Month: May 2022

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi (F&SF, November/December 2020) opens with Mansour, a woman with terminal cancer, going to the Bahrain Underground Bazaar. There she experiences the deaths of others (these have been harvested by an internet like brain implant called a NeuroLync):

In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer — the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing.
The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing — I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me.  pp. 7-8

On this occasion she experiences the death of a woman who is leading a donkey down a cliff path, and who either jumps or slips to her death (there is a death-wish moment at the edge, but it is unclear whether the fall is intentional). Then, after the blackness that normally denotes death, Mansour experiences something else:

And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all. And then voices.
The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead?
But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it.  pp. 10-11

This is the seed for the story’s further developments, but Mansour’s desire to find out more about the woman and that post-death experience is derailed when she is intercepted by her concerned daughter-in-law outside the bazaar (“You don’t need dark thoughts — you’ll beat this by staying positive.”). Later that evening Mansour’s son Firaz also expresses his worry, but this doesn’t stop her going back to the bazaar the next day and asking the proprietor to show her the dead woman’s “highlights reel”. Mansour discovers that the women was a Bedouin mother who lived a largely unremarkable life, and then, even though Mansour doesn’t feel any particular connection with her, she impulsively buys a train ticket to Petra in Jordan, the area where the woman lived.
On her arrival in Petra (spoiler) Mansour hires a teenager with a donkey to take her to see the tourist sights. First they go to the nearby Treasury, and then she asks to be taken up the cliff-edge path to the Monastery:

“Do people ever fall?”
Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline.
“It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.”
My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story?
While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff.
“Can we stop for a minute?”
“Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge.
Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge.
“Please, sayida!”
Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now.
Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there — the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise.
But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change.  pp. 20-21

They continue up the mountain to the Monastery. There they eat and drink, and Mansour discovers that the boy is the grandson of the woman who fell to her death. She asks him about his grandmother, and listens to what he has to say, but does not tell him about the recording of her death. Then she asks him to use his NeuroLync to call her son (she has left her phone behind so Firaz and her daughter-in-law cannot track her).
The last part of the story sees her reconciled with Firaz, and her approaching death (or at least to the extent anyone can be).
I liked this story quite a bit. Afifi’s writing style is concise but conjures up a believable world and characters—and there is a plot here too, even though it is essentially a mainstream one (one slight quibble is that the writer went for a mainstream ending—reconcilement, acceptance—rather than doing a transcendent call-back to the post-death experience). If the ending had been stronger (i.e. melded the mainstream and SFnal endings), I would have probably given this four stars.
A writer to watch, I think (I had the rare impulse to check out her novel1), and a story that would probably appeal to Ray Nayler fans.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,600 words.

1. The Sentient, 2020, first in the “Cosmic” series (the next one, Emergent, is due any day now). “The race to stop the first human clones uncovers a dark secret.”

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, April 1958) sees a time-travelling Claude Ford hunting a brontosaurus in the past:

You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

This intensely described and emotionally heightened narrative continues, with descriptions of the scene alternating with Claude’s inner thoughts, until (spoiler) he eventually shoots and kills the creature. Then, as he examines the dinosaur’s body up close, one of the beast’s parasites attacks and kills him.
This seems to be more of a dramatic prose poem than a story, but maybe that, and the ironic ending, will do it for some readers. It’s certainly got more depth and vibrancy than the other time travel pieces of the period.
** (Average). 2,400 words. Story link.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard by Cordwainer Smith

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard by Cordwainer Smith (F&SF, June 1961) is one of the author’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” series, and takes place at a time1 when the Instrumentality has decided to dismantle, or at least partially dismantle, the stable society it has created:

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past.

We knew that all of this was make-believe, and yet it was not. We knew that when the diseases had killed the statistically correct number of people, they would be turned off; when the accident rate rose too high, it would stop without our knowing why. We knew that over us all, the Instrumentality watched. We had confidence that the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More would play with us as friends and not use us as victims of a game.

