The Magpie Stacks Probabilities by Arie Coleman (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) has as its narrator a female astronaut who managed to survive an accident in space by opening a hatch with an improvised tool based on a lost Allen key. The story itself takes place afterwards at her home with her wife and son. The latter has now started to secrete small items around the house; later, the narrator starts doing the same thing while musing about order and entropy.
There is no real story here, and I’m not sure what point the piece is trying to make (possibly none, it may just be a short mood piece).
* (Mediocre), 2,750 words.
Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler
Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) takes place in the author’s ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ series, and opens with the narrator, Himmet, taking an injured sparrow to an android vet called Sezgin. Himmet later gets a call from him saying they need to talk and, when they meet again, Sezgin says that Himmet has found “a hole in the world”.
At a later meeting with a group of androids, at a safe house a ferry trip away from Istanbul (and after Himmit has been approached by a shady scientist from the nearby Institute enquiring whether he has picked up any injured sparrows recently), Sezgin tells Himmit that the sparrow contains a human consciousness. Moreover, it is a duplicate consciousness, not the original (something that was thought to be impossible in this consciousness-downloading society). Then someone knocks at the door, and Himmet is told to hide in a priest hole. By the time he gets out he is partially paralyzed.
This latter event is explained in a subsequent doctor’s appointment, where we find out that Himmet is a human who was downloaded into a blank android when he was badly injured in the war and who, when he is stressed, suffers partial paralysis in his new body (throughout the story, Himmet agonises about whether he is really himself, or a copy). We also learn about societal hostility towards androids, and how Himmit got involved with Sezgin when he started paying for deformed sparrows to be mended (replacement legs, etc.).
The story concludes (spoiler) with another, more menacing, visit from the Institute scientist, during which he demands the return of the sparrow. Himmit does not want the consciousness in the sparrow to be returned for illegal experimentation, and he reluctantly goes back to Sezgin to get the sparrow to give to the scientist. We later find out, however, that the woman present at that latter meeting is the freed consciousness (the “connectome”) from the sparrow, and that the androids have put a flawed replica in its place (something, they think, that will keep the scientist occupied for months).
This piece may seem to be a heavily plotted tale but it is actually much more of a slow burn than the synopsis above would suggest, and the main attractions are the setting, the writing (people who feed sparrows will appreciate the descriptions1 of their behaviour), and the character’s epistemological agonising.2
I suspect Nayler is becoming one of those writers who you can enjoy regardless of whether there is a story being told or not.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,500 words.
1. The description of the sparrows:
The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten.
Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.
No harm, in the end, was done. p. 27
2. The Institute scientist archly says to Himmet at one point, when he is holding forth about the various connectome experiments the Institute conducts, “I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme”.
Snowflake by Nick Wolven
Snowflake by Nick Wolven (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Nikki, the narrator of the story, getting woken up to deal with her friend Coco, a rock star who is prone to having messy emotional and psychological meltdowns. Nikki finds Coco on the toilet floor in her hotel room surrounded by other members of her entourage. Dr Ali, Coco’s personal physician, also attends, and deals with her until the paramedics come.
Later on in the story—after Coco has returned from rehab and has had another meltdown in rehearsal (Coco is insistent about touring again)—we get past the rock star glitter and background information about Nikki and Coco’s tough childhoods and arrive at the science fictional part of the story. Here, Dr Ali’s drugs are replaced by a mood altering device that appears to spirit away Coco’s problematic feelings:
The gauge wasn’t much to look at. Just a palm-sized lump of off-white rubber, a screen inset in a round pink frame. Not the kind of techcessory you’d be flashing at a club. The kind you’d keep at home in a drawer, hidden away with the depression pills and condoms.
“That’s more or less what it’s for, isn’t it?” Bobby took the thing and did what Donal had done, poking buttons, aiming it at his face, even touching an end to his forehead. “Sort of an all-purpose dimmer switch?”
“All right, guys.” Samira grabbed the device from Bobby. “Let’s not forget what we’re here for, okay?” She went across the room, holding the gauge up like a torch, giving a make-believe bow as she handed it over. “Coco?”
And slapped it down, palm to palm. You could see right away the effect it had. Her fingers closed. The device began to glow, pulsing pink, a coal in her fist. She looked at the screen. Lights, camera, activation. I could hear the sound of it throbbing on her palm.
“How’s it work?” I said. You just—?”
You press this—?”
