Month: June 2022

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) opens with Rand Conway dreaming that he is on Iskar, and his dead father is telling him, “I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of Gone Forever.” Conway then wakes, realises he is on his way there in a spaceship, and he thinks about the great wealth that he may find at the lake. Shortly afterwards, Rohan (a rich man who is connected to Esmond, the ethnologist fiancé of Conway’s daughter Marcia) comes to tell him that they are about to arrive.
After they land, the crew get the sledges out and they head for the nearest village: Conway, Rohan and Esmond travel, but Marcia is left behind with the ship. Several hours later, and after they continue on foot, they eventually come to the city:

It spread across the valley floor and up the slopes as though it grew from the frozen earth, a part of it, as enduring as the mountains. At Conway’s first glance, it seemed to be built all of ice, its turrets and crenellations glowing with a subtle luminescence in the dusky twilight, fantastically shaped, dusted here and there with snow. From the window openings came a glow of pearly light.
Beyond the city the twin ranges drew in and in until their flanks were parted only by a thin line of shadow, a narrow valley with walls of ice reaching up to the sky.
Conway’s heart contracted with a fiery pang.
A narrow valley—The valley.
For a moment everything vanished in a roaring darkness. Dream and reality rushed together—his father’s notes, his father’s dying cry, his own waking visions and fearful wanderings beyond the wall of sleep.
It lies beyond the city, in a narrow place between the mountains—The Lake of the Gone Forever. And I can never go back!
Conway said aloud to the wind and the snow and the crying horns, “But I have come back. I have come!”  p. 69

When they arrive at the city an armed group meet them before an old man arrives and identifies them as Earthmen. The old man, Krah, mentions someone called “Conna”, which Conway presumes is his father. Krah tells him and the other Earthmen to leave but, when Conway threatens war, Krah reluctantly orders the gates opened. Esmond and Rohan are not happy at Conway’s conduct, but he is determined to get to the lake.
The rest of the story unravels the reasons for Krah’s dislike and suspicion of the visitors—which are mostly connected with Conway’s father it seems—among the complications introduced by a native girl called Ciel, who causes trouble by trying to visit Conway, and Krah’s production of Conway’s daughter Marcia, who followed the group after they left and ran into trouble with the native women.
Ciel later shows Conway a way out of the city that leads to The Lake of Gone Forever and (spoiler), after Krah and his men pursue the pair there, the climactic scene sees Conway arrive at the lake, which is “semi-liquid” and contains valuable “transuranic elements”. He is told by Krah (who, like his men, has left his weapons outside the entrance to the lake) that their dead are put in the lake, and that it acts as a repository of the Ishtar people’s memories. Conway then sees a vision of his younger father together with his native wife and then, over the course of several visions, Conway sees his father consumed with greed at the thought of the wealth in the lake. Later there is an altercation when he tries to take a sample of the liquid, and he is stopped by his wife in the presence of Conway as a baby. During the struggle between Conway’s father and mother she falls into the lake and perishes. Conway’s father subsequently flees the planet.
Conway realises, after seeing the visions, that his mother was Krah’s daughter and so he must be Krah’s grandson. He gives up his dreams of wealth and asks Krah if he can stay on the planet. Krah agrees, and Ciel becomes Conway’s wife.
There is quite a lot going on at the end of this story after quite a protracted and unnecessary build-up (the story could probably start with Conway arriving at the city, and you could lose most of the other characters). Also, the idea of a radioactive (I presume) memory lake is poetic but doesn’t entirely convince. If you read this for the description and atmosphere it’s not bad, and I suppose it is a change, albeit a long-winded one, from the more prosaic delivery of the other stories of the period.
**+ (Average to Good). 13,400 words. Story link.

A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Blessing of Unicorns by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2021) gets off to a promising start with Police Sub-Inspector Ferron getting stabbed in the foot by a mini-unicorn while she is investigating a missing person’s apartment with her colleague, Senior Constable Indrapramit:

Around Ferron’s foot clustered a dozen or so jewel-hued, cat-sized, bioprinted synthetic unicorns, stomping their cloven hooves and tossing their rapier-like horns. It was the sharp edge of one small hoof that had laid her flesh open. Now the toe was bleeding copiously, as foot injuries often do.
“Don’t just stand there. Bring me the first aid kit.”
Gingerly, Ferron set her sandal down. Blood slimed between her sole and the shoe.
The most ferocious of the miniature animals, a sparkly, butterscotch-colored stallion, snorted and arched his neck. He defecated a marble-sized poop to let everyone know he was the boss of everything.
Ferron, who had never had much to do with farm animals, even tiny ones, did not find this charming.  p. 160

