Month: June 2022

Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan, translated by Judith Huang,1 (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) opens with Ding Jie arriving at the planet Yan: he is there to get a delicacy for the Emperor, the tongue of the Silver Rat. Jie is surprised to discover that a close friend, Chen Guang, is in charge of this bleak outpost. Then, after they catch up (at length) with each other’s news, Guang tells Jie that the Silver Rat’s tongues are now black and poisonous. Guang has one edible tongue left, however, and he gives Jie a taste:

He opened his mouth and bit into the tip of the tongue.
Suddenly, the whole busy world before his eyes grew dim.
The taste skated across his consciousness and melted a little in his stomach.
He was overwhelmed with the feeling that nothing he could remember that came before this amounted to anything, and his very life appeared barren and meaningless, reduced to something absurd. He thought back to the magnificent fireworks bursting over the roof of the Royal Palace, the most splendid of skies he had ever seen, and they all those memories seemed strangely leached of color. Even the most complex, most spectacular and intricate architecture he had seen in the Afang palace, dating from the Qin dynasty, its exquisite beauty beyond anyone’s imagination, now seemed boring and monotonous in comparison.
Every single taste bud in his mouth exploded simultaneously, like a singularity bursting and expanding into infinity.
This extraordinary taste had flown beyond all description.
Could this thing still be considered food? Or was it rather, a vast epic rushing through the tongue and vaulting past the stomach walls, a mighty poem redolent of ancient song.  pp. 46-47

The rest of the story sees the implantation of a mind-reading device into one of the rats, which later reveals that, when the rats meet each other in the wild, their tongues entwine—this is the way they communicate.
After this discovery Jie suspects the Silver Rats are sentient and he decides to decipher their language, a process that leads to the Silver Rat he has implanted eventually meeting the Grand Rat. When the Grand Rat then offers the implanted rat some dried tongue, the latter appears to gain access to all the Grand Rat’s memories.
Eventually Jie discovers that (spoiler) the rat’s memories and souls are contained in tongues, and the hatred they feel for humans—who have been hunting them—has made them poisonous. Guang subsequently hatches a plan to kill the Emperor by supplying him with a poisoned tongue, but what actually happens is that the Emperor falls ill (the rats have learned human language and made a taste that makes him feel nauseous every time he feels anger).
This story didn’t work for me, probably due to the strange (and barely) science fictional ideas which have been dropped into what feels like an oddly plotted fantasy. I think this would have worked slightly better if it had junked the SF furniture and been a fantasy.
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words. Story link.

1. There are unnecessary translation notes at the start of the story, mostly about the references to Chinese history: these could have easily been put at the back of the story, and then I wouldn’t have had to plough through them in case they were required to understand the story (they aren’t). Also, there are, for a story that is told in otherwise neutral fantasy language, a few odd colloquialisms: “nothing would have induced him to leg it” on p. 40; “it became super popular to eat Silver Rat meat”; “When their tongues met and entangled, the Silver Rats were, in fact, talking, not making out” on p. 51, etc. Jarring.

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins with a time-retrieval team (consisting of the narrator and his two colleagues) learning that their special assignment will involve taking a Professor Rothman back in time to the “Age of Desolation” to retrieve her brother and three sisters. It materialises that Rothman is a time-probabilist who herself was extracted from the past, and whose exceptional contributions to the work of the Conglomerate have provided her the credit to pay for the journey back in time.
Almost immediately after they arrive at their extraction point it becomes obvious that the plan they have been briefed about is a cover story provided by Rothman, and that she has other ideas. This begins with them having to walk to a nearby railway station at a military camp:

A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier.
The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.
“Not my specialty,” he said.
Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond. These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.
“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.”  p. 85

They later find out that they have arrived at this Nazi concentration camp at the beginning of a prisoner revolt and, during the turmoil, they join the fight with their advanced weapons: the team targets the guards and Rothman searches for a sadistic officer called Frenzel, who she kills (a “ghost killing”). During the action the team becomes concerned that this branch timeline they are creating (their own will be “canonical”) may not last long enough for them to complete the mission and they worry that they will become “ghosts”. Rothman reassures them that vortex that took them there will last for “days, months, maybe longer”.
Eventually (spoiler) they find Rothman’s family, and it materialises that she intends to rescue a different group of people:

The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“We—” I began. Rothman cut me off.
“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”
I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.
The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.
Instead, they smiled.
“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.
“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”
The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves.  p. 97

As they return to the extraction point the narrator tells Rothman that, if she returns to the future with her younger self, the Conglomerate will kill her and the child for breaching its rules. Rothman says she knows, and that she intends staying behind in this ghost timeline (“Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”). Their problems aren’t over, however, and they then find that even without Rothman they are a hundred kilograms overweight for the return journey. After they all strip off all their clothes and dump their equipment they still have forty kilograms to shed, and the story finishes with the narrator volunteering to stay with Rothman.
The time travel hand-wavium, combat scenes, and Holocaust elements are blended together well, and produce a pretty good story.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Story link.

Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator arriving at a hospital to see her dying father. She isn’t there in person but as an avatar (a robotic telepresence). As she talks to her father it becomes apparent that she is using this method of visiting because she is almost totally paralyzed, and has been since she was a child. We also learn that, when it became apparent she was never going to recover, she was introduced to virtual reality games and eventually managed to attend architectural college and graduate. Now, by the use of avatars, she works all over the world.
The last part of the story sees her watch her father pass away. There is a good penultimate line:

And how strange it is that, in just a few minutes, there will be two bodies in this room whose consciousness had left them to go elsewhere.  p. 41

A slight piece—but it has a neat idea, and the elegiac feel at the end is well enough done.
*** (Good). 3,600 words. Story link.

A Friend on the Inside by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Friend on the Inside by Will McIntosh (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins with Candace, a poor student, on the roof of her high school trying to hack into the school’s Axon network to get credit for lunch. Then, when she succeeds, she receives a message from an Izzy Mahfouz asking her if she is “outside”. Candace quickly disconnects and leaves. Later, after she is the victim of some routine bullying in the lunch hall (insert your own Heathers, Mean Girls, etc. scene here), Candace looks up Izzy’s name—only to find it belongs to a dead college basketball player.
When Candace next goes up on the roof and connects to the network Izzy comes online again and begs her not to leave. He tells her that his last memory was of a car crash, and that now he is in darkness and connected to three other “nodes” who are people like him. Then Izzy asks Candace to call his mother to let her know what has happened to him. When she pleads poverty, he provides her with a code for a “system” like the rich girls in school have, and which she later picks up from the shop:

[I] told her I was picking up a system. I gave her the code, and held my breath, half-expecting a platoon of Axon security people to come busting out of the back room, heaters raised.
A sparkly transparent ball rolled out of a slot. The ball, which felt like skin, broke open in my hands, like it was giving birth to the system rolled up inside. Triumphant music played.
I ran for the exit.
“Have an A day,” the associate called.
“Eat shit,” I called back as the door swung closed behind me.
Moving out of the flow of pedestrians, I unrolled the system. It was silver with green speckles, lighter than it looked, the material so thin it felt like it would dissolve in my hands. I pulled the sleeve up my forearm, looped my thumb through the smaller hole on the end. It extended just past my elbow.
Everything shifted. The air took on a golden tint. New Main Street was perfectly jet black, and each building was a different pastel color. Everyone who passed was smiling brightly. It was like I’d stepped into a new reality. I knew what the world looked like through a system—I’d seen it on TV a million times, but I’d had no idea it looked this real. I didn’t understand how something I put on my arm made my eyes see differently, and I didn’t care. I wanted to see like this for the rest of my life.  pp. 7-8

The benefits of the system don’t last long because the phone connection drops when Candace tries to call Izzy’s mother: Izzy realises that Axon are monitoring the calls, and disconnects her from the net so she can’t be traced.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Candace learn from Izzy that there are lots of nodes, and Izzy later says to Candace, “I’m just a brain, aren’t I?” They realise what Axon’s “revolutionary [network] technology” is and, when Candace learns that Izzy’s body was donated to Good Medical like her sister’s, she wonders if her sister is one of the nodes. Candace tells Izzy that if he wants any further help he needs to find her (and during this conversation she learns that the nodes suffer terrible headaches and pain when they are not doing the network tasks assigned to them).
The story turns into a chase when Axon put Candace’s picture on the net and she is recognised by a group of teenagers. As she evades capture by them and the others who start pursuing her, she repeats her demand to Izzy about finding her sister.
Eventually, and after a few more narrow escapes courtesy of Izzy’s magic hacker skills, the story comes to a conclusion when Candace contacts Izzy’s mother and Candace is then shot and wounded by an Axon guard. A driverless car then drives into him, while Candace is protected by a cyclone of drones and vehicles controlled by the brains/nodes. Video of the event goes viral, along with the nodes/brains’ demand for time off and pay for their families. Finally, Izzy tells Candace he has found her sister.
This is a well enough told story (McIntosh is a slick writer), but it is essentially a piece about stealing brains for God’s sake, something that might work in 1932 but terminally strains credulity ninety years later. And even if this is all a metaphor about the way corporations treat their employees, it is a silly one. (I’d also add that having “Pay for our families. Time off” as the brains’ first demand is ridiculous—what about the fact that Axon have essentially been kidnapping sentient beings, using them as slaves, and torturing them?)
** (Average). 8,250 words. Story link.

