Month: May 2022

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw (Cosmic Kaleidoscope, 1976) opens like a hardboiled detective story, but quickly becomes something else:

It was a Thursday morning in January—stale and dank as last night’s cigar butts—and my office phone hadn’t rung all week. I was slumped at the desk, waiting out a tequila hangover, when this tall, creamy blonde walked in. The way she was dressed whispered of money, and what was inside the dress hinted at my other hobby—but I was feeling too lousy to take much notice.
She set a flat parcel on my desk and said, “Are you Phil Dexter, the private psi?”
I tipped back my hat and gave her a bleak smile. “What does it say on my office door, baby?”
Her smile was equally cool. “It says Glossop’s Surgical Corset Company.”
“I’ll kill that signwriter,” I gritted. “He promised to be here this week for sure. Two months I’ve been in this office, and. . .”
“Mr. Dexter, do you mind if we set your problems on one side and discuss mine?” She began untying the string on the parcel.

The woman, Caroline Colvin, then unwarps the parcel and shows him a very good copy of the Mona Lisa—but the hands seem in a slightly different position and, when Dexter touches it, he gets an impression of great age, hilly landscapes, and a bearded man standing in front of a carousel-like contraption. Dexter rapidly comes to the conclusion that the painting is by Da Vinci himself.
Dexter then learns that Colvin inherited the painting from her father, who had visited Italy the previous spring. When he touches the painting again, he senses that her father recently travelled to Milan—the pair are soon catching the noon sub-orbital to the city.
Once they arrive in the city, it isn’t long before Dexter’s psi abilities enable him to track down a man called Crazy Julio, something Dexter manages with the help of a highly dodgy waiter called Mario (who, when he isn’t trying to buy Colvin from Dexter for the white slave trade, is gouging Dexter for money and rewinding the speedometer on the car he has borrowed from his mother).
The last part of the story sees Dexter and Colvin drive the last two miles to Crazy Julio’s without Mario as Dexter doesn’t want the waiter to get wind of the Mona Lisa, or the potential money involved (Dexter comments to Colvin, “If that poor boy isn’t in the Mafia, it’s because they gave him a dishonorable discharge.”).
When the two of them finally arrive at Julio’s farmhouse he greets them with a shotgun, but Dexter soon overcomes his resistance:

“Come on, Julio.” I got out of the car and loomed over him. “Where is the cave?”
Julio’s jaw sagged. “How you know about the cave?”
“I have ways of knowing things.” I used quite a lot of echo chamber in the voice, aware that peasants tend to be afraid of espers.
Julio looked up at me with worried eyes. “I get it,” he said in a low voice. “You are pissy.”
“P-S-I is pronounced like ‘sigh,’ ” I gritted. “Try to remember that, will you? Now, where’s that cave?”

In the cave (spoiler) Dexter and Colvin discover that they are another fifty or sixty Mona Lisa paintings loaded on a merry-go-round-like device with a viewing lens attached. Dexter realises that it must be some sort of animation device, and gets Julio to turn the crankshaft while he watches:

On top of everything else that had transpired, I was about to have the privilege of actually viewing Leonardo’s supreme masterpiece brought to magical life, to commune with his mind in a manner that nobody would have thought possible, to see his sublime artistry translated into movement. Perhaps I was even to learn the secret of the Gioconda smile.
Filled with reverence, I put my eyes to the viewing holes and saw the Mona Lisa miraculously moving, miraculously alive. She raised her hands to the neckline of her dress and pulled it down to expose her ample left breast. She gave her shoulder a twitch, and the breast performed the classiest circular swing I had seen since the last night I witnessed Fabulous Fifi Lafleur windmilling her tassels in Schwartz’s burlesque hall. She then drew her dress back up to its former position of modesty and demurely crossed one hand over the other, smiling a little.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Oh, God, God, God, God!”

The last scene has the complication of Mario turning up at the cave and getting the drop on them. Initially he is only interested in the immense wealth that will be his but, after viewing the animation, burns the paintings and mechanism out of an upwelling of national pride.
An amusing story with a clever (and certainly different!) central gimmick.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.

