Month: January 2022

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
** (Average). 7,050 words.

Kitemistress by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kitemistress by Keith Roberts (Interzone #11, Spring 1985) is a direct sequel to Kitecadet,1 the second of the ‘Kiteworld’ stories, and takes place shortly after Raoul’s crash in the Badlands. Raoul has decided to leave the Kitecorps, and we see Captain Goldensoul quiz him about his decision to leave. They quickly get to the nub of the matter:

‘Cadet,’ he said, ‘you saved both yourself and your String. You showed coolness, and considerable courage.’ He paused. ‘You are here, we are all here, to protect the Realm. You did your duty. I see no shame in that.’
But he’d been neither cool nor courageous. He’d been terrified. He’d seized the first weapon that came to hand, killed a defenceless creature with it. He said, ‘Have you ever cut a baby’s head off with a hatchet?’ His back stiffened instantly. He said, Sorry, sir. Beg pardon.’
The Captain waved a hand, mildly. He stared a moment longer, then sat back at the desk. He said, ‘You didn’t kill a baby. You killed nothing human. You destroyed an alien. An enemy of the Realm.’
Raoul moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘It was human,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t our enemy.’

Goldensoul decides to give him a conditional discharge (twelve months upaid leave) and Raoul leaves. He packs his things and goes to the bar, where Canwen, the legendary kiteman, summons him to his table. He quizzes Raoul about his decision, points out a few uncomfortable truths about the young, and then gives him a letter of introduction to the Bishop of Barida, who will get Raoul a job as a house kiteman.
Raoul travels to Easthorpe and is quickly placed by the Bishop in the Kerosin household. However, its wealthy master (“the richest bloke in the realm” on account of his fuel business) soon passes him on to the Lady Kerosina, who runs the household:

The Lady Kerosina was lounging in a chair of silvery Holand fibre. Behind her, long glass doors gave a view of landscaped grounds. A glass was at her side, and a bowl of some confection. He stared. Her hair was dark, shot with bronze highlights. It tumbled to her shoulders and below. Her cheekbones were high and perfectly modelled, her eyes huge and of no definable colour, her nose delicately tip-tilted. She wore a simple white dress; the neckline plunged deeply at the front. She wore ankle-high sandals, again of some silvery material. He saw they were uppers only; the soles of her feet were bare.
She inclined her head, graciously. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Josen,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and tell me about yourself.’
He took a chair, hesitantly. She crossed her knees. Her skirt was split to the top of her thigh. Her legs were long, and exquisite. He blinked. He’d seen some daring fashions in Middlemarch odd times, but nothing to compare with that. He rested his eyes carefully on the middle distance. He was aware she smiled. He began to talk, haltingly at first, about his training, early career; but she interrupted him. ‘Who,’ she said in her well-modulated, slightly husky voice, ‘was your Captain, in the Salient?’
‘Goldensoul, Mistress,’ he said. ‘He gave me an excellent testimonial.’
‘Dear old Goldensoul,’ she said. ‘Always the do-gooder.’ She selected a sweet, bit into it deliberately. Displayed even, pearly teeth. ‘And what brought you to Barida?’
He swallowed. He said, ‘I was sent by the Master Canwen.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I begin to understand. I was wondering how you breached our good Bishop’s defences. Tell me, is the Master still as mad as ever?’
He frowned. He said. ‘He’s one of the most respected Fliers in the Realm.’
She looked amused. She said, ‘No doubt.’
He risked another glance at her. She wore no jewellery of any kind; but round her neck was a slender leather collar. The sort of thing you might put on a dog. It seemed oddly out of sorts with the rest of her ensemble; he wondered what its purpose could be.

Raoul later talks to the retiring kiteman, who confirms other comments that Raoul has heard about Kerosina’s predatory sexual behaviour, and it isn’t long before he has to report again to her in his new uniform. This time she makes him kneel down in front of her and gathers his hair into two ponytails. She instructs him to wear it like that. However, when she invites Raoul to stay and have a glass of wine, he says he has urgent work to do.
In between the pair’s further encounters we learn more about the household and its personnel, one of whom is the unsavoury head horseman Martland—who Raoul ominously sees at one point in the house with a young boy and a nine-year-old girl (we learn at the end of the story that Martland is Kerosina’s procurer).
After further attempts at seduction by Kerosina (who gets progressively more irritated at Raoul’s reluctance) and more trouble from Maitland, matters come to a head when Raoul gets a letter from Stev, an old friend who had been posted to F16—then immediately afterwards gets another letter saying that Stev has been killed in a crash. While Raoul is emotionally vulnerable Kerosina takes him down to her mud dungeon and seduces him (this scene includes the first hint of urolangia that I think I’ve seen in an SF story).
Afterwards, Raoul packs his bags and flees with Canwen’s words ringing in his ears (“Wallow in mud, and then the stars come close. Because you have earned the right to see their glory. . . .”). Then a jealous Martland pursues Raoul on horseback and, when he catches him, beats him so badly that Raoul is badly injured. He lies on the ground going in and out of consciousness for days. During this period a thick bubbling voice talks to him and leaves food—rabbit haunches—on a decorated plate.2 Raoul comes to a terrible realisation about the mutants from the Badlands:

He thought, ‘So they’re even here. In the Middle Lands.’ So much for the Kites then. Once he thought he saw one of the creatures humping away. On all fours; smaller than a dog, and blue. He pushed himself up on his hands. ‘Come back,’ he called. ‘Come back, I want to talk to you. . . .’ But the bushes stayed still.
He wiped his cheeks. He’d met its sister once, and killed her. This was how they were repaying him. With Life.

Raoul eventually manages to get to his feet and continue his journey to Middlemarch, but he experiences further abuse from tinkers, who rob him of some of his clothes, and the Variant police, who beat him. He finally gets sanctuary at the doors of Middle Church just as he is about to be beaten again. Rye (the barmaid from Kitecadet) comes to him at the end of the story.
The bare bones of the plot probably make this sound like a fairly slight story, but the beauty of this piece is in its writing and characterisation, its subtlety and slow burn. And perhaps, most of all, its sorrowfulness. It’s a very good piece, if one that uses its main character rather badly.
**** (Very Good). 11,000 words.

1. I think that Kitecadet and Kitemistress (this story) would have been better published as one piece: Kitecadet has a rather abrupt, puzzling ending, and Kitemistress depends, at least for part of its effect, on a good knowledge of Kitecadet.

2. This part of the story, where the mutant brings Raoul food, reminded me of the scene in the ‘Pavane’ story, The Signaller, where the fairies/Old Ones appear after Rafe has been attacked by the catamount.
The more obvious reminders of The Signaller are the parallels between the Signaller’s Guild and the Kitecorps, and of a young man’s progression in those organisations.

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty1 (Lightspeed #125, October 2020) begins with the narrator, Barry Simcoe, looking at the drones flying over Chicago from the middle of a muddy expanse that used to be Lake Michigan. In the centre of what used to be the lake is a mass of steam rising up from Deep Temple, a mysterious mining project. We then learn, when Simcoe contacts a friendly AI called Zircon Border with a request for transport, that he is struggling to get to his destination because of the many interconnected pools that lie ahead (even though he is wearing a modern American combat suit):

One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very manoeuvrable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.
[. . .]
“Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’
“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”
“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”
“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”
“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”
“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”
“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.
“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”

As the drone takes him to his location, we learn about the post-collapse world that Simcoe lives in, and his mission, which is to take out a sixty ton killer robot called True Pacific. The robot is currently hiding in a wrecked ship but, when Simcoe arrives there, the robot comes out to kill him. There is then an exciting fight scene in the mudpools, which goes on until Simcoe finally outwits the machine and gets to a power cable at the rear of its head. When Simcoe threatens to disconnect the cable, the robot stops fighting.
Simcoe asks the robot why it has been on a rampage and, after some verbal back and forth, it eventually tells him that it has just disconnected an echo module, a comms device that was (spoiler) enabling an AI called Ambient Intelligence to control it. We subsequently learn that Ambient Intelligence is a newly aware AI born in the mysterious Deep Temple project mentioned previously. True Pacific adds that the AI is like a a child but, before we can learn anything more, Zircon Border interrupts to tell Simcoe that four drones have been hijacked by Ambient Intelligence and are inbound to their location.
The climactic scene shows the pair—now co-operating—defeating the drones, and then leaving the area for a hiding place in Chicago. Questions about what Ambient Intelligence will do next, and what is going on at the Deep Temple project, hang in the air.
This is more open-ended than I’d like (although it points to an obvious sequel), but it was refreshing to read a well-paced piece of action SF with an intriguing background and a sense of humour.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,400 words. Story link.

1. There is a short article about the story here, which also mentions how it fits in with McAulty’s* other novels (*Todd McAulty is the pseudonym of John McNeill, editor of Black Gate).

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:

For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.

Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:

He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”

After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:

He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .

When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy1).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.

1. The trilogy comprises The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven (Entanglements, 2020) gets off to a bloated and rambling start with four mothers, who are group-parenting a child called Charlie, meeting to discuss his lack of progress. During their long conversation, lights and icons flash across the walls—this is attributed to “Sparklybits”, but there is no immediate explanation as to what is going on. The author manages, however, to squeeze this in on the first page, well before the light show:1

Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do.

