Month: October 2021

At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes

Posted on by Paul Fraser

At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes (F&SF, October-November 1995)1 is the seventh published story in the “Kevin Grierson” series, and begins with his “Shadow”, a doppelgänger, or perhaps more accurately a secret double who normally exists inside Kevin, getting dressed and going to work instead of him. Most of the rest of the story involves the scrapes and encounters that the drug-using Shadow has with the other people at his place of employment (his boss warns the Shadow not to come in late again; he goes to an outdoor fashion shoot with Les; he meets a woman called Sarah who has a boozer/druggie husband, etc.)
Dropped into all of this mostly scene setting description and verbal back and forth, is a short flashback scene where we see Kevin working as a male prostitute (I think) and waking up to find his drill sergeant client is dead.
At the end of the story the Shadow returns from a drug deal to find Kevin has been drafted.
It was hard to keep track of what was going on in this slice-of-life, and I have little memory of what I did read. I’ve no idea what the editor saw in this (at best) borderline fantasy story, and wonder if it got taken on the strength of its prequels.
– (Awful). 6,750 words.

1. The ISFDB page for the Richard Bowes’ “Kevin Grierson” series.

Sector General by James White

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sector General by James White (New Worlds #65, November 1957) is the first of a long series of stories,1 and it gets off to a pretty good start with an alien spaceship coming out of hyperspace beside the Sector Twelve General Hospital:

The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub-critical, and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.
The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship captain—and crew—energised its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.
“This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly. “We have casualties and require assistance. Our classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM….”  pp. 4-5

After this the story continues with Dr Conway, a medic who has recently arrived at the Sector General. As he wanders around its corridors, we learn that (a) all species are described by a four letter codes, (b) there are doctors from a variety of species in the hospital (c) the hospital has multiple treatment environments, and (d) the pacifistic Conway does not like the Monitors, the “military peacekeepers”, who run the hospital.
The rest of the tale is a fairly episodic affair. Conway is summoned to treat the Telfi, but first has to go to the tape room, where he will be programmed with an alien physiology learning tape. When Conway sees the Chief Psychologist in charge of the process, O’Mara, is a Monitor, Conway’s attitude shows. O’Mara subsequently tells Conway that he wants to talk to him after the tape programming is removed.
Conway then goes to treat the Telfi, later dodging the interview with O’Mara by not getting the programming removed. Instead, he goes on his rounds but, after dealing with his first patient, a hypochondriac crocodile-like being called Chalder, Conway starts to feel cold and lonely. This turns out to be a side-effect of the learning tape, which is making Conway act like a Telfi, and his symptoms develop to the point that he leans against the dining hall oven and scorches his clothes. When he eventually recovers consciousness he gets a dressing down from O’Mara for not mentioning it was his first tape (which made him more susceptible to what happened).
The next part of the story sees Conway encounter a large number of Monitor troops who have arrived at the station; they have been in combat and need treatment, and this causes the doctor to do more brooding. Before he can consult another doctor about the way he feels, more troops arrive needing attention. As he treats them Conway learns that they have been intervening in a human-DBLF (a caterpillar-like alien) war, and that the Monitor who is telling Conway about this looks as disgusted as he does. Eventually, Conway learns the Monitors aren’t the warlike people he thinks they are, and that his own social group is a “protected species”:

Conway said, “What?”
“A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata—on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth—come practically all the great artists, musicians, and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilisation, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behaviour are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the galaxy truly civilised, truly good.”  pp. 26-27

At the end of this lecture/data dump (spoiler), a spaceship crashes into the station, and a blundering alien patient runs amok in the gravity control section. This sets up an extended final act, which sees Conway make a perilous journey into the area where the alien is rampaging. There he undergoes a crisis of conscience when he is told to kill the alien to stop the catastrophic casualties that the fluctuating gravity field is causing. (Conway eventually, and reluctantly, does so, but the author bottles out of his Trolley Problem2 by having Conway later discover that the alien has the sentience of a dog).
This story has some pretty good parts (the multi-species hospital, the interesting aliens, etc.) but it is (a) overlong (the couple of thousand words after the climax are largely redundant, not to mention Conway’s overdone—and at times somewhat unconvincing and ill-informed—pacifistic agonising), (b) uneven (the gobbets of exposition and moralising), and (c) generally gives the impression of a writer who is trying to run before he can walk. The later stories were better, but this is a promising start.
**+ (Average to Good). 17,700 words. Story link.