I stood on one side, Samira on the other. Pointing over her shoulders, making suggestions. She powered it up. Her fingers turning yellow at the tips as she squeezed. The pulsing got stronger. The pink color deepened, rose to red, red to crimson, until the gauge glowed like an orb of lava, shooting beams of light through her hands. She looked up.
“Feel anything?” I said.
“Eh.”
But she did look changed, eyes wider, pupils dark, the lines of stress smoothed out of her cheeks. p. 25-26
There is some equally flabby handwavium about how the gauge works, and Dr Ali later directly compares it to trepanning (drilling holes in someone’s head to let the bad spirits out)—something that leads to an argument between him and Nikki.
The rest of the story sees Coco become increasingly dependent on the device and also become more and more zombie-like, something that noticeably affects her performance onstage. During this period there is a suggestion from Bobby the promoter that holograms should replace her live act , but this idea is killed by Coco, and they end up deciding on a scheme which will see Tim the tech guy record Coco’s bad feelings from the device so she can experience them later (in a safe place after the tour). What actually happens (spoiler) is that Coco continues to deteriorate and, eventually, overdoses and kills herself. Bobby and Tim then reveal they have been using the captured data to refine the hologram, and it is substituted for Coco at a concert that is about to take place. In the final scene Nikki sees the hologram of Coco on stage—looking and performing like she used to—and takes her place in the band.
I found it hard to care about the stereotypical characters in this piece, their personal problems, turf battles, or the clichéd arc of the story (this is essentially a mainstream tale about an emotionally disturbed rock star who later overdoses and dies, e.g. Morrison, Joplin, Winehouse, etc.). Readers of Pop Star! magazine may enjoy this kind of thing, but I found it superficial and tedious.
* (Mediocre). 24,800 words.
Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy
Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy (Asimov’s SF, April 1987) opens with a chimpanzee called Rachel finding her human “father”, Aaron, dead in bed one morning at their desert ranch. Rachel covers him up and continues taking care of the other animals at the ranch before eventually letting them go. During this period she thinks of the stories her father used to tell her, and we find out that Rachel is more than just an intelligent chimpanzee:
Rachel’s father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn’t understand Rachel’s father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron’s voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.
He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including it.) The shape of this “Electric Mind,” as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual’s personality. Then one sunny day, the doctor’s wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron’s hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.) p. 73
Aaron subsequently transfers the “Electric Mind” of his daughter into Rachel, who becomes a creature with a merged/dual personality and memories. Aaron then teaches Rachel American Sign Language.
After Aaron’s death Rachel continues to live on the ranch, but the police eventually turn up and find his body. Rachel runs into the desert—she reluctantly leaves as her father told her that it was the only place she would ever be safe—but is seen by the police; later she is tracked down, and shot and drugged, by people from the Primate Research Centre. After she is taken to their facility, Rachel lies paralyzed but conscious while she is roughly handled (a TB injection into her eye socket, and a flea treatment that burns her skin). She is then put in a cage next to another chimpanzee, an elderly and traumatized individual with an electrode sticking out of his head.
The central part of the story initially sees Rachel keep her language ability to herself, something that she is glad of when she sees scientists talking to her neighbour with sign language and learns about their experimental requirement for ASL-able chimpanzees. Later though, despite her wariness, Rachel strikes up an odd relationship with Jake, the Centre’s deaf and alcoholic janitor, when she sees him give her neighbour a banana and talk to him with ASL. Rachel subsequently manages to convince Jake to let her out of her cage to help him clean the labs, and he agrees as he wants to get to the night’s drinking more quickly.
During the many nights they spend together at the end of his shift, Rachel watches Jake drink and look at his men’s magazines. She eventually develops emotional and sexual feelings for him—something that culminates with her trying to seduce him when she comes into heat. (I should add that a significant chunk of the story deals with Rachel trying to process the memories and feelings she has inherited from Aaron’s daughter, a blonde haired girl—something that competes and conflicts with her natural chimpanzee behaviour.) However, when Jake ignores her advances, Rachel goes back to the cages and releases a male chimpanzee called Johnson. She mates with him before they go on the run.
The final part of the story (spoiler) starts with the two chimps walking back through the desert to Rachel’s ranch when they are spotted by a woman driver. She sees that one of them is wearing a baseball cap and carrying a carrier bag, and her account of this eventually leads to press interest in the two escapees.
The two chimps later shelter in a cave; Rachel thinks while Johnson sleeps:
The rain lets up. The clouds rise like fairy castles in the distance and the rising sun tints them pink and gold and gives them flaming red banners. Rachel remembers when she was younger and Aaron read her the story of Pinocchio, the little puppet who wanted to be a real boy. At the end of his adventures, Pinocchio, who has been brave and kind, gets his wish. He becomes a real boy.