Kora is Life by David D. Levine

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kora is Life by David D. Levine (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with Kestrel Magid practicing for an air race on the alien planet Kora. He is the first ever human to fly in this particular competition:

A roar off to my right caught my attention. A pure white practice wing like mine, but with struts painted in red and blue . . . it was Skeelee. Of course. She gave me a roguish salute as she passed me, climbing fast.
My patrons were the Stormbird clade, their colors yellow and black. The Sabrecat clade, red and blue, was Stormbird’s longest-standing and most hated rival, and the loathing was mutual; Skeelee had given me nothing but shit since I’d arrived here last month. I had tried to maintain a professional, sportsmanlike attitude in the face of her provocations . . . but this was no competition, not yet. This was only a practice session. So maybe I could rag on her a little without betraying my principles. I squeezed the throttle and surged upward after her.  p. 29

This passage illustrates the personal and clan rivalries that run through the remainder of the story.
Skeelee gets the best of Magid in this duel (his Earth-built jet engine flames out on short finals to their landing zone on the beach), and (spoiler) she goes on to do the same again in the two formal practice runs before the final race.
In between these contests we see: Kora’s planetary and inter-clade politics at work; internal tensions in the Stormbird Clade that Magid represents (later on in the story their engineer commits suicide because the Stormbird Clade’s engine isn’t being used); and Magid generally acting like a fish out of water (getting into trouble with the aliens when sober, and also when drunk).
The story comes to a climax in the final race, during which Magid has to cope with not only the murderous Coral Clade, but also the stormy weather and the knowledge that, if he wins, the culture of Kora will be changed forever. Needless to say, Magid wins even though he crashes short of the finishing line (his engine runs out of fuel this time, but the nose piece of his wing crosses the line first).
This piece has pros and cons and, as it happens, most of the pros are noticeable when you are reading the story, and most of the cons occur to you afterwards. So, the pros: it is a good light adventure story (verging on YA) which is well paced, generally well-plotted, and is concisely and transparently told (oh, the joy of not having to hack through endless MFA verbiage). The cons: this is essentially a non-SF story about jet powered hang-gliders which has been moved to an alien planet; the bouncing nose-cone ending is weak and unconvincing; and the aliens are sketchily drawn (apart from the fact they have fur, we find out little else about their physicality). I’d also add that Magid starts off the story as a fairly callow sort, and ends up pretty much the same despite everything that happens to him. Notwithstanding the latter reservations, this is an enjoyable and easy read.1
*** (Good). 18,050 words. Story link.

1. In some respects, this story reminded me of the kind of thing that used to appear in the George Scithers-edited Asimov’s Science Fiction (or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as it was then) of the late 1970s. I think there is probably a gap in the current magazine market for a publication that emphasises lighter, entertaining, and more traditional work, and which avoids political division and lectures, solipsism, apocalyptic fiction, and MFA-inspired writing in general.

The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan,1 translated by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gives the narrator’s account of his researches into Xijin Guang Hansheng, the author of Ascent to the Moon: Travel Notes of Guang Hansheng (an incomplete Chinese newspaper serial from 1905-1906):

It wasn’t the content of the fiction that drew me in, but the small, blurry illustrations accompanying it. Ratlike humanoids stood on the cratered surface of the Moon. They were rigging up a crude, concave reflector like a present-day satellite dish, using a crater rim for support.
I knew it was a reflector because in the far corner of the image was the Sun, shining a beam of light onto the Moon, which the dish redirected at Earth. Black smoke rose from the focal point on Earth.
This gave me pause. Someone from the Late Qing knowing the Moon was cratered? Then again, it made sense. Part of the ether fantasy propagated back then was a notion that the fabled substance might fill the Moon’s craters, so that from Earth, the Moon would appear smooth. But my brief doubt caused me to linger on this newspaper, originally no more interesting than the other exhibits. Serialized novel chapters, each with a summarizing couplet, were the main form of fiction in the Late Qing.
This sheet of newspaper featured the ending of the seventeenth chapter of the novel in question.  pp. 70-71

The rest of the story isn’t much more than an account of the narrator’s obsessive and detailed research (mostly of the library’s microfilms), but his commentary on what he finds paints a interesting picture of China at the turn of the century. As various leads go cold, others turn up and, along the way, we also learn a little more about the narrator (he isn’t an academic, but won’t reveal his social status to the librarians he chats with).
Eventually, the narrator finds what he thinks is Hansheng’s last article (most of the rest of Hangsheng’s work is popular science), and his research ends. He concludes with an observation about the writer (and, perhaps unwittingly in the final part, himself):

I like to imagine an awkward, cantankerous savant possessed of scientific insight transcending his epoch, but unable to communicate it effectively. Understanding much that others can’t, proud yet distracted, getting no approbation, insignificant, at the end of his rope, nowhere to go, nowhere to vent, and not even knowing himself clearly—and suddenly, death is coming. He has squandered his rare smidgeon of talent, while watching others advance while he stays where he is. Alone. Just like countless literati of the time, and now, and even the future.  pp. 82-83

I suspect that this will be a Marmite piece—some will be engrossed by the detail of the library detective work, and amused by the narrator’s occasionally mordant observations (“Self-important people cannot abide silence or anonymity”, “I’d heard the PhD student looking for Reunions in the [vast ocean of the] microfilm archive had ended up with detached retinas”), while others will be bored witless. Even those in the former camp (such as myself) may find that, ironic ending or not, it rather fizzles out. Still, an interesting piece if not a totally satisfying one, and I’m glad I read it.
**+ (Average to Good). 5,500 words. Story link.

