No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) jettisons his (more usual, in my experience) breezy, lightweight approach in a more serious piece that starts with Martin coming back to his automated “HappyHome” to find his partner has left his son to run wild, with toys and dishes and mess everywhere. After he finds his son in bed asleep, Martin goes outside to find his wife Anna, who is having some sort of breakdown or dissociative episode in the communal reflecting pond.
Martin is later contacted by a man called Daniel, who says he can explain what has happened to his wife. When they meet he suggests that Anna has become “decohesive”—a result of her being a “Leaper” one of the first astronauts to use a quantum matter transmission device to explore the Galaxy.
The rest of the story sees a physicist called Lina from the LEAP program turn up, and Anna have further episodes where she forgets to pick up the child from nursery, or leaves him in the car, etc. Then Martin and Daniel meet again, and we get more of Daniel’s outsider hand-wavium about the LEAP process. He finally explains that that it doesn’t account for the “chaos” of the human mind when scanning a subject for quantum transmission, causing personality changes in those transported.
The final scene (spoiler) has Martin return home to find Lina the physicist there again, and to be told that Anna has decided to go back out again because she wants to be among the stars.
I found this dull, unengaging stuff, partly because of the makey-up science (shoving “quantum” and “chaos” in there does not make the hand-wavium believable), and partly because I just didn’t care about Anna, who seems to spend most of her time pretentiously staring at the stars or reflections of them in water (I exaggerate, but that’s what it felt like).
* (Mediocre). 9,600 words.
The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar
The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar (Eclipse Online, December 2012) is one of his ‘Solar System’ series, and it gets off to an evocative start:
Beyond the dome the ice-storms of Titan rage; inside it is warm, damp, with the smell of sewage seeping through and creepers growing through the walls of the above-ground dwellings. He tries to find her scent in the streets of Polyport and fails.
Hers was the scent of basil, and the night. When cooking, he would sometimes crush basil leaves between his fingers. It would bring her back, for just a moment, bring her back just as she was the first time they’d met.
Polyphemus Port is full of old memories. Whenever he wants, he can recall them, but he never does. Instead he tries to find them in old buildings, in half-familiar signs. There, the old Baha’i temple where they’d sheltered one rainy afternoon, and watched a weather hacker dance in the storm, wreathed in raindrops. There, what had once been a smokes-bar, now a shop selling surface crawlers. There, a doll house, for the sailors off the ships. It had been called Madame Sing’s, now it’s called Florian’s. Dolls peek out of the windows, small naked figures in the semblance of teenage boys and girls, soft and warm and disposable, with their serial numbers etched delicately into the curve of a neck or thigh. His feet know the old way and he walks past the shops, away from the docks and into a row of box-like apartments, the co-op building where they’d first met, creepers overgrowing the walls and peeking into windows—where they’d met, a party in the Year Seventeen of the Narrative of Pym.
He looks up, and as he does he automatically checks the figures that rise up, always, in the air before him. The number of followers hovers around twenty-three million, having risen slightly on this, his second voyage to Titan in so many years. A compilation feed of Year Seventeen is running concurrently, and there are messages from his followers, flashing in the lower right corner, which he ignores.
This last part sets out the story’s stall, which is that the protagonist has, since birth, had his life continually televised to a mass audience of “followers” as the “Narrative of Pym”. Think The Truman Show with an aware central character set in an exotic solar system.
This audience, when he is seventeen, watch him meet his true love and then, when she later leaves him, his continual search for her across various planets and moons until the day he dies. The story jumps about chronologically, so it may very well be a lifetime compilation feed, similar to the one mentioned above.
It is a wonderfully descriptive piece, and it packs a lot into its four thousand-odd words:
But Pym likes Tong Yun. He loves going down in the giant elevators into the lower levels of the city, and he particularly loves the Arcade, with its battle droid arenas and games-worlds shops and particularly the enormous Multifaith Bazaar. Whenever he can he sneaks out of the house—they are living on the surface, under the dome of Tong Yun, in a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Mother’s—and goes down to Arcade, and to the Bazaar.