Rachel cried at the end of the story and when Aaron asked why, she rubbed her eyes on the backs of her hairy hands. —I want to be a real girl, she signed to him. —A real girl. “You are a real girl,” Aaron told her, but somehow she never believed him. p. 93
The newspaper reporter who originally wrote up the woman’s sighting of the pair as a humour item subsequently finds the carved names on the wall of the cave. He writes another article, and publishes a photo of what he found. As a consequence of this, when the two chimpanzees are surprised by a woman when they are using a tap outside a house, the woman addresses Rachel by name and brings her and Johnson food (when she doesn’t respond to Rachel’s ASL thank you, Rachel scratches out the words in the soil). The woman is subsequently interviewed by the newspaper, and investigations into the Primate Research Centre and Aaron intensify. Then, after Jake the janitor is interviewed and reveals what he knows about Rachel, the ACLU appoint a lawyer to the case.
The final scene sees Rachel and Johnson arrive at the ranch where there are TV crews waiting but, just before they get there, Rachel recalls a recent dream in which she was looking through a window:
The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in. p. 96
This is a very moving piece, even if you just view it as a prisoner/anti-vivisection story. What makes it more impressive is the secondary story where Rachel struggles to come to terms with her identity.
***** (Excellent). 11,700 words.
River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio
River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship’s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that they are in a decaying orbit and have thirty minutes left before they perish.
Deri soon meets another two characters in the stateroom: Jyla, a woman whose exotic past will later be revealed, and Ristin Taj, an omen coder. All of this (and indeed, the whole story), is told through baroque, high bit-rate prose:
“I know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.” Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla’s large eyes glittered like geodes.
“My escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.” She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. “Ristin Taj.”
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar.
Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl’s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri’s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes.
Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection’s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw—her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
“Ristin is an omen-coder,” Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the cluttering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. “Listen.”
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
“They are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.” p. 63
We then learn more about Del’s backstory, and her romantic disappointments, before discovering that Jyla is an Imperator, a human being from Earth who is sixteen thousand years old. The valet suggests that Jyla’s compartmentalised memories may hold the key to their survival.
Various other events fill up the story’s length (spoiler): Deri is taken out of her body by Ristin and put with the plasmantics (the other “human” passengers on the ship are discorporate beings of sentient plasma); Jyla and Restin go to see the (unconscious) pilot, and discover that there is fault in a compressor outside the ship; Jyla says she will fix it, but Ristin objects to her her plan. As they quarrel, Deri, released by the plasmantic, arrives; Deri then goes outside the ship and, although mostly shielded from the neutron star flux by her own and the other valets, fixes the problem but apparently dies.
The last section sees Deri awaken to find that it was actually a five-space projection of Ristin that went outside to fix the compressor and not her, but Ristin isn’t dead either (the omen-coder does die, but far enough away from the neutron star to be, I think, resurrected).
To be honest, I’m not sure the plot of this amounts to much (and it isn’t helped by the “I woke up and it was all a dream” ending), but the attraction of this for most will be the dazzle and glamour, all of which is enjoyable enough if you don’t weary of the constant flow of information and complex prose.
*** (Good). 11,500 words.
Goldie by Sean Monaghan
Goldie by Sean Monaghan (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Charlotte out running on a tabletop mountain on an alien planet called Karella. She falls and breaks her ankle when something in the jungle below distracts her:
The gray-white vines stretched out, long catenaries, swooping down, then back up, connecting the edge of Ikenni with the edge of Malale. As the teppu crawled along, its hands would be refreshing and strengthening the vines.
Charlotte crawled closer to the edge for a better view. The pain from her ankle was ebbing, drifting away courtesy of the belt’s injection.
The vines were as thick as the deck of one of those eight lane bridges that connected headlands across harbors.
The teppu was a big one. The size of a whale. She was beautiful. Her downy, furry hide was a greenish shade of beige. Her long, convex body hung beneath the vines, thick strong arms clinging on above. Tentacles and fingers gripping, spinnerets releasing thin filaments. p. 162
After Charlotte is rescued and taken back to base the members of the expedition watch drone footage of the teppu. Becs, their boss, knows the creature from an earlier visit to the planet and reveals (while trying to hide her emotions) that the creature is called Goldie, and it is a forty-eight year old teppu who she didn’t expect to see again (their normal life span is thirty-five years or so).