1. This was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Supplemental issue, 2016.

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
**** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer (Worlds of If, November 1967)1 opens with a woman rescued from a wrecked spaceship barricading herself into the engine-room of the experimental FTL craft Sleipnir. She then accelerates the Sleipnir beyond light speed.
When Grettir, the captain of the ship, learns that the woman will only talk to him, he goes down to speak to her. He gives instructions to MacCool, his engineering officer, to blast his way in if he is incapacitated or killed. Grettir then talks to the woman, during which she confuses Grettir with her dead husband Robert (she has been delusional since she has been rescued) before shooting at him. When Grettir recovers consciousness he discovers that MacCool has blasted his way in, and that the woman stripped off all her clothes and went out the airlock. Grettir also learns that they are now in a strange, unknown zone of space.
After this fast-paced and Van Vogtian start to the story, it becomes something much more weird and trippy. Grettir sees that they are in a grey space filled with grey spheres and, after much speculation, he concludes that they have entered a “super universe”, and that the sphere behind them is their universe (there is some 1930s-ish atom-and-electron-worlds hand-wavium at this point). As they manoeuvre back to where they think they entered the super-universe, they fly past the woman’s now huge dead body.
The next part of the story sees the various attempts made by the Sleipnir’s crew to re-enter their own universe, during which, on one failed attempt, they have burning coal-like objects shoot through the bridge:

Grettir picked up his cigar, which he had dropped on the deck when he had first seen the objects racing toward him. The cigar was still burning. Near it lay a coal, swiftly blackening. He picked it up gingerly. It felt warm but could be held without too much discomfort.
Grettir extended his hand, palm up, so that the doctor could see the speck of black matter in it. It was even smaller than when it had floated into the bridge through the momentarily “opened” interstices of the molecules composing the hull and bulkheads.
“This is a galaxy,” he whispered.
Doc Wills did not understand. “A galaxy of our universe,” Grettir added.
Doc Wills paled, and he gulped loudly.
“You mean . . . ?”
Grettir nodded.
Wills said, “I hope . . . not our . . . Earth’s . . . galaxy!”

The story becomes even more bizarre when they later fly into the woman’s body, start overheating, and only just make it out again (you get the impression that in a more permissive age they would have been birthed out of her womb/vagina, but, if I recall correctly, they come out of her mouth). After this they prepare for a final attempt to get back into their own universe.
This has a fast-paced start, but the bulk of the story, although sometimes entertaining, is arbitrarily bizarre and goes on too long. The ending also fizzles out.
** (Average). 10,200 words. Story link.

1. From the Philip José Farmer website:

Farmer tried to sell this as a possible Star Trek episode (before the show ever aired I think). He later decided that it would not have worked. Just what is waiting for us at the edge of the universe?

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:

Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her.
“Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.”
Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces.
“Where’s the place?” Harafat asked.
“See for yourself.”
Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around.
Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view?  pp. 88-89

The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there.
When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps.
Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:

More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted.  p. 93

Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps).
This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings have too long titles, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action). I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles).
* (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.

Hatching by Bo Balder

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hatching by Bo Balder (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend.
The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.).
The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:

At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting.
Alzey blinked.
A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life.  p. 27

Aw, bless.
The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me.
* (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.

Common Time by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Common Time by James Blish (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953) sees Garrard wake up in a FTL spaceship with the thought “Don’t move!” He struggles to open his eyelids, senses that something is very wrong, and does not attempt to move his body. Eventually, after further description of his physical condition and of his observations, Garrard realises that the infrequent “pock” sound he hears is the hugely slowed down ticking of the ship’s clock. He then counts seconds in his head and discovers that ship time is moving much more slowly than his subjective time—and that it will take him six thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri.
After Garrard gets over the intial shock, he thinks further about the physical ramifications (his body is subject to ship-time, and much slower than the speed his mind is working, so there will be a problem with co-ordination) and the possible mental problems (how will he occupy his time and stave off madness?) Then, as he deliberates, he notices that the clock is speeding up, and that the ship-time is accelerating. Soon, the clock is a blur, and he enters a state of “pseudo-death”.
The next stage of the story sees Garrard awake at Alpha Centauri, where he is greeted by aliens who speak to him in a incomprehensible language (although Garrard can make sense of it):

“How do you hear?” the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual.
“I . . .” he said. “Or we—we hear with our ears. Here.”
His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language. “We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,” the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the deck beside the hammock. “We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.”
“With all of love,” Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.

