Month: June 2021

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg (The Arcanist, June 2021) opens with this:

The ticks dropped down from the trees thick as sleet. I’d been out hunting with my brother, Paul, when it happened. They fell in great heaps, burrowing into us, tangling themselves up in our hair, our clothes. We had to shake them from our boots. Out they spilled, endless grains of living sand scouring our toes for blood. We found them days later under our armpits, the backs of our knees, the crannies of our earlobes. And then the telltale bullseye would emerge, hot and red. I’d gotten tick bites before, but never like this. I was a feast for an entire generation.

Subsequently the brothers are repelled at the thought of eating meat (or diary), and their similarly affected father—who persists—ends up in hospital due to a physical reaction.
We then see that ticks have spread all over the world, as has the condition that has affected the narrator’s family. The resultant rejection of animal products causes the collapse of those industries and a forced shift to a vegan diet.
The story finishes with the two brothers at the local creek. When they hear a rustling noise they don their ponchos as they think it is an approaching swarm of ticks, but (spoiler) it turns out to be a female moose and her calf coming down to drink—the first time that animal has been seen in the area for decades.
This is quite good as far as it goes, but it’s a very slight piece—an if-this-goes-on SF story compressed into a literary vignette. If this idea had been used in an genre SF story it would probably have been much longer, had multiple point of views,1 and would telescope through time from the beginning of the change to the end.
**+ (Average to Good)

1. The Grand Guignol version would have a thread which has an abattoir worker killing animals, being laid off, hitting rock bottom, and then returning to the factory to shoot himself in the head with a bolt gun.

Sandkings by George R. R. Martin

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Sandkings by George R. R. Martin

Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979) is one of the standout stories I remember from my early magazine reading and a piece I went back to recently after I read Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020). I did this as I wanted to read other Microcosmic God-themed or related stories to see how they handled the same subject matter.1
The opening, which limns the story’s main character, Simon Kress, presages everything that will follow:

Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself. The little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Finally Kress just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat one another if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.  p. 1 (Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Ninth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1980)

By the time Kress returns all the fish are dead, as is the carrion hawk (which was eaten by the shamble after it climbed up into the belfry). So Kress takes a trip into Asgard, Balder’s biggest city, and he eventually finds himself in Wo and Shade, a shop selling imported artefacts and exotic lifeforms. Kress soon makes his requirements clear to Jala Wo, the co-proprietor (“I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals.”) and underlines the point by telling her that he occasionally feeds his shambler unwanted kittens. After perusing her stock he leaves after ordering four differently coloured colonies of Sandkings, insect-like hivemind creatures that have rudimentary telepathy and, if kept in a terrarium and fed limited food, will fight wars against each other that involve truces and alliances.
Three days later Wo arrives to install the Sandkings in the terrarium, and fit a plastic cover with a feeding mechanism (“You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping”). Kress settles down to watch:

The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours they had been incorporated into the castle walls.
The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate, seated on the couch so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.
He was disappointed. Days passed, the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and to answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war.
He was getting upset.
Finally he stopped feeding them.
Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.
Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.
When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners.
After that, war followed war.  p. 7-8, Ibid.