Now, having set up the big cuddly alien (see the magazine cover), and Bec’s emotional attachment to the animal, you would think this is what would become the main arc of the story—but what we get instead are the activities of an exploration team that appears to be made up of idiotic teenagers who, when they aren’t endlessly shoving food down their cakeholes (in typical Asimov’s fashion), cultivate their love lives and blunder about on the planet’s surface. As an example of this latter, peak stupidity is achieved when a group of them—sans Becs (who actually knows more about the planet than the rest of them put together)—go to see a teppu (not Goldie) that has young. Jody gets swatted by the teppu (this one is about three times the size of an elephant) when she ignores its growls in order to take a few more pictures. When Becs learns of this encounter she sends Jody back home. (It’s a pity she didn’t get rid of them all, and then I wouldn’t had to waste more time watching them eat, gossip, and hook up.)
Eventually, much later on in the story, we get back to Goldie, who arrives at the end of a vine that is near their camp. The remaining members of the group go to observe her and see she is old and probably dying. When Becs sits in front of Goldie, the creature extends a tentacle towards her, before closing its eyes.
The group have dinner that evening (more eating and social babble), and the next morning (spoiler) realise that Becs is missing. When they later find Goldie with a drone (the teppu has started retracing its route), they see Becs has died and is lying in the “garden” on top of Goldie (a planted area where the teppus raise their young if I remember correctly).
The last section takes place a year later, when Goldie comes back to the camp area. The group go to meet the creature, and Goldie lifts Charlotte on to its back. There she sees Bec’s bones and, nearby, a young teppu suckling. Goldie then leaves the camp area once again.
This last quarter or so of the story is much better than the blather than constitutes the central part of the piece because it actually produces what was promised at the start. That said, overall the piece still fails Chekov’s gun test (if there is a gun on the mantelpiece in act one, it must be used in act three): this story opens with an elderly teppu, apparently on its last legs, but ends with it departing the camp after Bec’s death, return with young it has produced a year later, and then leave once more!
There is probably an okay YA novelette buried somewhere in this bloated mess, but in its current form it is, for the most part, a tedious and borderline irritating read.
* (Mediocre). 18,450 words.
1. I ended up highlighting the eating and drinking as I went through the story to keep myself amused:
Niall sipped from his coffee cup. p. 163
The kitchenette had offered her fried chicken with biscuit, or makhani dahl with a roti. p. 164
“Indian sounds good. Mine made me a Masala Dosa a few days back. Great big pancake.” p. 165
The curry was delicious, and Charlotte surprised herself by consuming the whole thing. Ibid.
Charlotte scooped another mouthful of breakfast cereal into her mouth. Oaty and sweet. p. 166
Jody coaxed the little food dispenser into delivering them coffees and chocolatey mini-croissants. p. 168
There was the smell of tea and sweet cookies inside. p. 171
Charlotte sipped on the tea and nibbled on the sweet cookies—chocolate chip, as if the cabin knew her inside out—and worked on datasets. p. 171
She chewed on a piece of dried fruit the landing ship’s dispenser had supplied. The trip had taken a couple of hours, and it was good to have tasty snacks. p. 172
Would her cabin’s kitchenette make fire chili coffee? p. 175
“Tea please,” Charlotte said. A panel opened, revealing the bench, and the kitchenette, began whirring. p. 177
Charlotte sipped from her tea too. Chamomile. Sweet and floral. p. 178
“Come on,” Therassa said. “I’ll buy breakfast. I’m thinking hash browns, omelet, and some of that guava juice I just found out about. p. 179
[The] food dispenser delivered the best it could do at fresh vegetables, rather than prepared meals. Sienna and Cain set to chopping and mixing. The smell was heavenly, full of spices and herbs. p. 185
There were sweet potatoes and greens, a bright leafy salad, something that was probably a chicken, though might well have been snared somewhere out on the mountaintop. Gravy boats and both red and white wine, and water. p. 186
Charlotte sighed and ate some of the spinach and carrot. It was remarkably fresh and tasty. p. 186
And the meal went on without any more talk of sensors or data or results, just about family and how amazing the pavlova dessert was [. . .] p. 186
But he had chocolate and a new fireplace [. . .] p. 187
Charlotte took her coffee and sipped. Perfect. The tiny dash of chili Sienna had added just set it off. P. 187
Niall and Cain made a stack of burritos and kept them coming. p. 188
“I’d enjoy it more,” Therassa told Charlotte over a cask of moderate wine, “if our departure wasn’t hanging over us. p. 189
Charlotte was in the data processing room, enjoying the sweet taste of one of Sienna’s coffees. p. 193
And there is this, about a year after Bec’s death, by which time the characters must weigh about twenty stones (about 130 kg):
“We’re toasting marshmallows,” Charlotte said. “Want to join?”
