure I’d want to review all fifty of those here (most are inconsequential squibs) but I really liked this one, so thought I’d mention it.
The story is written as a series of letters between Lewis, a budding writer, and the editors of various SF magazines. The correspondence begins with this:

Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Lewis:

We are returning your manuscript THE NINTH DIMENSION.
At first glance, I had figured it a story well worthy of publication. Why wouldn’t I? So did the editors of Cosmic Tales back in 1934 when the story was first published.
As you no doubt know, it was the great Todd Thromberry who wrote the story you tried to pass off on us as an original. Let me give you a word of caution concerning the penalties resulting from plagiarism.
It’s not worth it. Believe me.

Sincerely,
Doyle P. Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine  p. 83

Lewis writes an indignant reply wherein he protests his innocence, and further states he has never heard of Thromberry in the ten years he has been reading the field. This is met by a world weary letter from Gates stating that he realises there are overlapping plots and ideas in SF stories, but not word for word replicas.2 Lewis cancels his subscription.
This back and forth continues with various other editors and fans, during which Lewis finds out that Thomberry’s works are very hard to come by, and that the writer specialised in electronics. More rejections follow, and Lewis (spoiler) eventually suggests to Gates (who he has contacted again) that the chances of him accidentally producing several stories similar to Thromberry’s are astronomical, and suggests that maybe Thromberry used his electronics expertise to travel through time to steal his manuscripts. He gets a short, blunt reply to this, and the final act has Lewis submit his letters and the responses he received in the form of a story to Sam Mines at Startling Stories—with the inevitable response.
This is a clever and amusing piece, and it is also pitch perfect (apart from the tone of both Lewis’s and the various editor’s letters, there are other neat touches like Lewis stating in one cover note that, because of the extensive research that went into a story, he must “set the minimum price on this one at not less than two cents a word.”)
This is one I’d probably use in my Best for 1953 (although, if I recall correctly, there is a lot of competition from that year).
***+ (Good to Very good). 1300 words.

1. Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction is the name of the Facebook group.
2. Talking of word for word replicas, someone recently tried to sell a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God to Clarkesworld.

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman (Far Futures, edited by Gregory Benford, 1995) opens with the (unnamed) narrator stating that he is writing this memoir in English, a language from “an ancient land of Earth.” In the story’s leisurely opening chapters we find that he and a woman called White Hill are part of a group of twenty-nine artists that has gone to Earth to take part in a competition to design and build a commemorative artwork that will serve as a reminder, after the Earth is reterraformed, of the devastation caused by the Fwyndri. This alien race, with whom humanity are still at war, released a nanoplague on Earth which turned most plant and animal DNA into dust.
All this background information is given in little snippets though, and initially the story is mainly concerned with the developing relationship between the two characters, their sexual attraction, and the differing sexual mores of their two cultures (although, to be honest, they seem pretty much like an ordinary 20th Century couple1). There is also quite a lot of discussion about art as they wander around their base in Amazonia (and this is the kind of thing you would find in endless 1970’s artist colony stories):

She scraped at the edge of the sill with a piece of rubble. “It’s funny: earth, air, fire, and water. You’re earth and fire, and I’m the other two.”
I have used water, of course. The Gaudi is framed by water. But it was an interesting observation. “What do you do, I mean for a living? Is it related to your water and air?”
“No. Except insofar as everything is related.” There are no artists on Seldene, in the sense of doing it for a living. Everybody indulges in some sort of art or music, as part of “wholeness,” but a person who only did art would be considered a parasite. I was not comfortable there. She faced me, leaning. “I work at the Northport Mental Health Center. Cognitive science, a combination of research and . . . is there a word here? Jaturnary. ‘Empathetic therapy,’ I guess.”  p. 215 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

