Month: November 2021

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1988)1 opens with a far-future soldier, who is trying to seduce a woman, tell her a tale about his childhood:

That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.  p. 24

There are other exotic details:

Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye, I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.  p. 25

The central episode of the story occurs when Flip, the narrator, gets bored with a procession outside and returns to the Stone House; while he is at the fireside a larl, a large predatory beast indigenous to the planet, comes out of the shadows and, to Flip’s surprise, starts speaking to him.
The larl begins by telling Flip how his kind pass on their memories by eating the brains of their dead, and how “he” was eating his grandfather’s when humans first came to this planet (presumably this is one of those inherited memories). The larl goes on to tell him that, after a period of peace between his people and the new arrivals, one of the larls killed a human. The man’s wife, Magda, pursued the larl on her snowstrider, even though she had her young baby with her, and chased the larl to his people’s sacrifice rock (the larl realised he could not outrun the woman and her machine, so decided to pass on the information he had gathered about how to evade her—temporarily at least—to his people).
Magda catches up with the larl at the rock, and watches from a distance while other larls kill and eat her quarry. She notes (spoiler) how they react when they absorb the creature’s flesh and knowledge—and then sees them turn towards her. They hunt her down, a long process that eventually forces her, after she loses the snowstrider, to circle back to the sacrifice rock. There she lays her baby down and offers herself up: when the larls kill and consume her, they become more than animals:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.  p. 37-38

The larl goes tells Flip that his people took the baby back to the humans’ Captain, and how the two groups lived in peace thereafter. The larl adds that they didn’t tell the Captain about the woman, and that they take a human every now and then to maintain their closeness to humanity. He then tells Flip that, if he is good, then maybe it will be him they eat.
The last section returns to the soldier at the beginning of the story (indentifiable now as the older Flip), where we see him try to complete his seduction. This part artfully makes the older Flip’s world more real while making his childhood world more doubtful: was it something he imagined, something that was real, or was the larl telling him a story?

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cavebears by playing the oldest winter games there are.
You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?
Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives.
That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.
All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.2

This is very well told story, rich in detail, and even the possible ludicrousness of the memories-from-brains gimmick didn’t register for a couple of days. A deserving winner of that year’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll.
**** (Very good). 5,950 words.

1. The 1989 Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll Winners at ISFDB. It is worth comparing this list with the Hugo nominees and the Nebula nominees. They are all quite different that year.

2. I note that this section (I haven’t checked the rest of it) is rewritten for the Spirits of Christmas, 1989 anthology version. Original in normal font, revision in italics:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed.

[No change]

“Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant.

“Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension.

Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

[“all” deleted]

“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it.

“As the woman had hoped I would be. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind.

She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.”

[No change]

The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.

[“smooth” changed to “velvety”, “hooded” changed to “sheathed”]

NB The first two quoted sections are from the reprinted version I read (but have the Asimov’s page reference); the third quoted section is from the Asimov’s version.

La Befana by Gene Wolfe

Posted on by Paul Fraser

La Befana by Gene Wolfe (Galaxy, January-February 1973) opens with an alien called Zozz arriving at a human settler’s household on Christmas Eve. There Zozz waits for the man of the family, John “Bananas” Bannano, to come home.
Once Bannano arrives there are several conversations that run in parallel about (a) the family’s emigration to Zozz’s planet (b) the mother-in-law, who goes into the room next door to avoid Zozz, and (c) a story about a witch eternally dammed to look for the baby Jesus/Messiah.
The last line draws this together somewhat with (spoiler) the mother-in-law saying she’ll only have to search until tomorrow night.
This is either a simple idea complicated by the various lines of conversation (in one or two places it’s hard to work out who is talking to who), or I missed the point. Either way, I suspect it is a slight piece.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.

The Breakdown by Marjorie Bowen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Breakdown by Marjorie Bowen (Kecksies and Other Twilight Tales, 1976) sees a young man called Murdoch get off an unserviceable train. Then, rather than wait for a conveyance to his acquaintance’s house, he decides to walk. During his journey we find out that part of the reason for Murdoch’s visit is that his friend owns a portrait of a young woman who Murdoch is attracted to—although she is long dead.
Later, the winter weather worsens, and Murdcoch comes upon a spooky house called The Wishing Inn. Murdoch decides to stay the night and, when he asks the proprietor about the inn’s name, he is told that wishes come true on Xmas Eve. Sure enough, the woman in the portrait arrives at the inn looking for her lover.
Murdoch speaks to her, and goes to help her look, and they later end up in a carriage riding to an unknown location. Then Murdoch realises she is not really there and jumps out. He ends up in a village graveyard, and stumbles upon the woman and her lover’s gravestone.
Fortunately, Murdoch’s friend is at the church, and takes him home. The next day Murdoch gets told the story of the woman and her lover. The final twist comes when the narrator meets the acquaintance’s sister—who looks like the woman in the portrait.
This isn’t bad but it’s a contrived sequence of spooky events that you can mostly see coming—with a convenient co-incidence for an ending.
* (Mediocre). 3,200 words.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion

Posted on by Paul Fraser

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion (Galaxy, December 1965)1 starts off with a quote by Thoreau for those who “need points sharply made” (e.g. me):

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.