The story continues with the narrator Paul pairing up with the French-speaking Virginia, who, during their conversation, reveals that she has previously visited the Abba-dingo computer located half-way up the twelve-mile-high Earthport. As Paul quizzes her about the experience, they follow a ramp down into the underground, where he is unsettled by the homunculi and hominids that work there tending their society’s machines. In particular, a female d’person (dog person), gives him a provocative look. Shortly afterwards, a drunken bull-man charges at them, and they are only saved when a cat person called C’mell lures the bull-man away with a telepathic projection. C’Mell shows the couple to a stairway that leads to the surface. Virginia tells Paul that he will see C’Mell again and, when he asks how she knows this, Virginia tells him it is a good guess, but also mentions her visit to the Abba-dingo computer again.
The rest of the story sees the couple travelling to Abba-dingo, the journey beginning when they go to a café and meet a man called Maximilien Macht, who “can take them to God” (this offer is made after he overhears an upset Virginia protesting to Paul that she does not know how much of what she feels is genuine, and what is predestined by the Lords of the Instrumentality). Macht adds, after his offer, that the Abba-dingo said he would meet a brown-haired girl, and then Virginia says that her aunt heard also heard the couple’s names from the Abba-dingo some time ago.
Macht says they can get there by using Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, a processional street in the sky which leads to Earthport. When Paul asks the point of such a journey, Virginia tells him:

“If we don’t have a god, at least we have a machine. This is the only thing left on or off the world which the Instrumentality doesn’t understand. Maybe it tells the future. Maybe it’s an un-machine. It certainly comes from a different time. Can’t you see it, darling? If it says we’re us, we’re us.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’re not.” Her face was sullen with grief.
“What do you mean?”
“If we’re not us,” she said, “we’re just toys, dolls, puppets that the lords have written on. You’re not you and I’m not me. But if the Abba-dingo, which knew the names Paul and Virginia twelve years before it happened—if the Abba-dingo says that we are us, I don’t care if it’s a predicting machine or a god or a devil or a what. I don’t care, but I’ll have the truth.”

There are (spoiler) various incidents on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard: Macht stands on some bird eggs and Paul hears a telepathic distress message from the parent (there has been lots of telepathic communication thus far)—and when Macht does not desist, Paul, prompted by the bird, strangles him till he falls unconscious. Later, the three of them get on a high-speed walkway at the side of the highway but, when they encounter a break in the bridge, Paul and Virginia make it over the gap while Macht falls onto the cables below.
They leave Macht behind and proceed to the Abba-dinga. When they get there it prints out a message for Virginia which says, “You will love Paul all your life”, and then, after Paul fights off a bird man attempting to stop him using the machine, he gets one which says, “You will love Virginia twenty-one more minutes.”
The pair set off back down the road as the weather deteriorates. Eventually, in the middle of a wild lightning storm, they reach the gap in the road: there, both Macht, who has been climbing up the cables, and Victoria fall to their death; Paul is saved by C’Mell, the cat woman from earlier in the story.
There are a lot of fascinating scenes and ideas in this story, as well as a lot of exotic background detail about the world of the Instrumentality, but ultimately this piece does not amount to much: the questions raised earlier about free will and predestination do not appear to be addressed.
Perhaps this is best read as an exotic and bizarre piece of future myth.
**+ (Average to Good). 11,250 words. Story link.

1. The timeline of the Instrumentality of Mankind is as follows:

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick (New Worlds, 2022) sees Ray, the war veteran protagonist, buy an old ground drone at a yard sale:

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.
The 6G was, in Ray’s opinion, the finest patrol and reconnaissance ground drone ever made. He had qualified on it during Operation Bolivian Freedom, back when he was young. He had hunted down insurgents with one, working from a combat recliner in a secure base across the border in Argentina. He’d known what it felt like to be the most dangerous thing in the jungle at night. He had never experienced anything like that before.
He wanted to feel something like that again.  pp. 87-88

After repairing the Leopard, Ray hooks up to a VR set one night and sends the drone out into the forest. After chasing raccoons and the like for a while, he senses another Leopard in the forest. He contacts the operator, and finds out it is a woman called Helen: she challenges him to find her. When he does they explore the forest together.
Eventually, after a period getting to know each other, they arrange to meet in person at a restaurant. When they arrive, however, they are horrified by what they see across the room: Helen is older than Ray expected, and using a walker, and she is equally horrified by the old, pot-bellied and balding Ray. They both flee. Then, when Ray gets home to his wife Doris, an alcoholic shrew of a woman—but a smart one who has used her previous tech skills to work out what Ray has been doing—she guesses what has happened at the restaurant, and turns the knife, “She was old, wasn’t she? Old like you.”
Ray flees downstairs and straps on his VR set, and sees that Helen’s Leopard is perched on the limb of a nearby tree waiting for his drone—“That’s not who I am,” she says.
The rest of the story details (spoiler), in parallel with the Ray and Helen’s further excursions, Doris’s increasing bitterness about Ray’s extra-marital relationship: she eventually threatens to tell the police about his “terrorist weapon” unless he blows it up and then kills Helen with his own hands. Ray and Helen then conspire to kill Olive, and the story proceeds to an ending where Olive gets the drop on both of them (those tech skills again): she scares off Helen, and then wears a triumphant smile as the Leopard comes down into the basement for Ray. There is a good payoff line:

There was the strong, willful woman he had fallen in love with all those many long years ago.  p. 98

The beginning of this is pretty good in its depiction of old people wanting to recapture their youth, but the back end is more a series of plot manoeuvres, and there is perhaps a little too much going on in that part of the story. Still, not a bad piece.
*** (Good). 3,900 words.

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson (Galaxy May 1958) opens with a Mr Whatney visiting a bicycle shop run by Oscar. Mr Whatney asks where Ferd (the other owner) is, and Oscar tells Whatney he is now on his own. The story of why begins with a habit of Oscar’s that irritated Ferd:

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”
“Why . . . I guess so.”
Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily.
He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”
“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

The rest of the story sees various other elements introduced, beginning with a couple with a baby visiting the shop in need of a replacement safety pin for the child’s nappy. Neither Oscar nor Ferd can find one in the shop, but later on Ferd finds a drawer full. Ferd wonders why this kind of thing happens, along with other phenomena like wardrobes suddenly filling up with coat hangers.
Running in parallel with these events is Ferd’s restoration of a red French racing bike, which he angrily smashes up after Oscar takes it to chase a female cyclist. When the bike later regenerates itself (and draws blood when Ferd tries to ride it) it leads him to speculate that there may be mimetic life on Earth:

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are— these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not . . .”

The story closes (spoiler) with Oscar telling Whatney he is now in a relationship with Norma (the female cyclist), breeding American and French racing bikes, and that Ferd “had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.”
This is an enjoyable and amusing read but the ending didn’t work for me, probably because I thought that the safety pin/coat hanger lifecycle would extend to the bikes (maybe it did and I just missed it) and (b) I didn’t really get why the coat hangers would kill Ferd (unless, again, they are the previous life stage of the bikes).
I assume this story mostly got a Hugo Award for its quirk (the observational humour about safety pins and coat hangers) and its (for the time) perhaps risqué suggestion that Oscar is having sex with a succession of young women in the woods.
** (Average). 3,650 words. Story link.

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin (Orbit #5, 1969)1 gets off to an unclear and confusing start with the androgynous “King” Argaven of Karhide (referred to as “she” rather than “they” for some mysterious reason2) apparently having a breakdown or delusional episode. Argaven repeatedly says to the surrounding figures, “I must abdicate.”
It is only much later in the story (for those that are lucky; myself, I had to go back a reread it after finishing the piece) that it becomes apparent that Argaven has been kidnapped and is being mindwashed.3
The story then cuts to the point where it should probably have started, with a harbour guard challenging a drunk figure and, after administering half second of stun gun, inspecting the body:

Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the finger joint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone.

Argaven wakes up in the palace (the real one this time), and starts a period of recovery. During this it becomes apparent that, due to the limitations of Karhidian technology, no-one local can determine what changes the mindwashers have wrought, or what they have programmed Argaven to do. Argaven abdicates, and arranges with Mr Mobile Axt, the Ekumen ambassador on Gethen, passage off-planet in one of the their near-lightspeed spaceships. Argaven later visits their firstborn, and leaves the royal chain in the baby’s crib before departing.
The second act of the story sees Argaven travel to Ollul (Earth), a trip that only seems to last a day but, because of the relativistic effect of travelling at near-lightspeed, has her land on Earth twenty-four years later. On arrival Argaven is given a summary of events in Karhide (the regency of Lord Gerer was “uneventful and benign”) before commencing treatment for the mindwashing episode. The doctors discover that Argaven’s mind was changed to make them become, over time, a paranoid tyrant. After the treatment is completed, Argaven subsequently decides to attend Ekumenical School on Earth (“She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert”).
As the years pass, the Ekumen train the ex-King to be of use to them in the future, and this time comes (spoiler) when the current King of Karhide (Argaven’s child) terrorizes and fragments the country. This eventually sees Argaven return to Karhide sixty years after their original departure—but only a twelve years older—and, on arrival, meet children who are now older than them.
After learning of the country’s further deterioration over the last twenty four years, and the revolt of some Karhiders, Aragaven leads a rebellion, and the story finishes with the ex-King standing over the body of their child, who has committed suicide.
This story has a poor start, good middle, and perfunctory ending (the idea of a parent standing over a child who is chronologically older than them is a good one—but there is no development or confrontation, just the image). I’m not sure that this piece is much more than an intermittently well-written gimmick story.
** (Average). 8,000 words.
 