White Hill’s occupation surfaces again at the end of the story.
After a couple chapters of these two mostly just talking to each other, the story finally gets going when they get a visitor who helps them plan their travel itinerary, at which point the story changes from an extended conversation into a travelogue. They go to Giza and the pyramids, and then by airship to Rome (which is now encircled by a wall of bones collected by the local monks). Then they learn they have to go back to Amazonia because “the war is back.”
At this point the story changes direction completely, and the pair return to discover that the Fwyndri have tampered with the sun’s internal processes and that it will become progressively hotter—eventually turning into a red giant. Earth will become increasingly uninhabitable and, when the sun finally expands, destroyed. The couple also learn that there is no way off-planet as all ships have been requisitioned (and ships from elsewhere will take too long to arrive). The pair decide to stay in Amazonia and continue with their work. They eventually sleep together.
The rest of the story charts their developing relationship and their projects. While they work on these latter, terraforming machines cool the Earth so much that snow ends up covering what was originally a desert. Then, when they are caught in one of the storms that frequently occur, White Hill is badly injured—she loses and eye and suffers serious facial injuries—and the narrator has to tend to her until she heals enough to undertake a “purge” and re-enter the safe underground areas for surgery.
After a couple more chapters about her recovery and their relationship, there is another right angle plot turn, which has him come back to find she has left to do “Jaturnary” work for a hundred people who are going off in a spaceship to cold sleep through the expansion of the sun. There is a place for him, but he knows that the therapy she will provide to keep the cold-sleepers sane will eradicate her personality (no, me neither), so he does not go.
If this synopsis seems all over the place, it is because the story is little more than a collection of deus ex machina plot developments (which are there because, I believe, the story is handily based on Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet2). There is also a considerable amount of flab here (there is endless chatter about the couple’s relationship), and a kitchen sink full of SF furniture (aliens, nano-plagues, exploding suns, cold-sleep, etc.) All in all, it struck me as very much the kind of story you would expect to see in a collection edited by another writer (which it was) and where, I suspect, the brief was, “write what you want!”
There are parts of this that are readable enough, but it is a mess, and average at best.
** (Average). 16,600 words.

1. These boy-meets-girl love stories clutter up quite a lot of Haldeman’s work, if I recall correctly.
2. Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet is here, along with explanatory notes.

The Three-Day Hunt by Robert R. Chase

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Three-Day Hunt by Robert R. Chase (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2021) starts with an Afghanistan veteran called Hammond going to investigate a flying saucer that has crashed near to his cabin in the woods. When he and Tripod, his three-legged dog, get to the craft the pilot is missing, so they start tracking it.
The rest of the story has the pair following the alien through the wood for the next couple of days, during which we get Hammond’s military and domestic backstory as well as the dog’s (their paths crossed in Afghanistan, just before a bomb went off and injured them both). Later, the military contact him by phone to try to get him to stop his pursuit, but Hammond ignores them and carries on.
Then (spoiler), when Hammond stops to treat the dog’s bleeding paws, he finally sees the alien. As Hammond approaches it, the alien gestures towards the dog—at which point the story dissolves into a mini-lecture about how humanity’s domestication and/or symbiosis with dogs makes it more likely that we will be able to successfully establish a relationship with aliens.
More a notion than a story, but okay, I suppose.
** (Average). 4900 words.

The Fear of Missing Out by Robert H. Cloake

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Fear of Missing Out by Robert H. Cloake (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2021)1 starts off intriguingly with a man called Candid meeting an attractive man on the way to a book club meeting. Rather than fumble a conversation (he later self-identifies as the “office loser”), he turns on his implanted auto-personality:

Candid turned on the software, and immediately his vision faded into a whitish haze. Only his overlays were visible.
When he had first tried the auto-personality in private, the sensory fade-out scared him. But he realized that the software couldn’t work if you were watching and analyzing the situation for yourself. You could play back what happened later, or, of course, turn it off at any time.
With all his senses muted except touch, he became acutely conscious of the texture of his seat and the cool metal of his buckle where his arm rested against it. He felt his mouth move, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then he felt his arm rise and do something, an unfamiliar gesture the auto-personality had chosen. He didn’t resist.  p. 43

Candid later discovers that his auto-personality has arranged a coffee date with the man, Barack, and he initially tries to deal with their next encounter on his own. However, after a fumble or two, he switches the auto-personality back on. Then, after leaving the coffee bar, they go somewhere else, and Candid briefly surfaces to find himself in a low-lit room. When Barack asks him if there is anything wrong he lets the auto-personality take over again, and after a while senses that they are having sex. This produces a good line:

And that was how Candid lost his virginity while unable to see, hear, smell, or taste anything.  p. 46

The rest of the piece sees Candid spend most of the following work day watching himself having sex (the software records what happens when it is active), and agonising about not being able to be himself in the relationship. When (spoiler) he finally manages to turn off the AP for a longer period he finds that the excitement of personal interaction with Barack is going to trigger his seizures. Ultimately, Candid decides that Barack deserves his AP and not him.
This is an interesting piece that, I guess, explores to what extent people suppress their real selves to be part of a couple, or to fit into society more generally. But I’m not sure that is writer’s intention: if it was he would probably have ended the story at the “it was the only adult, loving choice to make” line, and not continued on with a final two paragraphs where Candid experiences as much of the real world as he can before he once more visits Barack’s apartment. If I have got this broadly correct, then moving the “loving choice” sentiment to the very end of the piece would be the better option.
So, in conclusion, a thought-provoking piece but perhaps not an entirely successful one.
**+ (Average to good, and probably a minor revision away from the latter). 3700 words.

1. If I was editing the magazine I’m not sure I’d include this reading-desire killing sentence in the introduction:

With a background in academic philosophy, he uses his fiction to explore the ethical and ontological problems of truth, human personhood, and aesthetic value. p. 43

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw (F&SF, February 1977) takes place after the “Dust-Up” (which appears to have been a limited nuclear war), and starts with Victor Rowan and his wife Jane checking into a dilapidated hotel. Rowan is a dream fighter, a mutant who can project images, and we get an early demonstration of his abilities when the couple decide to take their disagreement about the quality of their accommodation out of the hotel corridor and into their room:

“Do you mind if we continue the conversation inside? If we’re paying for the room, we might as well make use of it.”
Jane nodded, turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.
Just beyond it, in the shabby dimness of the room, stood a grinning, scaly horror — part man, part dragon — which raised a clawed hand in menace. Jane drew breath sharply, but stood her ground.
“Victor,” she said. “Victor!”
“I’m sorry,” Rowan mumbled. He closed his mind, painfully, and the creature vanished into nothingness.  p. 65

We then learn that Rowan is due to compete in a dream fighter competition that evening and, in the rest of this section, we also find out that (a) his ability is due to a small walnut shaped mutation on the top of his head, (b) he has lost twelve fights in a row, and (c) Grumman, his next opponent, is very good.
There is also a scene where Rowan’s agent, Sammy Kling, meets with Tuck Raphael, who manages Grumman. Raphael has big plans for Grumman (who Kling quickly identifies as a psychopath) and bribes Kling to get Rowan to “accept defeat gracefully.” Kling takes the money but does not tell Rowan, who he figures will lose the fight anyway.
The climactic scene opens with Rowan meeting Grumman at the stadium for the first time:

A strongly built man he recognized as Grumman emerged from another corridor and reached the foot of the ramp at the same time. Rowan was instantly aware of his opponent’s chilling psychic aura, but he went through it, like a swimmer breasting an icy tide, and held out his hand.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.
Grumman looked down at the outstretched hand and conjured a piece of brown, smoking filth into it. The image was too close to Rowan’s sphere of influence to last for more than a fraction of a second before he blanked it out of existence, but the accompanying mental shockwave had the force of a physical blow.  p. 70

Just before the fight begins, Rowan gets another taste of things to come:

At the head of the ramp, one on each side, were two low circular bases. Grumman went to the one on the left. Rowan turned right and was still a couple of paces from his base when there was an abrupt silence, followed by the sound of a woman screaming. He spun and found himself facing a thirty-foot high demon.
A red light began flashing in the judges’ kiosk, to indicate that Grumman had made a foul play by leading off before the signal.
Rowan’s senses were swamped by the reality of the beast towering over him. He had seen many monsters during his career, beings designed to inspire fear and thus weakness, but this one was in a class of its own. Its face was a compound of things human and things animal, and of things the earth had never seen. Its body was grotesquely deformed, yet true to alien symmetries — black, powerful, matted with hair in some places, glistening naked in others. And above all, the demon was obscene, massively sexual, with an overpowering realization of detail which had the intended effect of cowing the beholder’s mind. Rowan was closest to the apparition, and he took the full projected force of it.  p. 71