After another page or so of Blish channelling (I presume) his inner James Joyce, Garrard sets off for Earth, and once more he experiences pseudo-death.
The final part of the story sees Garrard awake near Uranus, and he soon makes radio contact with Earth. The story then ends with a conversation between Garrard and Haertel, the inventor of the FTL drive, about various scientific and philosophical matters (how personality depends on environment, time flow, etc.). When Garrard volunteers to go out again on a new ship, Haertel refuses, saying that they need to work out why the beademung wanted him to come back to Earth.
This story has an intriguing gimmick at the beginning of the piece, and an interesting (if somewhat unintelligible) first contact situation after that. However, all this, and the dull talking heads section at the end, doesn’t really add up to anything, and you very much get the impression that the author was merely playing with a number of pet ideas as he went along.1
There are also a number of matters that don’t make much sense: (a) the interior temperature in the ship is noted as being 37° C, far too hot to be comfortable; (b) the reason he enters “pseudo death” isn’t explained (if time kept on speeding up in the last part of the journey it would appear as if he suddenly arrives at Alpha Centauri; (c) if ship time speeds up so rapidly your normal speed mind won’t be able to feed your body sufficiently, and you will starve to death during the ten month trip.
Those who like literary, or more ideational or philosophical stories, may get something out of this, but I suspect many will be perplexed.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.

1. The story was commissioned by Robert A. Lowndes to accompany a previously painted cover:



The details of this commission are discussed in Robert Silverberg’s anthology, Science Fiction 101, where the he recounts what the cover suggested to Blish:

Blish, early in 1953, was handed a photostat of a painting that showed a draftsman’s compasses with their points extended to pierce two planets, one of them the Earth and the other a cratered globe that might have been the Moon. A line of yellow string also connected the two worlds. In the background were two star-charts and the swirling arms of a spiral nebula. Blish later recalled that the pair of planets and their connecting yellow string reminded him on some unconscious level of a pair of testicles and the vas deferens, which is the long tube through which sperm passes during the act of ejaculation. And out of that—by the tortuous and always mysterious process of manipulation of initial material that is the way stories come into being—he somehow conjured up the strange and unforgettable voyage of “Common Time,” which duly appeared as the cover story on the August, 1953, issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.  p. 282

If Blish were older at the time he would presumably have identified the exploding sun in the background as the prostate.
Silverberg adds:

I failed to notice, I ought to admit, anything in the story suggesting that it was about the passage of sperm through the vas deferens and onward to the uterus. To me in my innocence it was nothing more than an ingenious tale of the perils of faster-than-light travel between stars. Damon Knight, in a famous essay published in 1957, demonstrated that the voyage of the sperm was what the story was “really” about, extracting from it a long series of puns and other figures of speech that exemplified the underlying sexual symbolism of everything that happens: the repeated phrase “Don’t move” indicates the moment of orgasm, and so forth. Blish himself was fascinated by that interpretation of his story and added a host of embellishments to Knight’s theory in a subsequent letter to him. All of which called forth some hostility from other well-known science fiction writers, and for months a lively controversy ran through the s-f community. Lester del Rey, for example, had no use for any symbolist interpretations of fiction. “A story, after all, is not a guessing game,” del Rey said. “We write for entertainment, which means primarily for casual reading. Now even Knight has to pore through a story carefully and deliberately to get all the symbols, so we can’t really communicate readily and reliably by them. To the casual reader, the conscious material on the surface must be enough. Hence we have to construct a story to be a complete and satisfying thing, even without the symbols. . . . If we get off on a binge of writing symbols for our own satisfaction, there’s entirely too much temptation to feel that we don’t have to make our points explicitly, but to feel a smug glow of satisfaction in burying them so they only appear to those who look for symbols.”  pp. 282-283

Knight’s analysis of the sexual symbols in the story can be found—if, like him, you appear to have too much time on your hands—in Chapter 26 of In Search of Wonder.