1. The ISFDB page for the Sector General series is here.

2. The Wikipedia page for the philosophical conundrum of the Trolley Problem.

Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first “Gunbelt Highway” passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6 (2052), Orbit 2 (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which in turn describe a stretch of road, two different songs, a space traffic route, a piece of malware, a TV movie, an account of the Biafran War, and a western adventure novella. As you read through these wikis, there are inconsistencies in the history they describe, something that is developed when the next wiki discusses a sentient meme:

Bentley (and others) also stress that the Gunbelt Highway Effect is far more insidious than the other described phenomena, in several key ways. One, its effect is often scattershot and piecemeal, rather than revolving around a single articulable fact. Two, it not only acts to change or invert verifiable historical details, it often seems to function retroactively, altering, mutating and even cross-pollinating the ‘prior strata’ of axiomatic information upon which any verification of said details depends. As such, the effect seems to possess an acausal property, which Bentley variously calls ‘quantum memetics’ or ‘memetic relativity’, behaving contrary to chronological or linear progression, with meaning and significance shifting depending on the objective position of the observer. Three, it not only affects a modification of collective psychology, but also of hard (usually digital) data.  p. 15-16.

Later on in the story this meme is traced back to science fiction in a droll passage:

In “The Primate Pool” (2098), Bell controversially traces the ideas of skeuomophic resonance and quantum memetics back to the pulp fiction mass produced during the 20th century. He suggests that the “heavy lifting” of human cultural development has occurred, not in the deliberate field of philosophy, with its “scrupulous laboratory condition”, but “in the wild”, without oversight or adequate containment, in works of science fiction and speculative fiction. While a significant portion of science fiction has been “purposefully prescient” and has often accurately predicted many aspects of what was deemed ‘the future’, Bell argues that the vast majority of works in the genre have been produced “like wildfire, almost at random, without peer review, and usually with a throw-away or wilfully disposable intent. Words were a base currency, squandered with spendthrift glee, with no thought for the exchange rate, or the infinite variations of idea they could generate”. Bell describes the authors of the genre, often producing frantically on demand to meet publishing deadlines and pay-by-the-word counts, as “toiling like the aphoristic infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, generating incalculable quantities of ideas purely for the purpose of escapist entertainment, without regard for the pernicious durability or half-life of those ideas”.
Bell draws a clear distinction between the small coterie of “responsible speculative authors” who conscientiously pursued the development of prescient scientific and sociopolitical concepts, and the “now largely anonymous legion of hacks and jobbing writers” who wrote “with flagrant abandon” to mass-manufacture prodigious quantities of consumable entertainment, the equivalent of “fast food giants churning out food substitutes that favoured short-term gratification over nourishment, or pre-regulation plastics manufacturers overstuffing cultural and mental landfills”.  p. 16

This idea of a changing or tampered-with history is examined once more using the biography of the previously mentioned Biafran War writer but, by the time I finished the story, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. The central conceit, and the changing events, are also buried under far too many words—the story would benefit from being shorter and more focussed (especially at the beginning, where it takes far too long to get going).
** (Average). 7,600 words. ParSec website.