The fight initially goes as expected, with Rowan taking a psychic beating as his images are overpowered. Later in the contest however (spoiler), Rowan manages to recover when Grumman is briefly distracted:

[Rowan] summoned up an old friend — one who had settled many issues for him in the past.
Valerius was a professional soldier, a scarred and weather-beaten veteran who had served with three different legions in Syria, Gaul and Britain. He had withstood rain, snow and desert heat with equal stoicism, and he had slain the varied enemies of Rome with impartial efficiency, regardless of whether they wore silks or skins, regardless of which gods those enemies believed to be giving them protection. He was a stolid, unimaginative man — as plain, functional and uncompromising as the short sword he carried — and in all his years of service he had never encountered a creature which could survive having an iron blade driven through its guts. And, as Valerius saw things, this meant that no such creature existed.
Rowan — knowing by heart every detail, every rivet and thong of the legionary’s equipment and armor — snapped him into existence in microseconds. He was much smaller than the demon, a sign that Rowan’s strength was nearly spent, but his sword was sharp, and he struck with economical swiftness. The blade went deep into the demon’s protruding belly, and puslike fluids gouted. Rowan heard Grumman grunt with pain and surprise, and he guessed at once that the younger man had never experienced neuro-shock before.
This is what it’s like, he thought savagely, directing onto the demon a flurry of hacking blows which transmitted their fury to its creator, convulsing him with sympathetic shock.  p. 73

Rowan wins the fight but, of course, he is later accosted in the street by Raphael’s thugs, and revenge taken when they cut off his “walnut,” which robs him of his powers. After the spade strikes down, there is a great line:

And, in that ultimate pang of agony, Rowan was born into the world of normal men.  p. 74

The story should probably have stopped there but it continues on for another few paragraphs as Rowan returns to his concerned wife, and asks her whether she wants to hear “the bad news, or the good news.”
When I first read this is 1977 I thought it was excellent, partly because of the 1950s post-nuclear holocaust feel of the story, partly because I didn’t see the end coming, and partly because of the great line above. This time around I didn’t find it quite so good, probably because I knew what was coming, and I could also see one or two areas where it could be slightly improved (see my comment about the ending above). One other thing that tripped me up a little—and this isn’t the story’s fault—is that I remembered a great scene that isn’t in this story but another one!1
Still, this is a pretty good piece, and I’d probably have it in my ‘Best Of’ for 1977.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4200 words.

1. I think that other story is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by James Quinn (F&SF, December 1977).

Tiki by L. Sprague de Camp

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tiki by L. Sprague de Camp (F&SF, February 1977) is the sixth1 of his ‘W. Wilson Newbury’ series of stories, all of which concern the eponymous middle level banker and his various supernatural escapades. This one opens at a party to celebrate the opening of a new wing at the local museum (the “Drexel Hall of Crustaceans”), funded by Newbury’s rich boss, and which we find is now home to a large Polynesian idol of the goddess Tiki of Atea.
The rest of the story has Newbury turn up a few weeks later at his boss’s invitation for a personal tour round the new wing. Accompanying Newbury are his son, and the latter’s ne’er-do-well friend, both of who run off ahead and graffiti the idol with a moustache. When Newbury and Drexel get to the idol they hear a muttered threat (“You shall rue your insolence, mortal!”)
Later on, when Newbury and the kids are alone in the museum, the goddess animates the dead giant crabs and they are chased about for a bit until (spoiler) Newbury eventually stops them with a fire extinguisher. No explanation is given for why this would be anyone’s weapon of choice in combating zombie crustaceans.
Nearly all of the Newbury stories had this simple setup/denouement structure, and little in the way of complication or plot. Consequently they weren’t much good, and I always wondered why (a) de Camp bothered writing them, and (b) any editor bought them.
* (Mediocre). 3200 words.

1. Or seventh story. Another of de Camp’s Newbury stories, The Figurine, was published at the same time in the February 1977 Fantastic. The ISFDB page for the series is here.