The Church of Robot is down there, and an enormous Elronite temple, and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist and Baha’i temples and even a Gorean place and he watches the almost-naked slave girls with strange fascination, and they smile at him and reach out and tousle his hair. There are Re-Born Martian warriors with reddish skin and four arms—they believe Mars was once habituated by an ancient empire and that they are its descendants, and they serve the Emperor of Time. He thinks he wants to become a Re-Born warrior when he grows up, and have four arms and tint his skin red, but when he mentions it to Mother once she throws a fit and says Mars never had an atmosphere and there is no emperor and that the Re-Born are—and she uses a very rude word, and there are the usual complaints from some of the followers of the Narrative of Pym.
If I have one minor criticism (spoiler) it is that the slightly abrupt death scene could have been foreshadowed a little before it happens (although I was expecting it from early on in the story).
**** (Very good). 4, 650 words.
I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia
I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) starts with an android called Reznikov being abused by his female owner until a friend of hers calls the police and she is arrested. After this Reznikov rips out his transponder and lives wild until he meets another woman and starts living with her. The rest of the story details their relationship (and the woman’s reservations about him) until they eventually have children—at which point the “story” grinds to a halt.
This story is similar to the kind of work you find on Tor.com (I suspect Reznikov is a metaphor for a certain type of emotionally shutdown man) and it has MFA/writer’s workshop stamped all over it. Apart from the fact there is little in the way of structure or an arc, I could have done without the omniscient author comments, e.g. “This is a story about a creature that was incapable of telling stories about itself.”
* (Mediocre). 2,850 words.
The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan
The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2012) starts with Fry, a female member of a spaceship crew in orbit around Jupiter, breaking her leg.
After this there is a lot of scene setting, most of which is about her being a “two-stepper” (an unmodified human) in a crew of “octos” (I presume these are humans that have transitioned to being octopuses; we find later that others have become Nautiluses, but I can’t remember seeing any particular reason why people would do either).
Arkae (the octo narrator) then visits Fry in hospital, and learns that her sponsors on Earth want her back dirtside. Fry decides to transition (presumably to avoid having to go back) and gets Arkae to contact Dove, a Nautilus lawyer.
Most of the rest of the story is a lot of waffle that includes: how octos live together as a group; Arkae’s team finding that there are missing sensors in the ring (the big job everyone is on are the preparations for observing a comet pass by Jupiter); and the bad feeling that exists between the two-steppers and octos. Eventually (and not soon enough for me) Arkae gets a message from Fry saying she has—surprise!—become a Nautilus instead of an octo, and has joined the Jupiter colony, who are going to hitch a lift on the comet and seed the Oort.
There is very little in way of story here, and most of it seems to be Arkae endlessly talking about everything and nothing:
Fry had worked with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed—two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi—more than will admit to it—have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.
Blah, blah, blah—and this goes on for twenty pages or so. Bafflingly, this won the 2013 Hugo for Best Novelette (and topped the Locus Poll): I don’t know if this was because it was a bad year for short fiction or whether this got the trans and/or minority and/or Fans are Slans vote.1
* (Mediocre). 8,850 words.
1. Fans have, in the past, viewed themselves as a mocked minority, and so have a tendency to identify with persecuted minorities in SF stories (especially when they are supermen in hiding), e.g. the Slans in A. E. van Vogt’s novel of the same name.
Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das
Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das (Asimov’s SF, August 2012) opens with a family who live on a tidally locked planet (one side of the planet always faces the sun, the other is always in the dark) on a train from the City of Long Shadows, which is near the boundary of the two halves, to Weep-for-Day, which is on the dark side of the planet. The story is related by the daughter, Valyzia, who states that they are going to stay with one her father’s clients, who has a “Nightmare” in captivity. These savage animals live in the dark areas near the terminator, and Valyzia’s race has long been in conflict with them—more so now that her people are penetrating further and further into the dark zone.
The first part of the story tells of the trip to Weep-for-Day, the advances in steam and electric technology that make feasible the trip into the cold, dark night, and Valyzia and her brother’s terror at the thought of seeing a living Nightmare. When they arrive at the outpost they settle in and then, on the second night of their stay, the family are taken to see the captive creature (spoiler):
It was in the deepest recesses of the manse, which was more an oversized, glorified bunker on the hill of Weep-for-Day than anything else. We went down into a dank, dim corridor in the chilly heart of that mound of crustal rock to see the prisoner.