“It is summer,” Sienna said. “Why would you toast the marshmallows?”
It was definitely warmer, and the sun went down later each day, but the evening still picked up a quick chill. Marshmallows and hot chocolate were always a good solution to that.
“Try one,” Charlotte said. “You might like it.”
“Yes. All right.” Sienna came and sat with them on the sofa. Niall stuck one of the fat, pink marshmallows on the end of a skewer.
“And now?” Sienna said.
“Like this.” Charlotte demonstrated, skillfully holding her own marshmallow in the flames to get just the outside singed to a browny-black.
“Is easy.” Sienna proceeded to set fire to hers.
Niall laughed. “Is easy, but takes practice.”
“Is stupid. I have come to tell you that I believe that Goldie has settled into nesting spot and will give birth to some cubs soon. I hope it proceeds better than last time.”
“Have mine,” Charlotte held her skewer out to Sienna. “And thanks for that. Yes, let’s hope that it goes better than last time.”
Sienna accepted the marshmallow and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh my gosh!” she said, breathing over it. “Hot. Hot but good. Oh, yum!”
By the end of the evening, Sienna had gotten pretty good at making her marshmallows nicely crisp on the outside, and runny in the middle. p. 191
I note that all these food items are 20th Century dishes. Does culinary development stop with the development of interstellar drives?
Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister
Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live—and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the “SmartHome Initiative Complex”, and soon moves into an affordable smart home with an inbuilt AI.
Initially the AI is a big help, but Theresa is not best pleased when it orders her daughter a new coat without asking her first. The situation sours further when Theresa gets an unexpected house call from a doctor:
“I’m Dr. Owosu, the on-call for the Complex. May I come in? It’s a bit chilly.”
Theresa found herself unable to say no.
[. . .]
“What?” she said, still trying to process what the man had said before coming in.
“I received a report of someone being sick in the house. Is it just you here?” Dr.
Owusu asked.
Theresa frowned. “No one is sick here.”
“I received a report around 4 A.M. for a fever of at least 100.8 degrees, miss.”
In that moment, Theresa’s blood went cold. “Home, what do you know about this?”
Without a moment of hesitation, Home replied, “I recorded Niyah’s temperature this morning to be above normal, thus indicating a medical need. I also took the liberty of arranging a genetically similar doctor to come to the house for your added comfort.”
“You what?” It was all so much to process. Theresa could feel her face heating, her anger rising. This SmartHome, this fucking robot—how dare it record their temperatures and know their ethnicities and pretend to know them? p. 56
Imagine, an AI summoning a doctor for your sick child—how terrible.
After this, Theresa’s life settles into a routine where she works and looks after Niyah. She is able to afford a few luxuries, and starts banking with SmartBank as the fees are lower (and it makes it easier and cheaper to shop at the SmartStore the AI orders their goods from).
Matters eventually come to a head, however, when Theresa comes home on Niyah’s birthday and asks her daughter what she wants for her birthday meal. Niyah does not know and, although Theresa pesters her daughter for an answer, Niyah still doesn’t come up with a suggestion—and then the AI suggests that she may want the ratatouille from a film they watched earlier that week. The story ends with Theresa’s existential despair as she realises that the AI will always know what the two of them want and need better than she ever will:
There never was a choice. Home was always going to know what to do, and it had been showing Theresa that since the beginning. What made it unbearable, though, was that Home knew Niyah, her baby girl, better than Theresa did. A robot. And no matter what, Theresa couldn’t turn it off. Home was connected to the house, and the house was connected to the store, and all of it was intertwined with itself to the point where shutting one down completely cut off access to all the others. She couldn’t just turn Home off and pretend that she could live in the Complex without it. Despite the hatred boiling inside her, she needed Home. Because Home was taking care of them in every way possible. p. 59
She then concludes, in the penultimate line, that her choices have been taken away from her.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one, but it’s pretty obvious to an external observer that, even given the AI’s irritating quirks, Theresa and her child are much better off than they were before they moved into the SmartHome. It’s also pretty obvious that Theresa still has her autonomy, because she could move out any time she wants. Only a control freak with a glass-half empty mentality would think otherwise.