After Ferron treats her foot they receive a video message from the police network and see the missing woman, a social media influencer called Bel Hinti, enter the deserted police station with a gun (all, or nearly all, of the city’s police force work at home or out in the field in this future world). Hinti eventually surrenders the firearm to the virtual assistant and tells it that someone is trying to kill her. Then, at the end of the video, Hinti scribbles something on a piece of paper before leaving the station.
So far, so good, but, after Ferron and Indrapramit complete their search and head out into the bright night (a supernova has appeared in the sky and there is mention of a dead alien civilization), Ferron heads home, and we get a four pages of description about her domestic circumstances. This involves, variously, what she has to eat, her interaction with Chairman Miaow and Smoke (her pet cat and fox), and her relationship problems with her extended family and mother (who has had her virtual reality budget cut off and is making Ferron suffer):

Ferron’s mother’s name was Madhuvanthi, and Ferron was used to seeing her only in virtual space, or as a body dressed in a black immersion suit, reclining on a chaise.
Ferron would never say it, but her mother was bedridden not because of illness, but because of self-neglect. She needed—had needed for years—treatment for depression, anxiety, and withdrawal syndrome. She obsessively archived her virtual memories, racking up huge storage bills that Ferron had, until recently, bankrupted herself to pay.
Ferron had long ago given up trying to talk her mother into treatment, and she had no leverage with which to force the issue. Her sisters pleaded poverty and unemployment, though Ferron knew at least two of them did pretty well on the gray market. The truth was, nobody really wanted to deal with Mom.
Madhuvanthi did not look at Ferron as Preeti pulled the omni away. Ferron made her tone exquisitely polite. “Hello, Amma. Hello, Preeti mausiji, Bijli mausiji. It’s good to see you out of bed, Amma.”
Madhuvanthi kept her face averted, and her hand went to the skinpet adhered just below her collarbone. Velvety fur rippled as she stroked it, her touch followed by the rumble of a purr.
“But look at this, Ferron,” Preeti said. “Look what we have done for you!”
The past tense increased Ferron’s apprehension to outright dread. She knew better than to say anything. She braced herself and accepted the omni.
It was a matrimonial ad, and Ferron was horrified to realize that it wasn’t some man that her family was going to try to force her to write to—or worse, had already written to on her behalf. This was an ad for her, seeking a groom. And it wasn’t a draft, either. It had already been posted.  pp. 169-170

This domestic soap opera (supposedly set in the 2070s or 2080s I think1) is a harbinger of what is to come in the rest of the story, which essentially devolves into a sequence of meals that Ferron has with or without Indrapramit, and tetchy encounters with her mother. This is punctuated with some light internet browsing and the odd trip out as the pair look for the missing woman. Eventually they find out (after a brief virtual reality episode) that another influencer from Hinti’s social media set is missing, which later leads them to suspect that a trustee or trustees of a fund the women belong to may be killing the beneficiaries to get control of the money.
The climax of the story comes after WhiteRabbit, a third influencer, (“Call me Rabbit”) turns up at Ferron’s house in the middle of the night, which prompts Ferron to meet Indrapramit at the station to look for the note that Hinti left but which no-one has been able to find . When they get there (spoiler), they see that someone has smashed the place up—and they are then held at gunpoint by Muhuli (the second of the missing woman), who is eventually shot by Ferron. Ferron then finds the note in the tea trolley, which identifies Muhuli as the villian—you cannot help but think that if the police search teams had done their job properly they could have saved Ferron and Indrapramit from a lot of eating and browsing. I’d also add that I would be surprised if any reader could work out that Muhuli was the murderer from the information provided.
By the way, Ferron suspects early on that Hinti’s body was dismembered and put through the bioprinter, turning the corpse into the unicorns found in Hinti’s apartment—but I can’t remember a CSI investigation for blood spatter, etc. when they can’t get DNA from the unicorns.
There is a very slight murder mystery story here, and it is buried under such a pile of extraneous description (food, pets, mothers, supernovas, aliens, etc.) that the piece eventually becomes do-not-finish tedious. Even though I, against my better earlier judgement, did, I had to take breaks and read it in three sessions.
Finally, I’d also suggest that, when most of a story is about the first three subjects in that list above (food, pets, mothers, etc.), you are looking at the work of someone who has burnt out as an SF writer.
* (Mediocre). 24,700 words. Story link.