“I call it Shadow. A little nickname,” Sir Tylvur said with a toothy smile, his huge moustache hanging from his nostrils like the dead wings of some poor misbegotten bird trapped in his head. He proved himself right then to have not only a startling lack of imagination for a man of his intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also a grotesquely inappropriate sense of levity.
It would be dramatic and untruthful to say that my fear of darkness receded the moment I set eyes on the creature. But something changed in me. There, looking at this hunched and shivering thing under the smoky blaze of the flares its armored gaolers held to reveal it to its captor’s guests, I saw that a phantom flayed was just another animal.
Sir Tylvur had made sure that its light-absorbent skin would not hinder our viewing of the captured enemy. There is no doubt that I feared it, even though its skin was stripped from its back to reveal its glistening red muscles, even though it was clearly broken and defeated. But my mutable young mind understood then, looking into its shining black eyes—the only visible feature in the empty dark of its face—that it knew terror just as I or any human did. The Nightmare was scared. It was a heavy epiphany for a child to bear, and I vomited on the glass observation wall of its cramped holding cell.
After a short scene which describes a brief altercation between her and her brother (he violently objects to the suggestion that he was scared of the creature), the story then telescopes forward in time to his graduation from the military. Six months later he is killed in combat, and Valyzia later attends his funeral, where she has doubts about her religious beliefs and wonders what truly comes after death.
The final scene sees Valyzia deep in the dark side, working as an archaeologist after the war against the Nightmares has been won:
My dear Velag, how would you have reacted to see these beautiful caves I sit in now, to see the secret culture of your enemy? I am surrounded by what can only be called their art, the lantern-light making pale tapestries of the rock walls on which Nightmares through the millennia scratched to life the dawn of their time, the history that followed, and its end, heralded by our arrival into their world.
In this history we are the enemy, bringing the terror of blinding fire into Evening, bringing the advanced weapons that caused their genocide. On these walls we are drawn in pale white dyes, bioluminescent in the dark, a swarm of smeared light advancing on the Nightmares’ striking, jagged-angled representations of themselves, drawn in black dyes mixed from blood and minerals.
In this history Nightmares were alive when the last of the sunwyrms flew into Evening to scourge the land for prey. Whether this is truth or myth we don’t know, but it might mean that Nightmares were around long before us. It might explain their adaptation to the darkness of outer Evening—their light-absorbent skin ancient camouflage to hide from sunwyrms under cover of the forests of Evening. We came into Evening with our fire (which they show sunwyrms breathing) and pale skins, our banners showing Dragon and the sun, and we were like a vengeful race of ghosts come to kill on behalf of those disappeared angels of Day, whom they worshipped to the end—perhaps praying for our retreat.
The story ends with Valyzia embarking on an expedition deeper into the darkness, but it is one motivated by curiosity, not fear.
This is a very good, if sad and elegiac, piece. The one minor criticism I have is that the final paragraphs could be briefer and more pointed about the change in attitude that has occurred after the genocide of the Nightmares (and there are also one or two other bits that could do with some polishing, to be honest1).
**** (Very good). 7,900 words.
1. The second last sentence in the section above could do with a “was” where the “ancient” is, and a “to hide from sunwyrms in the ancient forests of Evening” at the end. Or is it just my eyes that trip over “ancient camouflage” and “under cover of the forests”? And in the last sentence why have the sunwyrms suddenly gone from being predators to worshipped angels of Day?
My specific criticisms may be off, but my gut feeling is that there is the odd wonky sentence or paragraph in this tale.
Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick
Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick1 (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) opens with Mitchell and a robot called Simone (“Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir”) in a boat, with Mitchell diving down to a drowned Atlantic City Municipal Court to retrieve various documents. When he surfaces, Simone gives him news of an apartment fire. The pair are soon back on land and at the site of the blaze, where they manage to finagle matters so they are the only ones permitted to enter the “unsafe” building. This is followed by a meeting where they shake down the residents to get the salvage contract for their possessions.