The mother-stereotypes (“Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff”) chatter about Charlie’s “problems” for another few pages before Jo, the live-in mother, and Teri go to speak to Charlie. We then see Charlie communicating to the flashing lights—now described as a virus—in his room, using a non-verbal/sign language.
The story finally perks up (and starts making some sense) when Evan, the AI virus exterminator (and mansplainer) turns up to deal with the problem. After some talk about the virus/ghost, the semaphore/lights language, the internet of things, etc. Evan manages to capture Sparklybits when it turns up to see what is happening. Charlie loses his temper.
The final part of the story (spoiler) takes place after the three non-resident mothers depart, and Jo takes Charlie to Evan’s workshop. There, the two of them see other AIs that Evan has captured and given a home. At the end of their visit Charlie gets to take Sparklybits back home, but with strict instructions to keep him contained in the device that Evan has provided. However, the final page sees Charlie show Jo something that he and Sparklybits are building, although I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is (the picture he shows Jo has two tiny figures stand on the lawn in front of the house holding hands; Charlie wears a conspiratorial grin while he does this).
This story has a bloated and inchoate start (you can’t help but think that Robert Sheckley’s first line for the same story would have been, “There was a ghost in the house”); a decent middle; and a weak ending (and a twist I possibly missed because, again, too many words).2 Overall it is an okay satire about modern parenting I guess but, having reread the above, I suspect I’m being over-generous.
** (Average). 8,750 words.

1. What is it about Asimov’s SF (and adjacent anthology) stories that they have this constant description of food and people eating?

2. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Wolven is just not my cup of tea (and if he was coffee, he would be a cup that is mostly full of froth and not liquid). Of the stories by this writer that I’ve read so far, there is only one that I liked, Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017). As for the others, I thought Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? (F&SF, January-February 2016), Passion Summer (Asimov’s SF, February 2016), and No Stone Unturned (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) were mediocre; and Galatea in Utopia (F&SF, January-February 2018) and Carbo (F&SF, November-December 2017) were awful.

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:

Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”

This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
** (Average). 11,500 words.

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny, September-October 2020) has a long-ish set-up which sees an old man (on an otherwise deserted planet) create two robots, Brother and Sister, who subsequently change shape and roam their world in search of the heavy metals they need to sustain themselves. One day the old man falls ill and realises he will need to summon help—but he is wary of humanity. So, as he hasn’t been able to program his children to be suspicious, he tells them to hide. The wing-bearing Brother lifts Sister into orbit and they watch from behind a moon as a ship arrives and takes the old man away.
The second part of the story sees the pair roam through their solar system. During this they stumble upon a large spherical structure and, when there is no response to their signals, they start gorging themselves on the metal. Then, while they are distracted, something attacks them and they are taken prisoner.
On recovering consciousness Brother and Sister find that their attacker is a taloned amalgam of various mechanical parts, and it berates them for damaging its ship. However, once it finds out that Brother and Sister’s form-changing nanites can make him a larger set of wings, it says they will be set free in exchange for these (the pair do not know the machine, later referred to as Third Drone, is lying).
The final section (spoiler) sees Sister forage for materials so Brother can make the wings. During this Sister becomes suspicious of Third Drone, and teaches herself to lie (she tells herself that a pebble is black when it is really brown). Sister later tests her ability when Third Drone returns for her:

Third Drone reappeared, swooping down to pick her up and carry her to the next metal deposit. “Anything good?” they demanded.
“There was a black pebble,” said Sister, and waited for Third Drone to scream at her for her falsehood.
“And?” her captor said impatiently. “Did it have usable metal?”
“No,” said Sister, which was true whether the pebble was brown or black.
“Useless,” said Third Drone. “All these asteroids are useless. I will have to find some derelict mining outposts, if I am to get the metal for my wings.”
The lie had stood. Third Drone had not caught it. Third Drone believed that she had seen a black pebble. She had spread a deliberate error.
The universe picked itself up and spun around and landed in a different formation, but only inside her head. Third Drone noticed nothing. Sister hung silently from their talons and looked at the pebble again, to make sure that she herself was not in error.
It was still brown.