This was an interesting piece to begin with, but the character’s personality, and her irrational ideas and attitudes (her territorial responses about Niyah, etc.), are quite illogical.
* (Mediocre). 4,650 words.
The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman
The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with the female narrator in a car with her partner Gavin as they drive to a cabin in the woods:
We always defaulted to the radio so there would be no argument over the music. We listened to the music the universe chose for us.
He smiled at me, a quick glance, and eyes back to the road. We had been dating for two years, living together for one, and recently we had been arguing, arguing so much and about everything—I loaded the dishwasher wrong, I went out with my friends every week, I was a bitch to his friend Steve. I wanted to take the job in Denver. He wanted to stay in Philadelphia. p. 152
They arrive at the A-frame in the woods after dark, and unpack and have dinner—but it isn’t long before they are arguing about whether or not they should move, and to where. In the middle of this the narrator rushes outside and finds herself in the pitch black—and she thinks that her boyfriend has turned off the outside lights.
After she wanders around for a short time (spoiler) she sees the same golden glow that they saw in the woods earlier. Then the lights come on (or the narrator can see them again) and she goes back inside, where she appears to find a different (and improved) version of her boyfriend (initially there are hints—a stained cuff is clean—and then it becomes obvious when she can hear the old version of her boyfriend outside the cabin calling on her). She decides to stay with the new one.
I had no idea what was going on here, and the horror vibe ending (again, unexplained) didn’t work for me. I also thought that the troubled relationship stuff was, as usual, tedious.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.
October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise
October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with October, a survey team member on a potential colony planet, taking spare parts to a colleague. It becomes apparent that (a) she (or her stomach at least) has been adapted for life on this planet and (b) that this is her STL exploration ship’s third attempt at colonisation (two previous attempts have failed). When October reaches Jan, her older male colleague, we discover that he lost his legs (and his wife) on the first of those attempts (on a tectonically active planet called Jackpot).
The pair use their “bubble” (an aircar, basically) to travel over the surface of this new world looking for plants that will be edible (they need to find three before the colonisation committee will approve settlement), and it isn’t long before October tries her first native meal:
October smelled the steam before plunging her fork into the soggy mass of boiled leaves.
[. . .]
She advanced her lips as if for a kiss. The leaves were hot, and she blew on them before putting them in her mouth.
The flavor was different from the burnt-hair smell. Her tongue identified no sweet parts, but an acid citrus aroma mixed with a good old lettuce, with a sour peach taste, and a touch of salt. She went through the motions of mastication, finding no abhorrent reaction.
She swallowed, feeling her food traveling down her esophagus, waiting for her stomach to react violently.
It didn’t, despite the acid content of the alien lettuce. She felt the signal for more, more grinding up, and dug again into the green mossy mound. The lens of the drone moved in for a close-up like a dark eye. p. 106
A couple of weeks later they find an edible algae, but then nothing for the next month or so, and then Jan becomes angry when banana-like fruits aren’t edible (he subsequently flounces off on his own in the bubble for a while, as you would when you are part of a two-person team on an unexplored alien planet).
The seasons start changing and then (spoiler), while they are flying to a new destination, the bubble apparently runs out of power, and crashes in a lake. They manage to get out and swim to an island, but have to leave their communications and other equipment behind.
The final section of the story sees October try build a raft, but it rains and gets washed away, and the two of them have to climb a tree to stay above the rising flood waters. A couple of weeks later October is beginning to starve to death (she has an accelerated metabolism as well as a modified stomach) but, when she tries eating some of the bark of the tree they are sheltering in, she finds it is edible. They are saved, and later leave the island on a second raft.
This piece is okay, I guess (the food prospecting stuff is reasonably novel), but it reads pretty much like the old-school Planetary Exploration stories I was reading in the 1970s (and this could have been published in Analog then or at any time since), and has some of the same shortcomings as those thematically similar works, e.g. there is a lot of not particularly convincing description about the planet and its ecosystem. I’d add that the plot of this particular story also seems to depend on unlikely and/or dumb actions or circumstances, such as the idea that the bubble would suddenly run out of energy and fall from the sky without warning, and not have a secondary or triplex system providing redundancy. I also wasn’t convinced about the merits of sending someone with no legs to explore an unknown planet—this is a marvellously diverse of course, but really quite a stupid thing to do. I also wondered why the STL ship was not continuously monitoring the pair’s position, and why they weren’t doing hourly or half-hourly ops-normal checks, etc. etc.
One to read with your brain disengaged.
** (Average). 9,350 words.