The main part of the story (spoiler) sees the pair at work in the building, in which, the guard warns them, there may be an “anthroform” lurking. They soon find out that it is a robot when it physically attacks Mitchell and then Simone. During this episode they realise that it is made from standard parts, speaks Chinese, and its power levels are low (the only thing the creature says during the scuffle is that it has 6% power remaining). This encounter leads to more robots in the attic, where Mitchell gives them batteries and then rigs a solar panel to give them a permanent power supply. Then he and Simone leave.
The plot is by far the weakest part of this piece: not only is it relatively uncomplicated, but the idea of giving experimental robots of an unknown origin (one of whom has previously attacked you) a power supply and leaving them to it seems rather foolhardy. However, the story is fluently told, and there is a lively relationship between Mitchell and Simone that results in some sparky and/or quirky conversation. This isn’t limited to the exchanges between the pair however, as the apartment owners discover:
“No, wait, hold on,” said one of the interchangeable three. “So, we’re paying, what, you? And, er, your—” they paused, confused. “F. . . friend? Employee? The robot?” Simone turned a featureless head toward the speaker and said nothing. “And they’re going to help you retrieve things?”
“She is going to help.”
“Excuse me?”
“She is going to help.” Simone’s tone had grown clipped. “Not they. There is only me.”
The marks practically fell over one another in a confused torrent of explanation. “I thought robots were theys instead of its—” “You’re definitely displaying a gender neutral—” “Wait, is robot wrong? I’ve heard people saying Mobile Anthroform—”
Simone played an audio file of a sharp handclap as two sets of metal fingers came together, silencing the table. “No offense is taken,” Simone said. “If you find yourself struggling with the nomenclature, please feel free to ignore me completely.”
Mitch cursed inwardly—Simone had been getting worse and worse at handling the clients. In Pittsburgh, a recent argument about the nature of identity had ended with the clients never calling again. p. 117
It is a mixed bag of a story, but a very promising debut: I look forward to further stories from this writer.
** (Average). 5,300 words.
1. The introduction to the story mentions Gardner Dozois (whose office manager Swanwick was) shaking a baby toy at the author when he was an infant, so I presume he is the son of Michael Swanwick.
Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer
Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) opens with Station Commander Ennie Niagara of Kenlon Station having dinner with the Ijt ambassador, an avian like alien. Niagara listens to the Ijt’s account of the previous commander’s fall from grace (a food related incident involving the serving of ghost peppers), and learns that his actions were designed to get rid of the Joxto, a troublesome race of aliens, from the station. The conversation closes with the ambassador’s news that the Joxto are on their way back.
Multiple plot elements and characters are then introduced to the story: two aliens, Qasi and Baxo, set off the fire alarms when they try the human custom of fondue (the latter creature is unknown to the rest of the station, and lurks in the air ducts); then a spaceship arrives with a Captain Vincente, who comes with official news of the Joxto’s imminent arrival; meanwhile, a body is found in engineering, which turns out to be the previous station commander . . . .
After this the stories trundles along while the investigation proceeds. More characters are introduced (two security officers, Mackie and Digby, as well as a Dr Reed). There is an alien fruit ceremony that Ennie attends before later going to her office and finding a piece of fruit that Bako, the “ghost alien” has left there. Then Vincente gets news from Earth that there is an assassin on the station looking to kill the Joxto.
After the fruit left in the commander’s cabin is identified as a particularly delicious one from Tyfse, a planet destroyed previously by the warring Joxto and Okgono, this all eventually resolves (spoiler) in the station’s garden ring. There we find out that Fred the gardener is plotting with the remaining surviving Tyfsian to sell the fruit it has saved from its planet, in return for assisting it to kill both the Joxto and Okgono. The story closes with Ennie confronting both races about the genocide.
This is an okay story, I guess, but it’s plodding as its title, goes on too long, and generally felt like a dull “Sector General”1 story with trendy pronouns:
“That is because I have not yet added the [fondue] heat source,” Qasi said. “I wished to test my understanding of the processes and equipment, and also refine my selection of sauces, before I invite an entire party to participate in the experience. I will even invite the commander!”
“What is the heat source, though?” Bako asked. Ey rotated eir head upside down so ey could peer at the underside of the pot, long whiskers bent back. “Some sort of thermal pod?”
“No!” Qasi said, her long tail twitching behind her from the excitement. “This is the very best part.”