Sister eventually discovers that Third Drone wants to use its new wings to fly into the gas giant Chrysale and return to the surface to punish those who caused its exile. However, after Sister tests the wings in Chrysale’s atmosphere, we learn that she has sabotaged them when Third Drone plummets to the surface. Sister goes back to collect Brother but does not tell him about her ability to lie.
This is essentially a fairy tale1 about lying which is, for the most part, quite good if lightweight. Weaker ending though.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

1. I subsequently found out that this story won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. That way overrates it. I’d also note that another finalist, The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee, is also written like a fairy tale.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury (The Golden Apples of the Sun, 19531) is one of his prose poem stories, I suppose you would call them—tales where there is no particular story, but where a vivid, poetic image is developed. Here, that image is fire and ice:

“Temperature?”
“One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!”
The captain stared from the huge, dark-lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it for ever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical.
Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship—any small fire-breath that might seep through—would find winter slumbering here, like all the coldest hours of February.

As the temperature rapidly increases, a crewman falls to the floor dead (a faulty space-suit). There is more drama:

Their icicle was melting.
The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling. As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory-frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood.
On spring mornings as a boy, he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle on the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April, fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December’s weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the gravelled walk below.
“Auxiliary pump’s broken, sir. Refrigeration. We’re losing our ice!”

After they resolve this problem they eventually begin their mission, which is to extend a cup out of the spaceship to gather a sample of the Sun:

And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion, drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So we stretch out our hand with the beggar’s cup . . .

Insert smart comment about the relative ease of solar panels here.
One of Bradbury’s better efforts at this kind of thing.
*** (Good). 2,350 words.

1. The The Golden Apples of the Sun collection was first published in March 1953. The first magazine appearances were in Planet Stories, November 1953, and Argosy, July 1955 (the UK pocketbook magazine, not the US pulp).

Salvage by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Salvage by Andy Dudak (Interzone, January-February 2020) gets off to an intriguing start with a woman called Aristy examining “homifacts” on New Ce. These homifacts are petrified humans created by an alien race a thousand years previously, with the purpose of stopping human observation of the Universe (which was, apparently, causing it to fly apart). The hominids are, however, still alive as software inside their transmuted bodies—and Aristy is there and able to interface with them because her people were far away on near-lightspeed spaceships at the time of the alien action. As she tells one of the homifacts (a political man in the Picti dictatorship which ruled the planet):

“They asked humanity to turn its damaging gaze away from the cosmos. Turn inward, lose itself in simulated realities. And some did. Whole civilizations did. But it wasn’t enough for the aliens, the Curators as we’ve come to call them. So, they acted. They swept through the human Emanation in less than a century. No one knows how they did that.
“They turned the human species inward. Cities, worlds, systems, empires. The Curators’ Reagent froze people instantly, preserved their brains, which were gradually converted into durable networks suffusing their remnant statues. A trillion human beings Turned Inward, a trillion isolated minds in a trillion virtualities.”

Aristy now spends her time interfacing with these homifacts and asking them if they want to be downloaded onto her servers, where they can live in a world of their own creation; stay where they are, with or without improvements; or be deleted:

Of the six she hacked today, four chose transfer to her server: Acolyte, Night Soil Collector, Visiting Student, and Doctor. The small-minded Printer opted to remain in his simulated village, but with a larger, more prosperous print shop, a remodeled wife, and a medal of distinguished service from Generalissimo Picti. The brainwashed Commissar, unable to bear the historical irrelevance of Picti’s long-gone reign, chose oblivion.

Just as this story looks like it is settling down into its groove, the next part veers off in an unexpected direction: Aristy goes back to her camp and finds a lawyer and an armed guard waiting. They ask her about the homifacts she has salvaged, and then tell her that she needs to go with them to Drop City.
After her arrival, Aristy is quizzed by the Drop City Committee, and later has to listen to a number of homifacts give testimony about the historical crimes committed against them by Picti the dictator: they go on to demand his reclamation so he can stand trial. Then, during a recess, Aristy goes for a drink in a bar, followed by her guard; there, an old man challenges her about something she did on her starship. Finally, the committee reconvene and sentence Aristy to community service for her illegal salvaging operations, which means she has to track down Picti and bring him to trial for them.
The search for General Picti starts at a former torture chamber under a building called The Tannery. Aristy finds his security boss there, and starts going through his memories to find out where Picti was when the aliens arrived: these scenes build up a picture of the planetary society of the time.
When (spoiler) Aristy finally finds Picti, she enters his simulation and goes through the timeline, watching as it veers from reality into fantasy (during this sequence Picti turns himself into a god). Then she appears to tell him that he is to stand trial for his crimes, and Picti learns what has happened over the last 1000 years. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Aristy was one of the waking crew of the starship, and deliberately killed its sleepers. We aren’t really told why Aristy did this, but the ending has such an intense, almost hallucinatory, quality that I wasn’t as bothered about this unresolved subplot as I might have been.
This is an original piece, has a complex development and, all in all, is pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 10,600 words.