Month: November 2021

A Proper Santa Claus by Anne McCaffrey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Proper Santa Claus by Anne McCaffrey (Demon Kind, 1973) opens with a young boy called Jeremy painting a cookie (which he eats) and drinking a glass of Coke (which he drinks). As the story develops we see more of his artistic creations, and realise that he isn’t imagining all this but has an ability to make what he paints come to life:

Although he dutifully set out trick-or-treating, he came home early. His mother made him sort out his candy, apples, and money for UNICEF, and permitted him to stay up long past his regular bedtime to answer the door for other beggars. But, once safely in his room, he dove for his easel and drew frenetically, slathering black and blue poster paint across clean paper, dashing globs of luminescence for horrific accents. The proper ones took off or crawled obscenely around the room, squeaking and groaning until he released them into the night air for such gambols and aerial maneuvers as they were capable of. Jeremy was impressed. He hung over the windowsill, cheering them on by moonlight. (Around three o’clock there was a sudden shower. All the water solubles melted into the ground.)

As the story develops, Jeremy is unable to produce work that satisfies his teacher’s requirements, and this comes to a head with her criticism of his Santa project. This gives him “so overwhelming a sense of failure” that “he couldn’t imagine ever creating anything properly again”.
I suppose the message of this piece (criticism of children’s creative endeavours can be destructive) is valid enough, but I’m not sure that it provides a good story.
* (Mediocre). 3,300 words.

Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family’s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son’s in June, the daughter’s in August, and her dead husband’s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother’s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband’s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn’t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn’t think she was either.
The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.
This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.
 **+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.

The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, January 1982) is a Three Wise Men update that begins with one of them, Melichor, getting out of a Rolls Royce and inflating an air mattress. There then follows a certain amount of kvetching among the three (Melichor peppers his speech with Yiddish words, and the other two are later described as “Nubian” and “Oriental”). Then they eat, and later go to sleep.
They are woken the next day by the stench caused by the creatures of the underworld, which have reached their location and are overtaking them. So they gather their belongings and get back in the car.
They later turn back the Forces of Chaos and overcome other minor difficulties before arriving at a Hyatt hotel, where the Saviour is with his parents in a “moderately priced room”. There, they argue over what his name should be.
A weakly humorous non-story.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.

The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson (F&SF, January 1958) opens with a young boy called Allan talking to an alien called Harvey about how his mother is decorating a thorn tree for the family’s first Xmas on the planet:

There was beauty on Cidor, but it was a different beauty. It was a black-and-silver world where the thorn trees stood up like fine ink sketches against the cloud-torn sky; and this was beautiful. The great and solemn fishes that moved about the uncharted pathways of its seas were beautiful with the beauty of large, far-traveled ships. And even Harvey, though he did not know it himself, was most beautiful of all with his swelling iridescent jellyfish body and the yard-long mantle of silver filaments spreading out through it and down through the water. Only his voice was croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human word.  pp. 34-35

Allan adds that the decorations will make the tree beautiful, and that Harvey will understand what “beautiful” means when he sees the finished product. However, when Allan goes back to the house on his own, what he sees upsets him, as the tree isn’t the same as the one on the ship out. After his mother consoles him Allan goes out and briefly brings Harvey in to see the tree before taking him back to the water.
Allan and his mother wrap their presents later that evening, and he tells her that he wants to give Harvey one of his figurines, a painted clay astrogator, as a Christmas present. His mother tells him it is too late to go out again, so she goes to give the gift to Harvey instead, and also explains to the alien the concept of exchanging presents at Christmas time. Then she asks Harvey about water-bulls—dangerous sea creatures known to attack boats—as her husband will be coming back by river the next day. Harvey tells her their behaviour isn’t consistent (“One will. One will not”), before adding that his species is “electric”, so the water-bulls don’t bother them.
After Allan’s mother leaves (spoiler), Harvey swims out of the outlet and swims to a place between two islands where he finds a water-bull; he tells it he has come to make it into a present.
The story closes with Allan’s father returning home the next day by boat. En route he and the other settlers find a dead water-bull floating on the surface and, on closer examination, they find the crushed body of a Cidorian nearby. Allan’s father realises that the dead Cidorian is Harvey, his son’s friend, and asks the other settlers not to tell him about what they have seen. After they leave, there is an elegiac closing passage:

Behind them, the water-bull carcass, disturbed, slid free of the waterlogged tree and began to drift downriver. The current swung it and rolled, slowly, over and over until the crushed central body of the dead Cidorian rose into the clean air. And the yellow rays of the clear sunlight gleamed from the glazed pottery countenance of a small toy astrogator, all wrapped about with silver threads, and gilded it.  p. 42

I didn’t really buy the ending of this one, which seems to involve an overly disproportionate act in return for a simple gift. But I liked the alien setting, Harvey, and the last passage was still rattling around inside my head days later.
*** (Good). 3,300 words. Story link.

The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, January 1958) concerns Roberta and Robin, an old couple who live in an automated factory in the year 2388 (Roberta is forgetful, and Robin is the mostly bed-ridden caretaker). When Roberta realises it is Xmas day she goes downstairs to invite three tramps up to the flat (the tramps have an illegal home on the factory floor, but have to block the door every day to avoid being evicted by the “Terrible Sweeper”).
When the four of them arrive back to the flat, Robin is up and about—and not at all happy to find that Roberta has invited the tramps to spend the day with them. Then a Xmas card arrives for Robin but addressed to “Factory X10”. This causes Robin to become quite agitated because he is the caretaker of SC541, so he orders his wife and the three tramps to go and check the factory’s name on the output gate. On the way there, and back, the four of them discuss the factory’s change of output from television sets to strange metal eggs.
The group eventually return and confirm to Robin that the factory is now called X10. Jerry also reveals that he has bought one of the eggs back with him:

“I brought it because I thought the factory ought to give us a Christmas present,” Jerry told them dreamily, squatting down to look at the egg. “You see, a long time ago, before the machines declared all writers like me redundant, I met an old robot writer. And this old robot writer had been put out to scrap, but he told me a thing or two. And he told me that as machines took over man’s duties, so they took over his myths too. Of course, they adapt the myths to their own beliefs, but I think they’d like the idea of handing out Christmas presents.”  p. 73

Jerry’s thoughts are met with further belligerence from Robin, and Jerry responds by saying that New Father Christmas will come for him (New Father Christmas apparently takes old people and machines away).
When the egg later hatches Roberta becomes alarmed, as it looks as if the egg is going to build another factory in the flat—so she stamps on it. Then the group realise that the egg is wirelessing for help, so they flee, only to be caught on the stairs by . . . .
This is a little on the slight side, but the robot factory setting (with its interstitial humans, and the new myths that have arisen) is captivatingly and amusingly done.
*** (Good). 2,100 words. Story link.

The Gift by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gift by Ray Bradbury (Esquire, December 1952) opens with a couple and their son boarding an emigration rocket on Xmas Eve. As they only have a limited baggage allowance, the parents have to leave behind a little Xmas tree with candles, and the present they have for their son.
After they take off the boy asks to go and look out the one porthole on the ship, but his father says no, before adding that it will soon be Xmas: the boy asks if he’ll get his present and his tree, and his father says yes (much to the dismay of the mother). Then the father leaves their cabin on a short errand.
The story closes with the father taking the family up to the porthole. They enter a dark cabin and see the porthole before a number of unseen people start singing carols. Through the porthole the boy can see “the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles. . . .”
This is okay, but it’s minor Bradbury. And the idea of non-flickering stars in space resembling candles on a Xmas tree is a bit of a stretch.
** (Average). 780 words.