She pulled out a small metal can, took the lid off, and slipped it between the legs of the stand under the pot. Then she grasped the small pull-tab on the side between two claws and pulled.
Flame jetted out of the top of the can, engulfing the pot. Bako skittered away on all eir two dozen legs, screeching in alarm. “It’s supposed to be able to be modulated,” Qasi said, trying to get close enough to see without burning her own whiskers. “I probably should have read the instructions.”
“Fire!” Bako shouted. “You made a fire! On a space station! This was a terrible idea, Qasi!” p. 79
I can see why you might use these pronouns for a human character, but why use them for (to our view) a genderless alien instead of “they” or “their” or “its”? It’s an unnecessary distraction.
Another thing that irritated me by the end of the story was the continuous mention of food. There are numerous occasions where various characters are eating, and one of these, where a minor character is stuffing a burrito into his cakehole, just destroyed my suspension-of-disbelief. I thought, ‘They are still eating burritos on a distant space station hundreds of years from now?’
I also didn’t much care for the lazy contemporary dialogue and thoughts that the characters sometimes express. Apart from the likes of “Holy shit that’s good” and “crap ton of energy,” we also have twaddle like this:
The coffee machine was, in one of humanity’s oldest and most sacred covenants, fair game, with the caveat that if you finished the pot, you set it to make another. p. 84
I usually look forward to Palmer’s work but this was disappointing.
** (Average, barely). 15,150 words.
1. The ‘Sector General’ series, by James White, were stories about a hospital in space which treated different types of aliens. There is a list on ISFDB—read those instead.
Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin
Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) is one of her ‘Hainish’ stories, the most famous example of which is The Left Hand of Darkness. This story also takes place on the world of Gethen, a.k.a Winter, and, after some accomplished and elegant scene setting, the piece soon becomes a coming-of-age story about of one of the children of this planet, Sov Thade Tage em Ereb. Because Sov is an androgynous Gethenian, the process of growing up involves, in part, a fascination with the concept of “kemmer,” the periods after adolescence when Gethenians change into males or females to reproduce:
No, I hadn’t thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we have no gender and no sexuality, our hormones don’t give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where’s Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your porridge. When’s Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and what have you been up to while I was away? p. 290 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)
Eventually Sov ages enough to show the first signs of kemmer, which involves temporary physical changes and some discomfort, something Sov later discusses with a friend called Sether, who is going through the same thing:
We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going along side by side at an easy walk.
“Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?” I asked without knowing that I was going to say anything.
Sether nodded.
After a while, Sether said, “Listen, does your pisser get. . . .”
I nodded.
“It must be what the Aliens look like,” Sether said with revulsion. “This, this thing sticking out, it gets so big . . . it gets in the way.”
We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, “I’ll tell you what I hate, what I really hate about it—it’s dehumanizing. To get jerked around like that by your own body, to lose control, I can’t stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy and die if there isn’t anybody else in kemmer? That they’ll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?”
“They can’t,” I said, shocked.
“Yes they can.” p. 295
After a brief visit to the Fastness, which appears to be some spiritual seat of higher learning (and where Sov learns how to “untrance” and sing), the remainder of the story follows Sov’s first visit to the kemmerhouse. We see how the Gethenian sexual change is triggered (Sov becomes a female after being exposed to the male pheromones of one of the cooks at her Hearth), and learn of the various lovers she takes afterwards.
This a very well written piece (there is so much textual detail that it almost feels like a tapestry) but the story is ultimately little more than an extended alien biology lesson (although the kemmer process will be of interest to those that have read The Left Hand of Darkness).
*** (Good). 7,950 words.
The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe
The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe (Full Spectrum #5, edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey, Janna Silverstein, 1995) wasn’t, given that the last two stories of his I read were Seven American Nights and The Fifth Head of Cerberus, exactly what I was expecting, and the piece initially feels more like something from Stephen King. To that end, the beginning is not only evocative of place—a snowed-in log cabin in the woods—but also of character—Emery is estranged from his wife Jan and is waiting in his cabin for her and their children to arrive, along with the divorce papers she is bringing for him to sign. While he tidies up before their arrival he broods about this, and also thinks about a visiting coyote1 he has been feeding and trying to tame:
The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon, when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin. p. 391 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)
While he is outside, Emery also gets the impression he is being watched from the woods, a feeling that is confirmed when he sees a flash of a mirror . . . .