Upstart by Steven Utley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Upstart by Steven Utley (F&SF, February 1977) has a (vaguely Malzbergian) opening in which the captain of an Earth spaceship becomes increasing irritated with the intermediaries of the superior alien race which has snatched his ship from FTL flight:

“You take us in to talk to the Sreen,” the captain tells them, “you take us in right now, do you hear me?” His voice is like a sword coming out of its scabbard, an angry, menacing, deadly metal-on-metal rasp. “You take us to these God-damned Sreen of yours and let us talk to them.”
The Intermediaries shrink before him, fluttering their pallid appendages in obvious dismay, and bleat in unison, “No, no, what you request is impossible. The decision of the Sreen is final, and, anyway, they’re very busy right now, they can’t be bothered.”  p. 61

The captain eventually loses his temper and physically (and brutally) fights his way through to the Sreen and a climactic encounter.
The amusing last paragraphs crystallise this tongue-in-cheek story’s points about humanity’s belligerence and exceptionalism. (Spoiler: when the titanic Sreen, “masters of the universe, lords of Creation,” etc., ask the captain who he is, he thrusts out his jaw and asks “Who wants to know?”)
This is a slight piece, but it raises a wry smile or two.
*** (Good, if minor). 1200 words.

Gossamer by Stephen Baxter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Gossamer by Stephen Baxter (Science Fiction Age, November 1995) has a good opening hook that sees a two woman spaceship prematurely come out of a wormhole near Pluto and crash-land on the planet. During their approach, Lvov, the scientist of the two, has a brief (and story telegraphing) vision of a web between Pluto and one of its moons, Charon.
Both of the women survive the crash although the ship is wrecked, and Cobh the pilot tells Lvov that it’ll be twenty days or so before they are rescued, and that it won’t be via the wormhole (there is some handwavium here about the wormhole anomaly that spat them out of hyperspace).
The central section of the story then sees Lvov exploring the surface of Pluto and, as she flies along, we get some personal backstory. There is also further discussion between the pair (Cobh is off doing something else) about the unstable wormhole. Then Lvov finds what looks like eggs in a burrow:

Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life forms—or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognize any others.
She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possible want of Charon? What did it mean for them?  p. 129 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

When the pair realise that they may have discovered alien life there is a discussion about what they should do—if they signal Earth then the rescue will be called off as any rocket exhaust will damage the environment. Lvov (spoiler) feels strongly that if they have to die to preserve the Plutonian ecosystem then so be it and, when she realises that Cobh has figured out another way to get them home, she sends a message to Earth about her discovery.
The final part of the story has the pair going to the wormhole on Cobh’s salvaged and modified GUTdrive, the (presumably not ecosystem destroying) heat of which activates the Pluto-Charon ecosystem: the burrows open, the eggs hatch, and an interplanetary web forms between Pluto and its moon. Then the drive activates, and causes a distorted space wave which flicks the pair to Earth (or something like that).
This is a well enough put together story (apart from the telegraphing, which is repeated again later on), and it has a good sense-of-wonder finale—the problem is, though, that the piece as a whole does not convince. Part of the reason is the exotic ecosystem, which is interesting but rather far-fetched, and the other thing is Cobh’s rather unlikely invention of a new type of space drive amid the wreckage of their ship (this rather smacks of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, and cobbling together a star-drive out of a six-pack of used beer cans). There is also the minor problem (in practical if not narrative terms) of being trapped in your suit for twenty odd days, with no discussion of how you are going to eat or go to the toilet.
Normally, you can get away with one fantastic thing in a story; two or three is pushing it. Too far-fetched.
** (Average.) 6,100 words.

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts—not entirely clearly—with a female astronaut1 called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun’s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—”
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal—at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her “27.6 gravities”—death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov’s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
* (Mediocre). 8,300 words.

1. The character is supposed to be female but she comes over as a shouty, impulsive man in drag, to be honest.

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 51 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison’s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 58

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job—but not until they demand, and get, a break:

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”
“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”
“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.
“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”
“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.
“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”
“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 71

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story (as you can see from the extensive quotes above), with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It’s a pretty good piece, and one I’d have for my “Year’s Best”. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn’t read like a Silverberg’s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I’ve read recently.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.