Vagrants by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Vagrants by Lavie Tidhar (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) sees a man return to a space station he passed through twenty years ago, when he was on his way up from Earth and out into the solar system and what became his life (fighting in a war, etc.). He has various encounters with a robotnik beggar, a bar singer, and a robot hotel receptionist, during which various life observations are delivered:

“There’s a world right here”, Red said. She took a sip and studied him over the bottle. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said.
“Get what?”
“You think going out there fixes what’s inside here,” she said. She tapped him on the chest. It pushed him up so for a moment he was floating, just an inch or so above the seat. “Yeah,” Red said. She finished her beer and tossed it back to the bar. It floated to the old bartender. “I see guys like you every day of the week,” Red said. “Young and ignorant when you come up the gravity well. Old and ignorant when you come back. You think, if only you went out there you’d find whatever it is you’re searching for. But you never did find it, did you?”
“I don’t know,” Nugget said. “I lived a life.”
“No,” she told him. “You only ran away from one.”  p. 69

This is an okay read, I suppose, but it’s a fragment not a story.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.

The Sweetness of Berries and Wine by Jo Miles

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Sweetness of Berries and Wine by Jo Miles (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) opens with Shoshana on Kepler Station, where the quartermaster tells her he can’t supply the strawberries she wants for a Passover dish called charoset (he tells her, “The war in the Celosian System has messed up our supply lines”). Later on, Shoshana discusses the problem with her partner Kindra, who asks why it is important as she is not religious. When Shoshana replies that it is her daughter’s first Passover, and that she wants it to be perfect, Kindra suggests Shoshana call her grandmother on New Jerusalem.
The second part of the story sees grandmother set Shoshanna straight after some teasing (“A disaster! You’d better give up now”), when she reveals that charoset was originally made with apples but they changed the recipe on New Jerusalem when they couldn’t get any. Shoshana learns about resilience and adaptation.
This parable was too cutesy, too saccharine for me.
* (Mediocre). 1,150 words. Story link.

The Gift of Gab by Jack Vance

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gift of Gab by Jack Vance (Astounding, September 1955)1 is set on the oceans of an alien planet called Sabrina, and begins with Sam Fletcher, an employee of Pelagic Recoveries (a metals extraction company) looking for Carl Raight to take over his shift. After Fletcher unsuccessfully searches the large raft they use for processing (barnacles for tantalum, sea slugs for rhenium, and coral for rhodium) and gets no useful information from his co-workers, he takes the launch over to the nearby collecting barge. It is also deserted, and Fletcher comes to the conclusion that Raight must have fallen overboard. Then, as Fletcher fills up the holds before returning to the raft, he is attacked by the tentacle of an alien life form that coils around his leg and tries to pull him overboard. Fletcher only just manages to avoid this by cutting the tentacle with a nearby tool. Then, when Fletcher then looks over the side of the barge he sees another alien creature, a ten-armed, one-eyed dekabrach, swimming nearby. Fletcher takes the barge back to the raft and tells the rest of the crew what has happened.
Fletcher then gets together with a scientist called Damon and they go through their (non-computerised!) card index machine to try to identify the creature that attacked him. They find a lifeform called a monitor, which may have been the creature responsible, and also look at the dekabrach records. It is obvious that that parts have been deleted, and Fletcher learns from Damon that Chrystal—an ex-employee who has set up his own private company and is working nearby—did the initial capture and dissection of the dekabrachs. Fletcher video-phones Chrystal and warns him about what has happened, and asks him about deletions on the dekabrach records: Chrystal is hazy on the details.
These events set up much of what happens in the rest of the story, which begin with another man going missing, and Fetcher being attacked again, which leads him to take a submarine down into the deeps to explore (the first of two trips he will make); meanwhile Damon catches a dekabrach.
When Fletcher returns later he has a tale of the dekabrachs’ social organisation and coral houses; then he learns from Damon that the dekabrachs’ bodies may be worth processing for niobium. This information, along with the doctored records, point the finger of suspicion at Chrystal, so Fletcher goes to visit him. After an argument about the sentience of the dekabrachs, Fletcher sees a catch of the creatures landed in the middle of a hail of sea darts fired from the sea. There is some gunplay, and Fletcher arrests Chrystal.
The last part of the story sees Fletcher and Damon learn how to communicate with the captive Dekabrach so they can prove its intelligence to a planetary inspector who will arrive shortly. When the inspector lands on the planet and starts his investigation, there is a melodramatic episode where Chrystal breaks free and tries to poison the dekabrach with acid. Fletcher and Damon manage to save the creature, and it then identifies Chrystal as its attacker. Chrystal isn’t finished yet though, and pulls out his recovered gun, although his attempt to shoot the dekabrach is foiled by Fletcher, who takes the bullet.
The story closes with (the recovered) Fletcher and Damon deciding to stay on the planet rather than shipping out. They release the captive Dekabrach with a plea to bring others of its kind back for language training—and it does.
I rather liked this piece for a number of reasons: first, it is set in an exotic ocean environment, but one made realistic by the industrial process at work there; second, the story is an interesting and absorbing one (although you can see the obvious bad guy a mile off); finally, the piece slowly morphs from a whodunit into a first contact story as it progresses. That said, it has a few problems: I’ve already mentioned the bad guy (who is obviously dodgy, and spends more time than is convincing causing havoc); the two trips that Fletcher makes to the deeps are not experienced directly by the reader but are recounted by him later (this also involves a slightly disorientating point of view change—the only one in the story—while he is away on the first trip); the communication section and its code table makes for a dull read (I’d put serious money on that latter having been inserted by a meddling John W. Campbell); and there are probably other things as well, such as the dekabrachs readily forgiving the mass murder of their people, etc. Still, it is an enjoyable alien ecology story—a good yarn I suppose you could say—with an uplifting, slightly sense-of-wonderish ending that just puts it into the star category below.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 17,650 words. Story link.