The rest of the first half of the story proceeds at a brisk pace. Emery gets dressed and goes to the area he saw the light, only to look back at his cabin to see he is being burgled. When he shouts at one of the small, dark figures, they raise the rifle they have taken from cabin and shoot. He takes cover. Five minutes later Jan and the three kids arrive, but when Emery hurries back he sees the interlopers have vanished. He decides to keep quiet about what has just happened.
The next part of the story switches temporarily from thriller to family soap opera, with a conversation between Emery and Jan about the details of the their divorce (and an allegation of child abuse by Emery on the twin girls). This culminates in Emery’s refusal to sign the papers, and Jan and the two girls leaving the cabin (unlike the twins, Brook is Emery’s biological son and he stays). Shortly after the mother and daughters exit Emery and Brook hear a scream, and rush outside to see the burglars under the hood of the car, seemingly once again looking for parts (as they did with Emery’s Jeep earlier on). There is a struggle, and a shot is fired: the interlopers flee. After the family regroup, they realise one of the twins, Aileen, is missing.
Emery then drives through the snow towards the lake to see if he can find her, eventually coming upon the burglars, who are dark-skinned and petite young women. They have Aileen, but Emery manages to trade the car for her—although the women don’t speak throughout the exchange—and, after another scuffle during which he is shot (a flesh wound in his side), father and step-daughter walk back to the cabin.
At this point (a third of the way through) the story starts becoming SFnal: Aileen says that she has been in a ziggurat (she later clarifies that it wasn’t actually an ancient terraced structure, it just had the same shape), where she was stripped and examined, shown pictures of things she didn’t recognise, and given food before she slept for a while. Emery is puzzled, and tells her she has only been gone a couple of hours.
When they get back to the cabin domestic hostilities resume as Emery undresses to tend his wound, and the girls are told not to look:
Jan snapped her fingers. “Oil! Oil will soften the dried blood. Wesson Oil. Have you got any?”
Brook pointed at the cabinet above the sink. Emery said, “There’s a bottle of olive oil up there, or there should be.”
“Leen’s peeking,” Brook told Jan, who told Aileen, “Do that again, young lady, and I’ll smack your face!
“Emery, you really ought to make two rooms out of this. This is ridiculous.”
“It was designed for four men,” he explained, “a hunting party, or a fishing party. You women always insist on being included, then complain about what you find when you are.” p. 425
There is more of this kind of thing:
Privately [Emery] wondered which was worse, a woman who had never learned how to get what she wanted or a woman who had.
“You actually proposed that we patch it up. Then you act like this?” [said Jan.]
“I’m trying to keep things pleasant.”
“Then do it!”
“You mean you want to be courted while you’re divorcing me. That’s what’s usually meant by a friendly divorce, from what I’ve been able to gather.” p. 426-427
“Emery, you hardly ever answer a direct question. It’s one of the things I dislike most about you.”
“That’s what men say about women,” he protested mildly.
“Women are being diplomatic. Men are rude.”
“I suppose you’re right. What did you ask me?”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you ignore me until I raise my voice.” p. 430
Emery finally agrees to take his wife and daughters into town and, for the next part of the story, it is just the two men, Emery and Brook, who are left to deal with any remaining problems back at the cabin. (Apart from a couple of phonecalls, the weather conveniently keeps the local sheriff and the other authorities away.)
As they drive back, Emery does some more pontificating to Brook on the nature of women (“For women, love is [. . .] magic, which is why they frequently use the language of fairy tales when they talk about it.”). Then there is talk of “Brownies” (fairies) and the like, and an information dump where Emery speculates (spoiler) about the women landing the “ziggurat” in the lake; that they are afraid of men and want to leave the area; and a possible time-distortion effect that would explain Aileen’s experience.
They sleep, and when Emery wakes up the next morning he realises Brook isn’t there. When he goes outside to find him he discovers one of the women has killed him with the axe. After he covers the body and puts it by the woodpile, he then calls the undertaker and sheriff. Then he calls the mobile phone in Jan’s car: one of the women answers, and Emery tells her he is going to kill them for what they did to his son.
