Month: January 2021

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski (Analog, August 1995) is one of the author’s ‘Elysium Cycle’ stories, and opens with an exploration team discussing the biochemistry of the alien planet, IP3, that they are orbiting. The team are Andra, a human female; Skyhook, a sentient space shuttle AI; and Pelt, a sentient nanoplast AI who also serves as a protective suit for Andra.
Their discussion, in particular, focuses on the alien cell structure of life on the planet, and they watch as an alien cell splits into three. Unfortunately these discussions (there are more later on in the story) tend to result in writing like this:

“The usual double helix?” asked Skyhook. The double helix is a ladder of DNA nucleotide pairs, always adenine with thymine or guanine with cytosine, for the four different “letters” of the DNA code. When a cell divides to make two cells, the entire helix unzips, then fills in a complementary strand for each daughter cell.  p. 372 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The second act of the story sees Andra, Pelt and Skyhook exploring the surface, where they discover a herd of strange rolling aliens which are later attacked by a much larger one. Then Pelt starts malfunctioning, and Andra (spoiler) barely makes it back to the shuttle before Pelt shuts down. There is some further discussion about the way that the alien microbes attacked Pelt’s nanoplast structure, and the crew’s solution.
This reads like part science lecture, part story, and has an open ending that suggests it is the first chapter of a novel. I’d have preferred a longer piece that was more of a story, but overall this is okay, I guess.
** (Average). 4,200 words.

How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring by Joanna Russ

Posted on by Paul Fraser

How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring by Joanna Russ (F&SF, February 1977) has a young girl called Dorothy dreaming of adventures in a winter landscape with the Hunter, Clown and Little. Together they go to save a Princess from a tyrant. After they succeed, the Princess blows away:

Thank you for saving me, she said in a damp, rushing voice like water falling under stone arches. I am very grateful to you.
The Clown dropped to one knee. The pleasure is all ours, lovely lady, he said. She patted him on the head, and a little cloud from her hand caught on his hat and trailed from it like a breath.
They walked out of the castle. At once the fierce, grinning wind lifted the Princess and whirled her away in ragged, torn streamers.
What a shame, said Dorothy. Little nodded.
She was beautiful, declared the Clown sadly. I never saw anyone so beautiful before. Two tears rolled down his cheeks.  p. 58

At the end of the story Dorothy wants to keep away the spring but the three of them tell her she can’t. Then the Hunter says she doesn’t have to. When she arrives home in the (real) snow her father tells her to get back to bed, where she later dies.
There may be allegorical or metaphorical levels to this surreal, dream-like story (I’d guess it may be about puberty and adulthood) but, if there are, they went way, way over my head.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words.

The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter

The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter (Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2010) starts with the narrator, a British civil servant, visiting an old female college friend (and lover). They discuss an alien object called the Incoming which has entered the solar system and appears to be headed for Earth. Later in the conversation he reveals that the current scientific analysis shows that it actually headed for Venus.
The next section sees a later visit to see her at the Goonhilly telescopes, where she and others are attempting to contact the aliens, a controversial undertaking:

Our British Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted, nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter, I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the British Isles.”
I’d seen and heard roughs of Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan–style prime number lexicon, there was digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.

At the end of this section there is another revelation, which is that there are signs of life on Venus: a hole in the atmosphere has opened up where the Incoming is expected to arrive.
The climax of the story jumps forward in time once more, and (spoiler) they talk about how the Incoming attacked the Venusians, but were in turn destroyed by a gravity wave created by the latter’s destruction of Neptune. They also note that Mankind have been ignored throughout the war.
This is a good, if open-ended, piece, even if it is little more than an interesting notion combined with some philosophical musings about humanity. The story is told, appropriately enough, from offstage—which mirrors humanity’s place in the scheme of the story.
*** (Good), 4,850 words.