Nackles by Donald E. Westlake

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nackles by Donald E. Westlake (F&SF, January 1964) begins with the narrator discussing the characteristics of gods, and whether Santa Claus is one, before he goes on to talk about his sister and brother-in-law. We learn that the latter assaulted his wife on one occasion, but was convinced by the narrator (with the help of a baseball bat) not to treat her like that again. Later on, however, the brother-in-law reverts to verbally and emotionally mistreating his wife and kids, eventually inventing the idea of a satanic anti-Santa, Nackles, to keep his three children out of sight and earshot—he tells the kids that Nackles doesn’t leave presents, but comes up from his underground tunnels to capture and eat children who have been bad. Frank also tells other fathers about his invention, so the idea spreads and belief in Nackles increases.
In the final section (spoiler) Frank’s behaviour becomes worse than usual one Christmas Eve—with the expected results for someone who behaves like a spoiled child.
There isn’t much of a story here, but it is a neat, well-developed idea, with a good last line from a well-known Xmas Song (“You’d better watch out”).1
*** (Good). 3,050 words. Internet Archive.

1. Santa Claus is Coming to Town (not the original, but a version I like) at 00:49.

A Christmas Tale by Sarban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Christmas Tale by Sarban (Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, 1951) opens with the narrator’s description of a group of ex-pats in Jeddah donning fancy dress before they go out carol singing on Christmas Eve. After several recitations they eventually end up in the house of Alexander Andreievitch, a displaced (Imperial) Russian who now runs the Saudi Air Force.
There, after the group have sung their carols, the narrator and the Russian start drinking their way through a bottle of Zubrovka. When the narrator notices that there is a drawing of a bison on the label of the bottle, he asks the Russian if he has ever seen one, perhaps in the wilder parts of his home country. Andreievitch says no, but adds that he once saw something even rarer.
So begins a story which takes us from the sticky heat of a Saudi evening to the cold beyond the Arctic Circle, where Andreievitch was once the observer of a two-man crew tasked to fly a seaplane from a navy ship to a distant settlement. After the pair got there and dropped their message, they turned for home—only to be caught out by worsening weather. Just before they ran out of fuel, the pilot force-landed in the marshes. The pair then struggled on their own for a number of days, before they came upon a small group of Samoyed hunters.
The natives feed the two starving men, but the meat makes them both sick—and the next day they discover that it half rotten and is covered with unfamiliar red wool or hair. The pair angrily quiz the natives about the source of the meat and, when they cannot understand the Samoyed’s replies, demand that are taken to the nearest settlement. Later, however, when the weather closes in, they find themselves taking shelter at what would appear to be the partially uncovered (but still frozen) burial grounds of an unknown creature—the source of the meat which provided their meal.
The story concludes (spoiler) with the group sheltering from the deteriorating weather under an overhanging bank, when they hear a noise in the distance:

Igor Palyashkin and I, we too shrank down against the earth; what we could hear then stilled us like an intenser frost, and I felt cold to the middle of my heart. Through the dead and awful silence of that pause before the snow we heard something coming across the blind waste towards us. All day in that dead world nothing had moved but ourselves; now, out there where the shadows advanced and retreated and the pallid gloom baffled our sight, something was coming with oh! such labour and such pain, foundering and fighting onwards through the half-solid marsh. In that absolute stillness of the frozen air we heard it when it was far away; it came so slowly and it took so long, and we dare not do anything but listen and strain our eyes into the darkening mist. In what shape of living beast could such purpose and such terrible strength be embodied? A creature mightier than any God has made to be seen by man was dragging itself through the morass. We heard the crunch of the surface ice, then the whining strain of frozen mud as the enormous bulk we could not picture bore slowly down on it; then a deep gasping sound as the marsh yielded beneath a weight its frostbonds could not bear. Then plungings of such violence and such a sound of agonised straining and moaning as constricted my heart; and, after that awful struggle, a long sucking and loud explosion of release as the beast prevailed and the marsh gave up its hold. Battle after battle, each more desperate than the last, that dreadful fight went on; we listened with such intentness that we suffered the agony of every yard of the creature’s struggle towards our little bank of earth. But as it drew nearer the pauses between its down-sinkings and its tremendous efforts to burst free grew longer, as if that inconceivable strength and tenacity of purpose were failing. In those pauses we heard the most dreadful sound of all: the beast crying with pain and the terror of death. Dear Lord God! I think no Christian men but we, Igor Palyashkin and I, have ever heard a voice like that. I know that no voice on all this earth could have answered that brute soul moaning in the mist of the lonely taiga that evening before the snow.
That beast was alone in all the world.  p. 15-16