This ad hominem attack (“lump of dirt”, etc.) goes on to criticize a few other groups, before going on to suggest that only a few (“heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense”) serve the state with their consciences and/or resist it, but are commonly treated as enemies.
The story itself eventually starts (after a few opaque opening paragraphs) by introducing its two characters, the Harlequin—an atavistic, trouble-making personality in a future world of exact timekeeping—and the Ticktockman, the Master Timekeeper:

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.
Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime. Then a crime punishable by this:

EFFECTIVE 15 JULY 2389 12:00:00 midnight, the office of the Master Timekeeper will require all citizens to submit their time cards and cardioplates for processing. In accordance with Statute 555-7-SGH-999 governing the revocation of time per capita, all cardioplates will be keyed to the individual holder and—

What they had done was devise a method of curtailing the amount of life a person could have. If he was ten minutes late, he lost ten minutes of his life. An hour was proportionately worth more revocation. If someone was consistently tardy, he might find himself, on a Sunday night, receiving a communiqué from the Master Timekeeper that his time had run out, and he would be “turned off” at high noon on Monday, please straighten your affairs, sir, madame, or bisex.
And so, by this simple scientific expedient (utilizing a scientific process held dearly secret by the Ticktockman’s office) the System was maintained. It was the only expedient thing to do. It was, after all, patriotic. The schedules had to be met. After all, there was a war on!
But, wasn’t there always?

After several of the Harlequin’s disruptive escapades (jelly beans scattered on rolling roads that are very similar to those in Heinlein’s story, making speeches on the top of construction projects, etc.) he is (spoiler) eventually captured. Although he initially resists, he is broken and brainwashed and repents on TV. Then he is destroyed . . . but, in the closing sentences, the Ticktockman is three minutes late on his schedule.
The Harlequin’s sacrifice has presumably altered/affected the system.
It’s tempting, because of the heavyweight opening quote, to analyse this story’s political message in some depth2 but, on reflection, I think it’s probably just a bit of clever froth meant to pander to the anti-authoritarian crowd of the mid-1960s.
*** (Good). 4,350 words.

1. The introduction to the story in the Vandermeers’ The Big Book of Science Fiction states:

Ellison wrote it in six hours in order to present it the next day at the Milford Writer’s Workshop, run by Damon Knight.

And, in some parts, it reads like a story written in six hours (see my comments about the opening paragraphs—you can almost see the writer’s coffee begin to kick in).

2. The story generated a lot of comment in a recent (closed) group read, partly because people were tempted to see more in it than is actually there (when I say people, I mostly mean me).

Unawares by Hildegarde Hawthorne

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Unawares by Hildegarde Hawthorne (New England Magazine, December 1908) opens with elderly couple sitting together on Xmas Eve; they talk about how they wish they had had a child, something they would have appreciated at this time of year. During their conversation, a young girl called Desiree turns up at their door, and starts calling them Grandpa and Grandma. They take temporary care of the child, and give her presents and read her stories, etc.
After this one-two setup, the story ends the next day (spoiler) with a neighbour coming to the house to find the couple dead, but with a smile on their faces.
I think the intent here is probably to show that couple get a dying wish, but the ending leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The piece is also more of a punchline than a story.
* (Mediocre). 1,750 words.

A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh (Christmas Ghosts, 1993) has the narrator (perhaps the writer) going to a Christmas Eve party for ex-pats in China. Then, on the way home, she is accosted by a young girl who says she is the narrator’s Christmas Spirit. The narrator tries to fob her off and go home, but she blacks out, and then finds herself at an underground (and illegal in China) Catholic service.
The next (Christmas Carol-like) stop is in the living room of the cook of the special dining room the narrator uses at work. She doesn’t know the man that well (a language issue) but it soon becomes clear that he and his wife do not get on, and that he may be cheating. The Christmas Spirit tells the narrator she is here, “To show you his choice”.
The final visit is to a shared room where one of her ex-students lives, a young woman who is an untreated depressive and almost completely withdrawn. The narrator reflects that she has similar mental health issues but has always managed to avoid the abyss into which the young woman has fallen. She remembers a previous depressive episode, and how she came out of it one day when she noticed the beauty of a maple tree: she resolved to choose that viewpoint in the future.
Then (spoiler) the narrator realises that she has stopped doing so—at which point she finds herself back on the road.
The final part of the story sees the writer intrude into the story even more and talk more directly about her time in China and why she went there (although her specific reasons are never revealed). She concludes with this:


Maybe I had a sort of blackout on Red Flag Road, or maybe I met an old Chinese spirit. I am telling you now, I don’t know. But some things you must choose. Choose a bad marriage, choose a bad life, or choose to look around you and see.