The Day the Aliens Came by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Day the Aliens Came by Robert Sheckley (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) gets off to a quirky start when an alien Synestrian (they appear similar to humans but have faces that look as if they have melted) comes to the writer’s door wanting to buy a story. They come to a deal and, when the writer finishes the story, he takes it to the alien and gets the latter’s notes:

[The] Synester said, “this character you have in here, Alice.”
“Yes, Alice,” I said, though I couldn’t quite remember writing an Alice into the story. Could he be referring to Alsace, the province in France? I decided not to question him. No sense appearing dumb on my own story.
“Now, this Alice,” he said, “she’s the size of a small country, isn’t she?”
He was definitely referring to Alsace, the province in France, and I had lost the moment when I could correct him. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right, just about the size of a small country.”
“Well, then,” he said, “why don’t you have Alice fall in love with a bigger country in the shape of a pretzel?”
“A what?” I said.
“Pretzel,” he said. “It’s a frequently used image in Synestrian popular literature. Synestrians like to read that sort of thing.”
“Do they?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Synestrians like to imagine people in the shape of pretzels. You stick that in, it’ll make it more visual.”
“Visual,” I said, my mind a blank.
“Yes,” he said, “because we gotta consider the movie possibilities.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, remembering that I got sixty percent [of the movie rights].  p. 356 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This extract pretty much sums up the quirky, offbeat tone of the story. Unfortunately the following scenes are equally as odd: we learn that his wife is also an alien; a family of Capellans turn up in their house as uninvited guests; the writer’s home is burgled when they are out but the Capellans just watch; the Capellan’s baby is kidnapped and they don’t seem to care; the couple watch a show where a man eats small aliens that congregate on his plate; the couple’s baby arrives before the wife goes into labour; etc.)
This just seems like random, pointless nonsense, and seems typical of what I’ve read of Sheckley’s late period work. I don’t know if he forgot how to write normal stories, or whether he was attempting to write some kind of modernist or post-modernist humour but, either way, it’s not worth your time.
– (Awful). 3,800 words.

Martian Heart by John Barnes

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Martian Heart by John Barnes (Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011) opens on Mars with an old man talking to a botterogater (robot interrogator or interviewer) about his life. He begins by talking about his partner and later wife, Samantha, and tells how, as teenage vagrants in LA, they got picked up by the police. After that their options in this punitive future world were (a) twenty years in the military, (b) ten years in the “glowies,” (radioactive decontamination squads) or (c) going to Mars as settlers. They choose the latter option (after marrying to qualify) as the much smarter Samantha realises it is the only way they can stay together.
Most of the rest of the story tells of their time as Martian prospectors, an occupation that takes them to distant parts of Mars in the rover Goodspeed, until, eventually (spoiler), Samantha’s well-telegraphed heart problems (caused by the reduced Martian gravity that affects a substantial proportion of the new settlers) leads to her death. Before she dies she gets him to promise to cremate her—she doesn’t want to be buried in the freezing ground—and also that he will continue with his ongoing education (earlier on in the story he is illiterate, but she manages to cajole him to learn to read on the long trip out to Mars).
When he later crashes the rover trying to get back to base with her body it lands on its roof and damages the radio. He realises that he won’t be rescued, and so decides to use the remaining oxygen to burn the rover with her in it—that way he can keep at least one of his promises to her. He’s subsequently knocked out by the explosion, but a satellite detects the flash and the AI sends an auto-rocket to rescue him. He is later indentured for the cost of his recovery and treatment, but eventually buys his freedom, partly because of his continual program self-improvement. The final scenes show him having become vastly wealthy, and the founder of a huge Martian city called Samantha.
This may seem a relatively uncomplicated piece, but the pleasure is in its telling: the narrative is delivered by a man whose other half is obviously his better half (and who continuously works on his improvement); it is set in a frontier, Old West-like Mars, which is explored in the story; and the scene where he cremates his dead wife (and indeed the greater love story included in the piece) is affecting without being mawkish:


I carried Sam’s body into the oxygen storage, set her between two of the tanks, and hugged the body bag one more time. I don’t know if I was afraid she’d look awful, or afraid she would look alive and asleep, but I was afraid to unzip the bag.
I set the timer on a mining charge, put that on top of her, and piled the rest of the charges on top. My little pile of bombs filled most of the space between the two oxygen tanks. Then I wrestled four more tanks to lie on the heap crosswise and stacked flammable stuff from the kitchen like flour, sugar, cornmeal, and jugs of cooking oil on top of those, to make sure the fire burned long and hot enough.
My watch said I still had five minutes till the timer went off.
I still don’t know why I left the gig. I’d been planning to die there, cremated with Sam, but maybe I just wanted to see if I did the job right or something—as if I could try again, perhaps, if it didn’t work? Whatever the reason, I bounded away to what seemed like a reasonable distance.
I looked up; the stars were out. I wept so hard I feared I would miss seeing them in the blur. They were so beautiful, and it had been so long.

This is a pretty good old-school story that will appeal to lovers of mid to late 20th Century SF.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,650 words.

Collapse by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Collapse by Nancy Kress (XPrize, 20171) was a recent group read choice of the Science Fiction Book Club FB group (they’ve just gone private so you’ll need to join to see the comments in that link), and the story is set in a future where a 2017 Flight 008, from Tokyo to San Francisco, passes through a wrinkle in space-time and lands in 2037. (Kress’s piece is one a number that share this initial premise.)
The story sees Matthew McAllister, the occupant of seat 12C, experience the first glimmerings of future shock as odd looking airport security staff move through the cabin in their fuchsia uniforms retinally scanning the passengers. The next morning, matters are worse:

By mid-morning, it was major news: The Flight From the Past. Lost for twenty years, no wreckage ever found. Interviews with the “miracle survivors,” bewildered or furious or terrified, frequently all three. Tearful reunions, mothers staring in disbelief at grown sons last seen as toddlers. Then the harder reunions: husbands facing wives now married to someone else, people whose elderly parents had died.
I’m the lucky one, McAllister thought, not without irony. He had no wife, children, parents, girlfriend; he’d always preferred it that way. He’d escaped the swarms of newspeople, government officials, and scientists tormenting the other Flight 008 passengers. He had cash in his briefcase from the currency exchange in Tokyo. He had hefty bank and brokerage accounts, and without instructions to the contrary, those went on forever. He had—
He had hysteria rising in his throat like bubbles of carbonation. He forced it down. Control. It was what would get him through, what had always gotten him through. He could do this.

McAllister then takes the maglev to Sacramento and spends the journey observing the changed world, the holo-TVs in the train, building roofs covered by green-white material he later learns is climate cooler, VR parlours, etc., but the thing that shocks him more than anything is a field of cucumbers. This plot element reappears at the end of the story (and also as section headings which give a time line of the exponential price rise of Dill Pickles: “2027: 40-Ounce jar of whole dill pickles, $7.99”)
The rest of the piece sees McAllister unable to access his apartment or funds (he is thrown out of the bank as an imposter), and when he tracks down his cousin, the beneficiary of his estate, he finds that he has died and the money has gone to a hostile wife. McAllister’s next move is a journey to see an old acquaintance called Erik, a cucumber farmer, and there we get a climactic SFnal data dump where we learn (a) McAllister was in Japan to sell a pollinating drone that was intended as a cure for Colony Collapse Disorder in bees and (b) that his device is been superseded by tiny FCO pollinating robots that no-one operates (FCO=fast, cheap, and out of control).
The story ends with McAllister staying the night and contemplating his future.
This is an interesting and readable enough piece, but it’s more futurology than story, and it fizzles out at the end.
** (Average). 3,350 words.

1. There have been at least a couple of these X-Prize digital anthologies. Another that I’m aware of is 2019’s Current Futures: A Sci-fi Ocean Anthology, edited by Ann VanderMeer.  ●

Evolution by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Evolution by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, October 1995) begins with an edgy conversation between two mothers over a garden fence about a hospital doctor who has been murdered.

Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.
I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Sean and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothesbasket.
“Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“Have the police arrested anybody?”
“Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers. There are only five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”  p. 322 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This gritty soap opera feel is maintained throughout much of the rest of the story.
We later find that this crime has occurred in a near-future where widespread drug resistance has caused a partial breakdown of the health system, as well as vigilante resistance against the doctors and hospitals who dare to use the one remaining drug, endozine, that has any anti-bacterial efficacy.
Later on in the story Betty’s son Jackie is linked, by an old high school friend who tries to recruit her to the pro-endozine side, to the vigilantes who are violently opposed to its use. We then find out, when the Betty can’t find her son, that the latter’s biological father is a hospital doctor called Salter (there is also some detail about their estrangement, and how Betty did prison time as a teenager when she shot out the windows of Salter’s house and injured a caretaker—I did say it was soap opera-ish).
When Betty goes to the hospital to see Salter to enlist his help in finding Sean (spoiler) there is an overly compressed scene where the news of endozine’s failure is revealed (the CDC have identified a resistant bacterial strain) and, after a huge data dump about this, (the obviously sick) Salter announces he has a solution—which is another bacteria to attack the resistant one. He gets Betty to fetch a syringe, and injects her, and then they leave the hospital just before it is blown up.
Betty then spreads the protective bacteria to everyone she meets.
This story doesn’t entirely work, mostly because the SFnal substance of it is crammed into the long single scene just described—and not in a particularly reader-friendly way (it’s Jargon Central in some places). And there are also a couple of questions that are not answered. Why did Salter get sick if he had the cure? Why does Betty’s vigilante son end up, at the end of the story, with the woman who tried to recruit Betty? On the other hand, some will appreciate the grittiness of the piece (and perhaps its current relevance), and there is some effective writing:

I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do.
I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of [prison]. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.
And it doesn’t work.  p. 335 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

**+ (Average t0 Good). 9,000 words.

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the “Highway”. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the “ghosts” but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty’s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That’s what this one said.
“Save it for a gawker’s tour,” I told her. “I’ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You’re fine, and then you’re dead.”
“This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I’d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
“This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?
“It’s good to see you,” Bloom said to me.
“Don’t let me interfere with this reunion. I’m out of here,” Havana said. “I don’t need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn’t fix the Highway’s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon’s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom’s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was “mapped” as a starting point) was “raped”. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story’s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:

You’ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.  p. 187 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (“Highway,” “Big R,” “go flat,” etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I’m not sure it’s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.

In Saturn Time by William Barton

Posted on by Paul Fraser

In Saturn Time by William Barton (Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark crater they find hard white rock (frozen water?) under a thin film of black matter.
The rest of the story telescopes forward at roughly four year intervals, and each time deploys an event vignette: Jensen is in orbit with the 1977 Apollo 29 when the Russians land on the Moon; in 1980 he is with President Udall, Vice President Mondale, and California Governor (and the next Democratic President after Udall) Jerry Brown, watching an (enhanced ) Saturn 5M lifting a moon base station; then, in 1984, he is on a mission taking a seventy-year-old Walter Cronkite to the Moon:

And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, [Cronkite had] chuckled softly and said, “This kinda reminds me of Paris . . .”
Uh. Paris.
“Sure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a goddamn typewriter . . .”
Then, sitting on the Extended LM’s floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he’d whipped out a kid’s folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first space flight.  p. 273 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

There are various other events: Jensen is the first man on Mars; a partly reusable Saturn 5R is launched; Jupiter’s moon Callisto is orbited, etc.
This is a well enough done piece but it’s really just a techo- fantasy for thwarted space geeks, and one that exists in a world that is completely devoid of any sense of realpolitik (there is no explanation as to why the voters would happily spend the colossal amount of money needed to fund an Apollo program on steroids, and the piece also posits the election of four Democratic Presidents succession).
For dreamers.
*** (Good). 5900 words.