1. I read a revised version of this—apparently there are differences between the original Orbit version and those in subsequent publications (or perhaps just post the author’s collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters). Rich Horton has written an article about the differences at Black Gate.
 
2. This piece is a “Hainish” story, and one set on Gethen, the same planet that featured in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In that work the Gethians were referred to as “he”. There is more about the pronoun switch at Wikipedia.

3. Apart from the cloudiness of the first two pages, I couldn’t work out if the palace scene that follows (after the guard discovers Argaven’s body) was a continuation, or not (not, as I concluded later).
I would also suggest this is a terrible first paragraph:

When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sublightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.

I’m not sure starting with whirlpools and moving smartly on to snapshots is a winning opening sentence. Then we get a data dump about radios and spaceships. And who is Plenipotentary Axt? (He turns up pages later, by which time I had long forgotten his name.)
Winner of the 1969 Random Musing Award.

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gets off to a flashy start:

Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red

wakes

up!

Later:

Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?

Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
*** (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke (Astounding, May 1946) opens with an alien spaceship commander telling the crew of the S9000 that they are about to arrive at the third planet of the solar system ahead—and that they only have four hours to explore before its sun goes nova! We then find out why the aliens have so little time:

“You will wonder how such a disaster, the greatest of which we have any record, has been allowed to occur. On one point I can reassure you. The fault does not lie with the survey.
“As you know, with our present fleet of under twelve thousand ships, it is possible to re-examine each of the eight thousand million solar systems in the galaxy at intervals of about a million years. Most worlds change very little in so short a time as that.
“Less than four hundred thousand years ago, the survey ship S5060 examined the planets of the system we are approaching. It found intelligence on none of them, though the third planet was teeming with animal life and two other worlds had once been inhabited. The usual report was submitted and the system is due for its next examination in six hundred thousand years.
“It now appears that in the incredibly short period since the last survey, intelligent life has appeared in the system [and a] civilization that can generate electromagnetic waves and all that that implies [has existed for two hundred years].”

“As you know, Bob, [insert explanium or handwavium here].”
When the S9000 arrives in Earth’s atmosphere two hours later they find they are too late: there are no signs of life, and the wildfires that have raged across the planet are dying out (they have run out of fuel).
Two scout ships are dispatched to explore the planet anyway. The first finds a set of mirrors that appear to be transmitting TV signals out into the galaxy; then they find a deserted city, apparently abandoned by humans years earlier when they returned to the live in the countryside. On return to the S9000, the crew find that the other scout ship has not returned.
The second ship, meantime, has found a huge administrative centre (jam packed with filing cabinets full of computer punch cards!) Then, when they leave to return to the S9000, they spot a huge tunnel opening and quickly decide to explore it—only to find themselves trapped by closing subway doors, and whisked off in a train that eventually takes them under the ocean.
The third act of the story sees the S9000 follow the train and rescue the scout ship crew at the next station. As they get them back on board, the sun goes nova (the ship is hiding in the lee of the Earth and the aliens see the Moon light up). The S9000 accelerates towards light speed as they leave the system.
There is final section to the story which sees the aliens realise that the mirrors are sending video signals of the catastrophe in a particular direction. When the S9000 follows they eventually see a “great fleet” of human generation ships ahead.
The last paragraphs see one of the aliens say they feel rather afraid of the humans’ fleet, and another reply that they are a “very determined people”, and that they had better be polite to them as “we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one”.
I liked this well enough, but it’s basically an overlong story (the two scout ship accounts have needless overlap and duplication) about aliens wandering about on a depopulated Earth and getting themselves into trouble. The strongest parts are probably the astronomical setup (the nova, the ship hiding in the Earth’s shadow), the dying Earth descriptions, and the slingshot ending where they find the generation ships (although not the last line, “Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny”, which seemed a rather dissonant and threatening expression of human exceptionalism).
*** (Good). 10,300 words. Story link.