Interesting final point, but I’m not entirely sure the story’s different parts sum to that observation (what was the point of the church service scene, for one thing?) I also wondered whether this is really a story, or self-therapy for the writer. Whatever of those two is true (probably both) it has an interesting Chinese setting and wise final message. If you don’t squint too hard, it sort of works.
*** (Good). 4,150 words.

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young (F&SF, January 1959)1 starts with Ross requesting his own personal Santa Claus from the devil (who he has just summoned). The devil agrees, but says he can’t subdivide “childhood fantasy”.
Ross subsequently gets the Xmas presents he wants, including a pretty blonde wife called Candy, but things starts going awry almost at once: she refuses to have anything to do with him after she has kissed him goodnight and shuts him out of her bedroom; then Jack Frost appears to ice the windows; the Sandman throws sand in his eyes before he sleeps; and a Guardian Angel—a guitar playing cowboy with wings—appears. Later on, Candy becomes pregnant (even though Ross still hasn’t been near her).
Eventually, after a few more months of these childhood fantasies (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc.), the Stork comes tapping at the window. Ross decides he has had enough, and once more summons the Devil: Ross tells him he wants out of the deal. The Devil agrees to modify their contract so that he won’t live in a world of childhood fantasy—but again specifies it will be for life, and apply retrospectively.
The final twist of the story (spoiler) has Ross loathing Candy, when he thinks of her, “almost as much as his mother”.
I guess the wife-mother psychosexual tangle made sense to 1950s Freudians, but it seems quite quaint today.
** (Average). 3,600 words.

1. I initially wondered if this story had first appeared in Playboy and, when I learned not, whether it was written with that magazine in mind.

The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF, January 1957)1 opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at “Cravolini’s Christmas Tree Headquarters”.
While her husband and daughter go into the depths of the barn-like structure to find the perfect tree, Margaret is surprised by the owner, Cravolini, who touches her forearm—this gives Margaret a brief vision of the pair of them in a cabin, and the feeling that they have met before. Her husband interrupts the encounter before she can make sense of it, and she goes to join the rest of them:

Don led her down one of the long aisles of trees to where Bonnie and Bruce were huddled beside their choice. Margaret scarcely glanced at the tree. Don was annoyed with her—half-convinced, as he always was, that Margaret had invited the pass. Not by any overt signal on her part, but simply because she forgot to look busy and preoccupied.
“Don’t go dawdling along in that wide-eyed dreamy way,” he’d said so often. “I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got that look—as if you’d say yes to a square meal or to a panhandler or to somebody’s bed.” pp. 124-125

The sexual frankness here is not the first instance of this in the story—during an earlier embrace, her “frank desire” is referred to—and both pale in comparison to the second encounter between her and Cravolini while she is looking at four blue candles:

“Do you like those candles?” he asked softly.
“Where is my husband?” Margaret kept her eyes on Bruce’s fine blond hair. Don’t let the door open any more. . . .
“You’re husband has gone to bring his car. He and your daughter. The tree is too large to carry so far. Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. . . .” She glanced fleetingly into the man’s eyes, troubled again that her knowledge of his identity wavered just beyond reality. “Have we met before?” she asked.
“I almost saw you once,” Cravolini said. “I was standing at a window. You were reflected in it, but when I turned around you were gone. There was nobody in the room but my sister . . . the stupid cow. . . .” Cravolini spat into the sawdust. “That day I made a candle for you. Wait.” He reached swiftly behind the stacked packing boxes that held the candles on display. He had placed it in her hand before she got a clear look at it. Sickeningly pink, loathsomely slick and hand-filling. It would have been cleaner, more honest, she thought, if it had been a frank reproduction of what it was intended to suggest. pp. 125-126

The rest of the story tells of further visits over the years, with Cravolini repeating his behaviour and Margaret unable to tell her husband. Then, on the climactic visit (spoiler) she meets the sister at the door of the store, who directs her to a bed at the back. When Margaret gets there she realises she is now the body of the sister, and she watches herself leave the shop with her husband and family. Cravolini has “the proud, silly spirit” he desired.
I’m not sure the possession ending makes much conventional sense, but the story works on a dreamlike/nightmare level, and is notable for its unconcealed sexuality.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.

1. I recently bought this writer’s collected short story volume, The Clingerman Files (Amazon UK £2.99). I suppose I should really get into it, but I rather like coming across stories like this, and Stair Trick (F&SF, August 1952), one by one in the wild.

Christmas Tree by John Christopher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949) opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:

“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.

After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:

Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.

The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
*** (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.

Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan (Minds, Machines and Evolution, 1988) sets up, in its short introduction, a world two thousand years from now, where Christmas Day is used to celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton, “who came to save us all from irrationality”. It is told from the point of view of a Chinese family (Europe is in ruins), and is moderately amusing.
** (Average). 1,100 words.