The creature never gets close to them, seemingly disappearing into the marsh or the gloom.
The final section sees the narrator’s carol-singing acquaintances get up to leave, whereupon the Russian tells him of the brief glimpse he caught of the creature: the great head, the long red-brown wool, the long curling teeth.
I liked this story—it’s an atmospheric piece with a lot of evocative descriptions (a result of its old-school literary writing). Even if the climax of the story does involve a creature that remains largely (and correctly) offstage, it is nevertheless an effective piece.
Worth reading.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6550 words. Amazon UK Look Inside. Amazon US Look Inside.

Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta

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Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with an intriguing short hook before becoming a long description of the narrator’s friend Herbert, a childhood prodigy who is blunt to the point of rudeness with other people. We see this play out in various scenes from Herbert’s childhood, mostly at school, from which he eventually gets expelled. Later in life he gets married, but his wife subsequently divorces him because of the many experiments he undertakes at home.
After more than four thousand words of back-story about Herbert (about half the length of this piece) we eventually get to the science fiction, when he visits the narrator’s house and states that he has managed to make one of his mice disappear but can’t replicate the experiment. Then Herbert vanishes while the pair are in the garden.
Years pass. The narrator’s business thrives and his children grow up. One day, while he is looking in an old book, the narrator sees Herbert in a photograph taken in 1913 (fifty years earlier). Further investigation reveals the man in the photograph invented a revolutionary steam engine and wrote a treatise about time as a fourth dimension.
These discoveries drive the narrator to teach himself science and investigate Herbert’s inventions but, eventually, he realises that his intellect isn’t up to the task. Then a young schoolteacher arrives in town and takes an interest but, at the end of the story, he also vanishes.
I was a bit perplexed at why this story was selected for publication—it isn’t structured like a modern work (the long section at the start detailing Herbert’s character and history feels like something from H.G. Wells), the time-travel idea is unoriginal, and there is virtually no story beyond a couple of people vanishing. Or any resolution. Not only is the story set in 1963, it feels like it was written then too. All that said, I’ve read worse in pro SF magazines.1
(Mediocre). 8,200 words. ParSec website.

1. The writer is Ukrainian, so English is perhaps her second language, but the copy-editor should have asked her to get rid of some of those commas and simplify some of the sentences:

That morning when Herbert, a good friend of mine, came to me, again, the third time that week, was the most usual Tuesday morning one could ever imagine. His theories did not let him sleep at night, which happened pretty often, but this time everything was different. This time it was real.
Since early childhood, I was his only friend and the most appreciative listener—in all honesty, I didn’t always understand what he was saying and what he was even talking about, but, unlike other people, I didn’t have anything against it.
I met Herbert on my first day at school. Those huge thick glasses he watched the world through made his eyes look even bigger than they were and a little goggled. But even without them, he looked pretty weird, which did not do him any good in high school. He was different from all the rest of the children, too different to be part of the crowd and remain unnoticed wherever he went. Frankly speaking, it never mattered to him, just like everything else- everything but science.  p. 32

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #298, 27th February 2020)1 has a title that pretty much describes the story: a mermaid called Essarala wants to travel among the stars but lives in a planet-bound culture. Then, when an interstellar trading ship arrives in orbit for the first time, Essarala thinks she may have found a way off-planet—until she realises that the ship has no water for a mer to live in. Her sister Kiovasa suggests they should visit the witch beneath the waves for help.
After arriving at the witch’s lair, and discussing the matter with her—during which the witch gives warnings about the dangers and difficulties that will lie ahead—she says that she can give Essarala two legs like the humans. Essarala is determined to go and, even though she doesn’t understand everything the witch has warned her about, asks what the price is. The witch replies that one day Essarala will want to come home and, when she does, she should visit her again. Then the witch gives her a knife that will cleave her tail into two legs.
Later, after Essarala has cut herself and been accepted onto the crew, she is given to an alien called Ssen to be mentored. We see her develop as a crew member, and learn about some of her adventures:

Essarala learned to fly in skysuits in vast and turbulent gas planets, some of which had corrosive atmospheres. She saw twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nighttime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once a millennium. And she kept her promise, too: for every world she visited, she sang her sister’s name.