The last section of the story sees the climactic encounters between Emery and the women, which take place in both the ziggurat/space-time ship (where he fights a woman with an axe) and in the cabin (where the other two ambush him, and he kills one and injures the other.
The final scene has him tending the wounded woman: Emery tells her he us going to burn the ziggurat and that she will just have fit into current day society. While she sleeps he plans a new company which will exploit the time-travellers’ technology. He also determines to make the woman, who he calls Tamar, his new wife. Emery talks to himself while she sleeps, saying that they’ll have a family, and build a house on the lakeside to take advantage of the still functioning time distortion device. She squeezes his hand, and the story ends.
Now the unfortunate thing about reducing this story to a plot summary is that it makes it sound like something that A. E. van Vogt might have cobbled together in one of his wilder moments, and I’d have to concede that at times it does have a whiff of that about it. However, it is a very readable piece. The problem is that is it a mixed bag, and the second half is not as good as the first. Part of this is due to the wild plot, and the way that key information is delivered (apart from the dumping a lot of this in the middle section, I’m not sure that there is a clear mention of a ziggurat in the middle of the lake until he goes into it later on). Then there are the Emery’s actions and his character: the former seem borderline reckless and/or idiotic at times, and he comes over, at best, as a complex character, or, at worst, as having patriarchal, misogynistic, and abuser tendencies. Whichever side you come down on regarding Emery’s character, this is something which threatens to bend the story into a no-man’s land between a dark, mainstream examination of a complicated man, and a highly entertaining SFnal potboiler (or as I found out later, make the account the delusions of a madman2). At times it’s an uneven mix.
These reservations notwithstanding, it is a fast paced read with some good description and characterisation, and, if you don’t pay too much attention to the bonkers plot, and the distractions of Emery’s character, it’s a pretty good read. I enjoyed it.
***+ (Good to Very Good) 27,200 words.
1. No doubt the coyote reference is Wolfe inserting himself into the narrative as per The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
2. After posting this review, one of my Facebook group members posted a link to a draft of an article by Marc Armani (a Wolfe scholar) which describes what the story is really about (spoiler): Emery is delusional and has killed/raped the members of his family (or something like that). I wonder what my blood pressure was when I read the line “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact [. . .] then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I think I am now officially past caring about what this story, or any of Wolfe’s work, is about. But those of you who like walking on quicksand, knock yourself out.
The discussion thread and link to the Armani article are here (although the Armani link may have expired by now—buy the book).
Lunatic at Large by Ron Goulart
Lunatic at Large by Ron Goulart (F&SF, February 1977) is one of his ‘Jose Silvera’ stories about the planet-hopping writer-for-hire. This one opens with him and a new client, the actress Mary Elizabeth Trowbridge, arriving at a film premiere on Barafunda naked in her aircar:
“And let’s see who’s in the aircar which is just now landing on the A-List landing yard!” boomed a voice immediately outside their cabin windows.
Silvera found himself staring into the lens of a robot video camera and the bright blue eyes of a grinning lizard man in a purple dinner jacket. “Oops,” said Silvera. “Black the windows, stupe.”
“Miss Trowbridge,” replied the voice of the aircar, “had earlier expressed a wish to see the myriad stars of the Barnum System night sky whilst being—”
“That was a prior mood,” said Silvera. “Black the damn windows.”
“It looks like our beloved novelist, Mary Elizabeth Trowbridge, spread-eagled under a dark saturnine man I don’t recognize, folks,” boomed the lizard announcer. p. 87
The above gives you an idea of the tone of the story, which is mostly about Silvera attempting to recoup an overdue payment from a lizardman literary agent called Mazda. Mixed into this are the various manoeuvrings of the KAML (Kill All Monarchs League) and the possibility that the planet’s ruler, Prince Lorenzo, may be an android. All this is mostly irrelevant though, as the plot is pretty much an excuse to string several amusing scenes together (my favourite is probably the fight scene that takes place in a pub after Silvera smirks at a dandy who “playfully inserted the lighted table candle into [the] handy orifice of yonder serving wench android.”
Minor stuff but quite funny (if you don’t mind the rude humour).
*** (Good). 5,550 words.