The Santa Claus Compromise by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Santa Claus Compromise by Thomas M. Disch (Crawdaddy, December 1974) opens with the Supreme Court giving children of five and older full civil liberties. Various societal changes ensue, including the ability of children to work as reporters: this leads to Our Own Times’ Bobby Boyd and Michelle Ginsberg running a story stating the there is no Santa Claus!
We learn about the evidence that the pair have uncovered to support their story (Bobby finds receipts for items similar to the gifts Santa brought him, etc.) and, when the news starts breaking through to other youngsters, opinions change; eventually there is a serious economic impact when people don’t buy Xmas presents and other merchandise.
Eventually (spoiler), the President has to take the two intrepid reporters to the North Pole to restore the status quo ante:

What they saw there, and whom they met, the whole nation learned on the night of January 24, the new Christmas Eve, during the President’s momentous press conference. After Billy showed his Polaroid snapshots of the elves at work in their workshop, of himself shaking Santa’s hand and sitting beside him in the sleigh, and of everyone—Billy, Michelle, Santa Claus and Mrs. Santa, the President and the First Lady—sitting down to a big turkey dinner, Michelle read a list of all the presents that she and Billy had received. Their estimated retail value: $18,599.95. As Michelle bluntly put it: “My father just doesn’t make that kind of money.”
“So would you say, Michelle,” the President asked with a twinkle in his eye, “that you do believe in Santa Claus?”
“Oh, absolutely, there’s no question.”
“And you, Billy?”
Billy looked at the tips of his new cowboy boots and smiled. “Oh, sure. And not just ’cause he gave us such swell presents. His beard, for instance. I gave it quite a yank. I’d take my oath that the beard was real.”

A droll story about the mercantile aspects of Christmas.
*** (Good). 2,000 words.

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop (F&SF, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, Danny hears what he thinks may be a burglar coming down the chimney; eventually, a grungy looking man in a heavy red coat and khaki trousers appears.
Danny challenges the intruder and, after ducking an ornament thrown at him, shoots. His mother hears the altercation and comes downstairs, taking the shotgun from Danny and reloading. But by the time she is ready to shoot, the man is almost at the top of the chimney—so she goes outside to get a clear shot:

Unless [Danny] was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who’d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it—“Up, Blitzen, up!”—to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.
“Stop!” Mom shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.
“No, Milly!” the man on the roof pleaded. “Don’t!”
“Clifton?” Mom murmured. Then, louder: “Clifton?”
The compact little buck (a courser, Danny thought, like in “The Night Before Christmas,” which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.
The deer—the courser—drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.
“Here’s something for you, Milly!” And the stolen ornament—a second one, Danny realized—shattered on Mom’s forehead.
“Ouch!”
“Merry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni—”

Danny’s mother shoots, and (spoiler) the man falls off. The reindeer then crash-lands into a barbed wire fence. Both die. The mother subsequently takes her ex-husband’s body to the dump and burns it, while Danny butchers the reindeer for meat.
After this captivatingly bizarre start the story leaps forward thirty years, and we find Daniel in hospital. He has just finished telling a man called Philip about the incident, and goes on to tell him about what happened on the tenth anniversary of the altercation in 1967, when he was camping alone in the wilds: Danny was visited by the ghost of his father, and his sleeping bag and tent disappeared (presumably his father’s doing) while he was following the apparition. He almost died from exposure.
Danny then recounts what happened on the twentieth anniversary in 1977, when his father’s ghost came and took the soul of his terminally ill mother.
After listening to all this, Philip gets up to leave. He kisses Danny on the forehead, and notes that it is the thirtieth anniversary that day. Daniel then asks Philip to get Gary to visit him, but Philip has to remind Danny that Gary is “gone” (there are hints in the latter section that Danny is gay, and presumably in hospital with AIDS). Philip leaves.
The story ends with this:

Outside Daniel’s window, faint icicle music. The glassblower’s panpipe hanging from the cornice had begun to melt, releasing long-pent melodies.
“Come on,” Daniel murmured. “Come on.”
He couldn’t wait. He wanted his father’s bitter ghost to get a move on. If it materialized in the room and stole his soul, that would be a welcome violation: a theft and a benediction, the first Christmas present his daddy had given him in over thirty years.
Come quickly, Father. Come.

This is an odd and very dark Xmas story but it works, and I suspect it’ll stay in reader’s heads for some time.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words.