1. This was part of a group read on one of my Facebook groups. One commenter said, “It’s one of the least characteristic Vance stories I know, and of all those probably the best. (What I mean is, the other uncharacteristic ones strike me as potboilers, but this is pretty good.)”. Others added, “A surprisingly science-fictiony story by Vance”, “Atypical Vance but still good”, “A great story that isn’t very Vancian”, etc.

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld #164, May 2020)1 gets off to a rambling literary start:

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.
The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don’t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered—long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last—and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world’s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.

The idea of written works being lost to climate change a few decades in the future seems rather unlikely (one would have thought they would all be scanned and on the internet by then), but I suppose this occupation lets the narrator give his thesaurus a work out and utter pretentious comments like “Poetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart”, and “the city’s death will come après moi”, etc.
We also learn about the climate disaster future the narrator lives in, and how his home in a tower block has a flooded ground floor where the rugs stink of mildew (and yet they still have intermittent electricity—I’m not sure how that works in a building awash with water).
In amongst all this are a couple of trips to his friend’s library, and a mugging by the local youths for his groceries. The same feral children who steal from him later start setting people of his generation on fire (drowning would have been better symbology).
In short: a poet’s misery memoir crossed with climate-change hand wringing.
– (Tedious). 3,950 words. Story link.

1. This was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award—a group of voters who, it would seem, must like to see writers writing.

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired, 11th December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.
After a few pages of scene setting (including a childhood flashback), Bari agrees to join the New Suns to better care for his mother. This involves him joining a starship crew after he is given quantum consciousness:

Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time.

The remainder of the story sees Bari switch his consciousness back and forth between his body on the starship and a telepresence robot in his mother’s house. Because of the relativistic effects (time passes much more quickly on Earth than it does on the ship), a few seconds away from the ship equates to hours on Earth. Eventually (spoiler) the relativistic trips start to have a mental toll on Bari, which in turn causes the failure of a relationship with a woman on board the ship. Then the mother dies a couple of weeks or so after launch (on Earth, over a decade has passed).
What we have here is a mainstream story with a clunky SF idea bolted on, i.e. a hand-wringing story about family and dementia, and not one about quantum consciousness.
* Mediocre. 2,950 words. Story link.

Uma by Ken Liu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Uma by Ken Liu (Avatars, Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator discussing his employment-related disciplinary case with a lawyer before the story flashbacks to the incident that caused his problem—the rescue of three children from a burning house while he was operating a UMA for a power company:

A Utility Maintenance Avatar is vaguely humanoid, but only about three feet tall fully stretched out and no more than fifty pounds in weight. For light maintenance tasks such as vegetation management, removal of bird and wasp nests, patching cables, and so forth, you don’t need or want anything bigger—the extra bulk would just get in the way. I had at my disposal small shears, extensible ladder-legs, a general electrical tool kit, and not much else. PacCAP has thousands of these cheap telepresence pods distributed around the state to maintain its hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission, distribution and equipment. With remote operators in centralized offices inhabiting them whenever needed, it’s much cheaper than sending out a whole crew in a truck just to prune an overgrown oak branch.  pp. 134-135

During the rescue the children receive minor injuries (scratches, a sprained ankle, etc.), and subsequently a plantiff’s bar AI suggests they should sue the power company because the narrator wasn’t properly trained, etc. Hence the company disciplining him for safety violations.
Later, after the narrator has refused to sign the legal papers, he is contacted by the power company’s CEO about another emergency—and ends up operating a similar model UMA in Myanmar to save a kid trapped during an earthquake.
This piece is a convincing look at what the future might bring, and it also has a couple of good action scenes—but it feels rather fragmentary, more a neat idea than a story.
**+ (Average to Good). 4,150 words. Story link.