Kress subsequently invites his friends and acquaintances over to a party at his house where the main attraction is watching the Sandkings war. The gathering is a huge success, but there are a couple of discordant episodes, first when a former lover, Cath M’Lane—whose puppy was eaten by the shamble when she and Kress lived together—tells him he is disgusting before walking out, and secondly when Jala Wo asks if he is feeding the Sandkings sufficiently. When Kress tells Wo to mind her own business, she says she will discuss the matter with Shade, and leaves, telling him to “look to his faces”. When Kress later looks at the castles in the corners of the tank, he sees that the images of his face the Sandkings previously created on the walls now have a slightly malicious expression on them.
The parties continue to be a success, and the guests start betting on the various castles; then other alien animals are introduced into the terrarium to (unsuccessfully) fight with the Sandkings. During this there is the first sign of a coalition between the various castles when three of them wait for an invading sand spider to emerge from the fourth castle.
While all this is going on Kress’s ex-lover M’Lane reports him to the authorities, and he has to bribe an official to bury the complaint. Then, as payback, Kress puts a puppy (similar to the one M’Lane lost previously) into the Sandking terrarium, films the result, and sends it to her.
It’s at this point where matters (spoiler) start spiralling wildly out of control. Kress notices the Sandkings have changed the faces on their castles to look malevolent and leering, and punishes them by sticking a sword into the maw of one the castles. Then Cath M’Lane comes to his house, furious at the film he has sent her, and attacks the tank glass with a hammer. Kress tries to stop her stop her causing any damage to the terrarium, but ends up stabbing her with the sword which is lying nearby. In her death throes she smashes the glass, and the Sandkings escape. Kress flees.
The rest of the tale sees Kress trying to clean up his various messes, which variously involve an attempt to kill the Sandkings in the garden and cellar with insecticide (but the latter only after he chops up Cath’s body for them to dispose of), his recruitment of “cleaners” with flamethrowers (who destroy two of the colonies but are either eventually overrun or pushed into the cellar by Kress), and invitations to friends so he can feed the hungry creatures (one wonders why he didn’t just open an account with the local butcher). Eventually he contacts Wo, who tells him that the remaining maw is becoming sentient and birthing second generation “mobiles”.
Eventually, Kress flees into the desert and, when later suffering badly from dehydration, runs towards a house in the desert only to find it has been built by the missing orange Sand Kings . . . .
This is very good, near excellent piece of SF horror and, even if a couple of things are slightly far-fetched, it has a relentless, over the top ghastliness that makes it a compulsively readable piece.
I note in passing that, although this has some similarities with Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, it is more about man’s appalling treatment of other species (something that Martin would return to again in his contemporaneous series of ‘Haviland Tuf’ stories) rather than the idea of man-as-god. That said, you could liken Kress’s boy-burning-an-anthill sadism with that of a capricious deity.
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 16,000 words.

1. Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) sees a man accelerate the evolution of a colony of creatures (by repeated genocide among other techniques) to produce inventions which he then sells. You could say that the protagonist essentially converts their pain and suffering into money. Reviewed on my other blog here.

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
**** (Very Good). 23,350 words.

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler (F&SF, January-February 2021) opens with the narrator recounting a childhood memory of the day that the king and queen came through his village; the narrator’s sister was given a disk with the king’s symbol, a red dragon, on one side.
The story then moves to the current day, where we get some brief information about the village and the narrator’s marriage plans before learning that the king has gone to war. The army subsequently passes through town, and the narrator and his friend Henry are recruited.
The pair endure a long, hard march to the sea and at one point the company shelter in a cave. When the narrator goes to relieve himself he finds a passage that takes him back to the surface. He sleeps there and, when he wakes the next day, he sees the skeleton of a dragon (“the king’s dragon”) embedded in a nearby rock face. The commander sees it as a sign.
When they finally arrive at the coast (spoiler) the narrator decides to desert and go back to his village. En route, he wonders what he’ll tell his family and neighbours on his return:

I would have to explain to the village why I was back and everyone else gone, and it couldn’t be a story that made me a coward, a deserter, and a man who didn’t love his king. I wasn’t yet sure how this story would go, but I wasn’t really worried about that. I had twelve whole days to work it out and I could already see its bones.  p. 256

I can understand why a departing editor (who is off to write his own tales) might use this as the final piece in their last ever issue, but the arc of this story seems pointless: young man goes to war, changes mind, goes home. Littering it with dragon images doesn’t much improve that.
* (Mediocre). 3,000 words.

Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) opens at a Thanksgiving dinner where Ori the narrator (a sort of adopted stepdaughter of the husband of the couple) has to cope with a variety of snooty and/or eccentric relatives: the wife and daughter are supercilious, the aunt constantly corrects and scolds everyone and laments the decline in standards, and Grandma Elving talks incessantly and with great detail about a Christmas job she had in Woolworths as a teenager. The wife can’t stand Grandma Elving’s endless stories and constantly tries to change the subject, but Dave Lassiter, the daughter’s boyfriend, is interested because he is studying neuroscience and is finishing a project on TFBM—traumatic flashbulb memory—and realises that Grandma’s vivid memories may be a case of that.
Then, on the Monday after the dinner, Ori gets a call from Gramdma asking for a lift to the doctors. However, when they get to their destination, Ori discovers that Grandma has arranged to meet Lassiter, who wants to interview her for his TFBM research project. The rest of the first part of the story sees Lassiter undertake many long interviews with Grandma, eventually becoming convinced that her intense memories are trauma related. Later on, after making little progress in discovering what the buried trauma might be, there are hints that it might possibly involve a young man called Marty who worked on the lunch counter with Grandma.
During this period Lassiter and Ori spend a lot of time together, and this is redoubled when Grandma suggests that they go to the city to look at the store to see if it will jog her memory:

The wind was definitely blowing today, a biting wind that whipped icily around the corners, but Grandma Elving didn’t seem to notice, she was so busy remembering what stores had once been there. “There was a shoe repair shop there,” she said, pointing at the Planet Fitness gym. “It had a neon sign that said, ‘Soles While You Wait.’ With a ‘U’ instead of the word You.’ It was right next to a Christian Science reading room, and I always thought the sign should be in their window instead.”
“What about the store?” Lassiter said, turning her wheelchair so she was facing the building where the Woolworth’s had been. “Do you remember where the door was?”
“Yes, it was right there,” she said, pointing at one of the windows of the 7-Eleven. “It was a big double door, and above it was the store’s name in gold letters on a red background—F.W. Woolworth & Co.—and in the corners, 5c and 10c,” and it looked like she was seeing it right now.
And seeing the whole store. “The candy counter was near the door,” she said, pointing, “and so was Christmas merchandise—tinned fruitcakes and bath sets and shaving mugs, and over in the corner was Gift Wrapping. I loved working in Gift Wrapping because you could see outside, the cars and the people hurrying by with their shopping bags and packages, all bundled up in their hats and scarves and boots.”
“Where would the lunch counter have been?” Lassiter asked.
“There,” she said, pointing to the left. “It stretched half the length of the store. It had stools all along it and booths coming out from it, like that,” she said, gesturing.
“And you and Marty and Ralph worked behind the counter?”
“Yes, I made the sandwiches and dished up the blue plate specials, and the boys grilled the hamburgers and hot dogs and made the fountain drinks, which was good. The first cherry Coke I tried to make, I got cherry syrup all over, and Marty said—”
She stopped short. “The cosmetics and notions departments were in the middle,” she said, starting again, “and over there,” she pointed to the right, “was Gloves and Scarves, and behind it was Stationery, which I loved working in because Andy worked there. He was so cute.”
“Before, when you were telling us about the lunch counter and Marty,” Lassiter said, kneeling down next to her wheelchair, “did you remember something?”
“No,” she said, but doubtfully, and then burst out, “It’s so maddening! Every time I think I have it, it disappears!  p. 179-180

After this they go and have lunch, where Grandma disappears into the loos for an inordinate amount of time leaving Ori and Lassiter together to talk. Then, when Grandma returns, she remembers the Christmas manger figurines she had been collecting at the time, and how Marty bought two of them for her. Subsequently she dispatches Lassiter and Ori to scour the thrift stores for a set, in the hope that the figurines will jog her memory. Eventually they find what they are looking for, and Grandma reveals that Marty died when he was young.
However, we eventually find out towards the end of the story (spoiler), when Grandma ends up in hospital during Xmas dinner, that she already has a set of figurines at home—and that the interviews, the trip into town, lunch, and the search for the figurines, and all the time that they spend together, was actually Grandma’s plan to matchmake Ori and Lassiter. And, worse, Ori learns that Marty wasn’t killed, which leaves her with the unenviable task of telling Lassiter that Grandma’s manufactured trauma is not true and that his research is based on falsified information, something that will likely cause him to fail his course.
The final part of the story reveals that Grandma’s vivid memories were created by a feeling of intense happiness while she stood at the door of Woolworths one evening. Ori has her own experience of this when she hears Lassiter say that he didn’t her earlier hypothesis that this was the case as it would have meant that he couldn’t go on seeing Grandma—and her.
This is a well told and entertaining romcom (the daughter provides a couple of amusing interference episodes during the story), and the evocative final description of Granma’s flashbulb moment, as well as Ori’s epiphany in the lift, are fittingly seasonal. They are also enough to overcome the late switcheroo of the trauma plot device.
I note in passing that this is a mainstream piece, not SF or fantasy.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 21,650 words.