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with Oobleck being accosted by a partner from a recent heist: Oobleck has swindled Manzello Lorikeet of his share, and he takes her sigil and a copy of her Kirlian aura (to unlock it). Lorikeet then shoots transposon particles at Oobleck, which sends her to the Second Aether, a multidimensional nexus that sends her to various other timelines over the course of the story:

For an infinitesimal moment after she was shot, a period that was all time and none, Nova Oobleck saw the essence of the Second Aether, with its hyperdimensional moonbeam roads twisting to infinity. And then she was jarringly reembodied in a new brane.
Stable once more, however temporarily, Nova felt her insides still shimmering from the invisible massless bundle of transposons that had burrowed into her gut at the impact point of the blast from Lorikeet’s Tegmark gun. It seemed almost as if the active particles were writhing like snakes inside her. Now and then, it struck her that she could sense an individual transposon dart away from its fellows, radiating outward and losing contact, thus bringing her that much closer to the end of her unanchored status and a permanent renewal of solidity. She sensed that when the knot of transposons achieved a certain phase-state, she would again be ejected from her place in this merely eleven-dimensional reality and sent randomly across the Second Aether. And there was nothing she could do to prevent it.  p. 51

Oobleck ends up in a timeline where she is the bombardier on an aircraft that is (according to the pilot) en route to bomb the Sultan’s Palace. At the same time as she drops the bomb the transposon particles energise to shift her to another reality, but the decoherence effect of the weapon sees the pilot and the plane come with her. They force land, and Nova gets out. When she is attacked by three trolls the pilot (a hive being) disassembles and attacks them.
When Nova shifts again she does so alone, and finds herself on a desert planet called Spalt. Eventually she comes upon the house of a self-exiled scientist called Barxax. He manages to stabilise her but, when he dies a year later, she shifts again. This time she ends up back in the Second Aether, where (spoiler) she is finally rescued by a multiverse ship commanded by Ona Von Bek. They then set off to retrieve Oona’s sigil.
This is a readable and engaging piece—there are touches of Vance and Moorcock—but ultimately it is a series of loosely connected episodes with a deus ex machina ending. Pleasant enough, just no real plot.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,050 words.

The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) starts off with an alternative take on the Three Little Pigs story that ends (spoiler) with the pig beating the wolf to death. The other two fairy tales are also different versions: the second is a long and rambling Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Goldilocks is a ferret, and we get far, far too much family backstory about the bears; the third is an overlong and overwritten Aladdin story.
I initially thought this one must have come from the slush pile but apparently the writer is a World Fantasy Award finalist. You would never guess from the likes of this incontinent blather:

Mid, uh, Mama Bear knew more than she let on. She knew what he was doing, but sometimes this life was all too much for her who was now just a low-class sneaky nomad, by, she reminded herself, compassionate choice.
For after all, what did she need him for? Or any him? She’d always been as independent as her mother, and her mother’s mother, and all mama bears from the first to, as proper time would have it, eternity.
But she was a soft touch, and when he came a-begging with no malice in his eyes about her cub, she let him graze beside her in the blueberry patch.
And by the time she heard bushes rustle behind, and saw him chuffing the cub along in protective panic, it was almost too late.
When he told her his story in her all too easily found den, it was too late. Her compassion, that thing more useless to a mama bear than plastic wrap for freshness—that extraneous to needs and able to damage you if you don’t throw it away thing—that thing compassion had snuck into her heart and lodged there.  p. 47

Oh dear. The indignity of being rummaged (and the pathetic, hopefilled thrill). Lifted up high, my spout scoops air laden with fragrances—oatmeal soap, some supermarket shampoo; ohh er! a whiff of Terre d’Hermès perfume for men but always in a place like this, worn by a woman who wants to be seen as casually rich and certainly independent; its price is not just for the name but the story that it’s been created by a ‘great nose’. But trust me. My nose says—and do I have a nose!—it’s a mix of citronella candle and spray-on insect repellent with added pepper for irritation. The smell physically hurts my nostrils, tingles on my skin, and if I had a dog it would make my dog sneeze and run from me. And I’m quite convinced it would ward off swarms of bugs. No one should wear this, especially if you love dogs.  p. 48

Less is more.
– (Awful). 4,600 words. ParSec website.