Someday I will go back and tell her of the things I have seen, Essarala thought again and again. But not yet, not yet.

Then, towards the end of the story (spoiler), Ssen teaches Essarala about special relativity, and she realises that time will be passing much more quickly for her sister on her world. Essarala begs the captain and crew to take her back home, and they generously do so. As soon as they arrive Essarala visits the witch as promised, to be told that the old woman will shortly die and that, given the wisdom she has gained on her travels, Essarala will replace her . Then the witch tells Essarala that her sister is still alive but that she doesn’t have long left. Essarala goes to find her, and the story ends with the two sisters together.2
I thought the idea of telling an SF story as a fantasy tale worked very well here (it’s possible to view the severing of her tail to become two legs, etc., as unexplained superscience), and it is an enjoyable and original piece. I also thought Lee’s elegant and concise writing style added to the story. The ending is perhaps not as strong as the rest of it, but that is a minor quibble.3
***+ (Good to very good.) 5,950 words. [Story]

1. This is a finalist for the Sturgeon and short story Hugo Awards for 2021.

2. There is a dedication at the end of the story to Lee’s sister.

3. Some of the commenters in one of my (private) FB groups (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction) thought that the lack of foreboding at the end of the story was a weakness. I thought that the uncertainty about her sister provided that.

Stranger Station by Damon Knight

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Stranger Station by Damon Knight (F&SF, December 1956) opens with Paul Wesson arriving at a space station built far from Earth for the purpose of interacting with visiting members of an alien species whose proximity causes humans mental distress.
For the first month of Wesson’s six month stay he is alone, apart from an AI/computer network he calls “Aunt Jane”, who he quizzes about various matters while he waits for the alien to arrive—What do the aliens look like? Can he see a picture of them? How did the previous incumbents of the station cope with their tour of duty, etc.? But Aunt Jane won’t answer most of his questions, saying that it isn’t permitted. The computer does, however, read to him an account of the first contact with the aliens on Titan:

We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening . . . The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia . . . Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading . . . We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it this was later forwarded for analysis . . .  p. 6

The rest of the month sees Wesson become slightly stir-crazy but then, one day when he is on a spacewalk to the much larger sector two of the station (built to house the alien), he starts to feel fearful, and then there is a booming sound—the alien visitor has arrived. Wesson now feels the same distress as the original contact team:

It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face. . . . It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota . . . wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold. . . .
With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around in slow circles.  p. 11

During this part of the story we also learn that the alien’s golden fluid provides humans with increased longevity, and that Wesson’s bosses want him to ask the aliens if they intend continuing their twenty year visits. Then Wesson realises he can sense the position of the alien, and realises that it may be suffering too. Eventually he pressures Aunt Jane into showing him a video image of the alien, which precipitates a realisation (“When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate.”). Wesson concludes (spoiler) that, while he and the alien are in close proximity, his mind is being changed so that he (and others like him) will be able to peacefully co-exist with them. When he explains all this to Aunt Jane however, he discovers that he can no longer understand her or speak, read or write English.
The last section sees Wesson decide to resist the emanations coming from the alien, which then causes it such pain that it breaches its sector and wrecks the station. There is a long description of the death throes and, before Wesson dies, his final realisation is that his actions will cause humanity to come into conflict with the aliens.
If the plot of this story sounds like it doesn’t makes much sense, that is because it doesn’t: I think Knight was writing a brooding psychological horror here, and hadn’t really thought through the internal logic. Now, if readers are happy to just immerse themselves in the descriptive writing and atmospherics, they will probably enjoy it—if you have an analytical mind, however, you will be distracted by many questions (Why does Masson have to be unconscious when he arrives at the station? Why does he spend a month there on his own before the alien arrives? How does humanity manage to get enough immortality fluid for everyone if the aliens only visit every twenty years? How did they discover that the fluid could be used for this purpose in the first place? Why do the aliens think they can affect humanity as a whole if they only “convert” one station keeper every twenty years? Why must the two races have a love/hate relationship, can’t they peacefully co-exist or ignore each other? Why does the last sentence have Aunt Jane sounding as if it loves Wesson?) Also on the debit side of the story is the fact that a lot of the writing is long-winded description (whereas the conversation Wesson has with his boss about a possible fluid shortage—and why he doesn’t have a cat on board with him—isn’t even that, it’s just padding). The final nail in the coffin is that a couple of major plot developments come from Wesson having realisations or intuitions about things, always a weak way of advancing a story.
Not one for the left-brained (analytical/methodical).
** (Average). 9,400 words.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod

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Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) is set in the world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (now out of copyright), and takes place five years after Winston Smith’s interrogation, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Thought Police. The story opens with Smith drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, and watching a news program about Number One (the leader of the enemy state Eastasia). Then he recognises a man sitting behind him, and realises it is Syme, who previously worked with Smith in the Research Department until Syme was unpersonned, disappeared. Syme begins talking to Smith, and tells him that he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Shetland but was released early.
During the pair’s subsequent conversation Smith finds out that Syme is going back to his old job (Syme notes his ex-colleagues are still working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary), before they are interrupted by events on the screen, which shows Eastasian people protesting against Number One—an unprecedented event. Smith, Syme and the rest of the café’s patrons join in with shouts of “Down with Number One!”, cries similar to those they would normally make during the Two Minute Hate.
After Syme leaves, Smith starts walking home, only to be accosted by the Thought Police and bundled into a car. Sitting in the back is O’Brien, the man who tortured and psychologically broke Smith in Room 101. Smith tells O’Brien to get it over with (Smith expects to be executed, and has done for the last five years) but O’Brien says a worse fate awaits him: Smith subsequently spends several days in a rubber cell withdrawing from his alcohol addiction.
O’Brien then sends for Smith (spoiler):

‘Why have you brought me here?’ Winston asked.
O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose, and looked at Winston with the intense, unspoken sympathy of their first exchanged glance, long ago. It was as if the arrest, the torture, the long interrogation and indoctrination, and the room that Winston could—with some effort—avoid thinking about, had never happened.
‘I am engaged,’ said O’Brien, ‘in a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the Party in Airstrip One, and hopefully in the whole of Oceania. You have a small but important part to play in this conspiracy. Will you join me?’
Winston’s mug rattled as he put it down. A cold sweat broke from his every pore. It was possible that this was a test of his loyalty. It was also possible that O’Brien—the manipulator, the torturer, the inquisitor, the provocateur—was after all an enemy of the Party! In either case, it was best to play along. If he did not, he was unlikely to leave this place alive. He could always gather what information he was able to, and denounce O’Brien to the Thought Police at the first opportunity.  p. 22

In the rest of this long section, O’Brien unveils a conspiracy which involves many of the Thought Police, and he also provides Smith with an account of what life was like under Socialism at the end of the WWII. He then reveals that Smith is one of the Windrush generation (a black immigrant from Jamaica). O’Brien finally adds that there are other people who can remember what it was like at the end of the war, and takes Smith to meet some soldiers.
The last part of the story sees O’Brien and Smith go to an underground shelter where members of the military are in the process of mounting a coup. During the visit a black officer called Haynes gives Smith an account of the various flash points and insurrections in Oceania before the pair ask him to be the Minister of Truth in the new provisional government (“political reasons in the Americas [mean] that at least one of the Ministers in the new [Airstrip One] government should be a Negro.”) Then, during this conversation, there is an attack on the bunker by forces that are still loyal to Oceania. After the shoot-out Haynes is dead, and Syme appears from the smoke as the leader of the rebels who have saved Smith and O’Brien from the loyalist attackers. The revolution succeeds, and Smith then becomes Minister of Truth.
The first half or so of this is quite well done, but the later insertion of contemporary political issues (Windrush, racial strife in America) completely derails any suspension of disbelief, and seems like little more than a facile black-washing of Orwell’s novel (racial conflict is mentioned in the story but is not addressed in any meaningful or significant way).
A game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,000 words. ParSec website.

Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen

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Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) has as its narrator a woman called Mercedes, who lives beside a stargate on a future Earth:

This part of the world is a landscape of steps, a white stone hill two miles wide and one mile high. Eight thousand steps with a hundred flights and platforms. At the bottom lies a human city, a ramshackle shanty thing.
At the top are the sky-high silver pillars of the Tannhauser Gate, the beautiful gate, the one we Earther soldiers tried so hard, so very damned hard, to reach.
How I hate that gate. Yet here I am, living in its shadow. Most visitors climb the centre regions of the steps. The aliens come down and the replica men go up, because now they are free they can do what they want. Them, but not us.
Cytheran guards keep everything peaceful, which is nice of them considering they made us rebuild the place when the war was over.  p. 4

The story opens with Mercedes meeting a woman called Riay coming back through the gate (we later find out she is physically altered, two elbows on each arm, three fingers on her hand, etc.). She tells Mercedes she has come back to help, and Mercedes refers to her as a “priestess” at one point. We also get some back story about the war against the aliens, and some detail about the Cytheran guards that now patrol the Tannhauser gate (such as the fact they float just above the ground as they move around). We also learn that few humans are allowed to use the gates, although this does not stop many travellers coming to petition the aliens.
We later learn more about Mercedes and Jonni’s relationship (including that she is emotionally dependent on him) before three aliens arrive to see the site of the battle at the gate. Mercedes is on the point of telling them that she was a combatant when a man called Blascard arrives demanding a minnesang from the aliens—a key that will let him use the gate and travel to the thousand worlds on the other side. When he continues to make a nuisance of himself, and subsequently gets too close to the aliens, a Cytheran guard teleports him away. When Blascard later returns to the gate, he demands a key from Riay instead (one of the few humans who has been allowed to use the gate), but she offers him only the chance to learn from her.
The penultimate part of the story (spoiler) sees Jonni offer water to a group of petitioners making their way up the steps to the gate. Mercedes speaks to the group and identifies herself as Sergeant Mercedes Gantl, the last survivor of the Fighting Ninth, the military unit that attacked the gate. Then she realises that the group are Neos, ex-military who intend doing the same. Mercedes and Jonni watch their attack: Jonni gets caught in the crossfire and is badly wounded. After all the Neos are killed, a Cytheran comes over to Mercedes, who is holding a dying Jonni in her arms:

I heard a furious static burst and a hundred voices spoke in my mind.
—this was never our intent
Never.
Unforseen
—we know the difference
Unwished
Unwanted
All our <untranslatable> weep with you
He was never—
—he would ever have been—
Welcomed
A final Cytheran slid aside like a leaf on the wind and I was at the gate. The pillars went up forever, the space between a silver-grey curtain like soft rain. Beyond it lay everything we had been denied and now they were letting us through. Jonni was his own minnesang, and today, somehow, he was mine too. If I wanted, I could go through.
—no, he is only himself—
You are your own song—
Changed now.
—each becomes their own minnesang.
If you want— p. 9

The Cytheran then takes the dying Jonni out of her arms to take him through the gate, and tells her to come back when she is ready.
The last section of the story shows a changed Mercedes, no longer resentful but someone who now helps others. A year later she goes back to the gate and passes through. She spends a thousand years travelling on the other side of the gate before returning to find she has been gone for three days. She discovers that Blascard is really a teacher, helping those left behind to get through the gate. Mercedes and Blascard and Riay team up to work to that end.
There isn’t really much of a story here—it is more a series of events—but it has an intriguing setting, convincing description and characterisation, and a transcendent ending. Stock stuff maybe, but well put together. I thought this was a pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Parsec website.