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, September/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship:

Rumors floating around Ciudad Orilla promised vast stores of untold wealth inside that crater on Madreperla, from sea creatures with bones made of the finest glass to minerals needed for every single engine. The water that filled part of the crater, the stories went, contained healing properties, and had more nutrients than anything that humans had concocted thus far.
The Maria Segunda, a ship that had land-to-sea-to-space capabilities, set out to learn which of those rumors had a basis in fact.
She arrived on the rim on a Thursday, set down on what her crew thought was an ice shelf, and by Friday morning, found herself in the midst of what the crew later described as an ice storm.
Only it was unlike any storm they had ever seen. A massive wind swirled around them, and they were caught in the center of it. But that didn’t stop ice pellets, rock, and other materials that seemed harder than rock from hitting the outside of the ship. The Maria Segunda had defensive shields, but they were rotating shields, built to stave off laser weapons. The normal heat and weather shields that any land-to-space ship had were not up to dealing with this particular anomaly, whatever the heck it was.
In the space of an hour, the damage to the ship’s exterior was so severe that there was a good chance the ship might not make it out of the relatively weak atmosphere of Madreperla.  p. 15

This passage, with its Star Trek tech (“rotating shields”, “heat and weather shields”), flabby prose (“whatever the heck it was”), and tell-instead-of-show approach (all of it) illustrates the overall quality of the story.
And, after this section, matters do not improve when the daughter then interviews one of her father’s one-time crewmates in an over-described space pub called the Elizabeta—we get a page and a half about its skanky surroundings, and the owner, before the daughter asks about her father and the ship.
Then, later on, we are back at the pub—again—with other characters:

So, on that final Sunday, she slides her whisky back to Beta, and walks out of the bar in search of Ferguson. Imelda finds him sitting in an “outside” table along the so-called promenade.
Most commercial districts of star ports have several promenades. On the exclusive levels, the promenades are designed to make patrons think they’re outside in some exotic natural environment, complete with expensive water features and fake sunlight.
On most levels, the promenades resemble city centers of faraway famous places, with some replicas of the cultural icons hovering nearby. Or, if the displays aren’t permanent, there’s a rotating spectacle of VR images that show the tourist highlights of the planet below.
But the promenade outside of the Elizabeta is nothing more than chairs and tables and some gambling booths. The ceiling is as brown as the walls that are as brown as the floors. There’s nothing special or even “outside” here, just a place to be away from the bar’s noise, while still receiving the bar’s service.
Captain Giles Ferguson is sitting out there alone, his fingers wrapped around a stein of a particularly skunky local beer called Ragtop. He drinks nothing but Ragtop at the Elizabeta, but unlike some of his shipmates, he never had the beverage delivered in quantity to the ship.  p. 21

I can see the point of the first and fifth paragraphs, but do we really need a lot of vague blather about what would normally be seen on the promenade outside of the pub? This is a writer thinking out loud about background details rather than reducing them to a pithy line or image.
These interviews are followed by accounts of (a) the corporate shenanigans behind the trip (it seems that tech triggers the storms but the insurers were content to underwrite the trip); (b) her father’s marital backstory; (c) the recruitment of another captain to act as a rescue ship should the need arise; (d) what might have happened to the Gabriella when it arrived over the crater (three scenarios where the second-hand speculation about what may have occurred is about as riveting as you would expect); and, finally, (e) the findings of the inquiry.
It is bad enough that this is all told in mind numbing detail, is set in the thinnest of space opera realities, and that there is no plot progression whatsoever (at the end of the piece we are in exactly the same place as we were when we began), but throughout the story it is blindingly obvious that that the maelstroms are caused either by aliens, or by some current or leftover defence tech (the narrative grudgingly has one of the crew of the Maria Segunda state late on in the story that it felt like they were fighting a “live thing”). This idea, however, is almost completely unexamined: whether this is because the writer couldn’t come up with an intriguing explanation or whether it’s because there is another twenty thousand words to be milked out of this idea remains to be seen.
– (Awful). 21,450 words.

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)1 sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

1. Previously published in Czech in 2018, and a winner of the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.