1. Ferron is born in the years after 2042.

Glitch by Alex Irvine

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Glitch by Alex Irvine (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with Kyle waking up in a medical facility and realising that he has been “recompiled” (uploaded) into a new body (he notes a missing tattoo, unpierced ears). His partner Shari tells him that he was killed in a terrorist bomb blast and that there has been a glitch in his persona upload (there are unconvincing explanations about why they have had to delete his backup and so cannot repeat the process). Then, when Kyle later remembers the attack from the bomber’s perspective, he realises that part of the terrorist’s persona has also been uploaded into his new body:

An image drifted through his head, smeary and fleeting. A toddler on the bricks of Monument Square, spilling out of a baby backpack. Eyes closed, mouth open, dust in pale streaks on his skin and in the black springs of his hair. An adult’s arm still twisted through one strap of the backpack. Blood dark on the bricks.
One more maggot won’t grow up to be a roach.
Kyle twitched and his eyes snapped into focus. God, what kind of a person—
The thought had come from inside his mind.
He leaned his elbows on the porch railing and rested his face in his hands. Imagine dying, he thought, and that’s one of your last thoughts . . . and now it’s one of my memories. Because he did remember it, and to his shame a part of him had felt a visceral satisfaction. That was the other person.
Brian. That was his name. Another neural pathway knitting itself into the gooey matrix that made Kyle Brooks who he was, and who he would be. Brian.
“You’re a fucking asshole racist, Brian,” Kyle said into his hands. “Sooner you’re gone, overwritten, forgotten, whatever . . . sooner the better. I hope nobody recompiles you.”  p. 19

This idea of being trapped inside your own head with a racist terrorist is quite a promising one (in a chilling way) and, for the first part of the story, it is reasonably well handled—we get further racist outbursts from Brian, and memories of bomb-making with his wife Marie, etc. (that said, his character is never really developed much beyond a sanitised version of a stereotypical white supremacist villain1). Then the Feds turn up to question Kyle, suspecting that he has some or all of Brian’s persona in him; they tell him that if they find out that is the case, they will (by some legal hand-wavium) arrest him.
Kyle then goes to see Abdi, a Somali business contact and hacker, who agrees to track down the source of the hack that corrupted Kyle’s persona backup (Kyle figures that if he can find out more about the bomber he can make a deal with the Feds). Then a ticking clock is introduced when Kyle learns that the Feds have an arrest warrant for him, and the tempo speeds up further when Kyle sees a second bomb in one of Brian’s memories.
The rest of the story sees Kyle and three of Abdi’s cog swapping friends (body-swappers) run around (directed by Abdi’s magical hacker skills) looking for the bomb and, in one sequence, Kyle cogswaps with a transgender woman and goes to a club looking for a contact of Brian’s. There are further convenient memory reveals from Brian which move the plot forward when Abdi’s computer isn’t doing so.
The action draws to a conclusion when (spoiler) Kyle finds the bomb and the real Brian at a house Abdi has located from his computer searches. Brian beats up Kyle and injures him, but Kyle is rescued by Chantel from the house fire Brian starts afterwards. Then Kyle, Chantel and another cogswapper have to chase Brian to a fairground where Kyle finds the bomb under a school bus. Then Brian finds Kyle, and Kyle has to deal with Brian, the bomb and (of course!) his own inherent racism:

Over the loudspeaker, Kyle heard a voice instructing fairgoers to please exit to the parking lots in a calm and orderly fashion. He unzipped the backpack, exposing the explosive charge. Through the fog of agony, the Brian in his head tried to stop him, but Kyle was in charge now. You’re just an ugly part of me that already existed, he thought. And because I died, you got a name. Once I accepted that, I understood how weak you are.
you’re not so different, I fit right in
Kyle’s heel gouged a furrow in the ground as Brian dragged him all the way out.
As he emerged into the light again, he remembered Marie’s hands. He remembered exactly what they had done. Anyone pulls the red wires, boom.
He heard both Brians at once. No no no don’t—
He pulled the red wires.  p. 48

Kyle awakens in a new body, and sees Shari and Abdi (who has edited out Brian from the new persona backup that he has conveniently been running for Kyle since earlier in the story). Kyle has no recollection of anything that has happened since the original bombing.
This story starts with a neat idea but it is one that is sloppily executed (how did Brian’s persona get mixed up with Kyle’s; why are there such stupid laws surrounding the backup technology and responsibility for criminal acts, etc.). Much worse is the second part of the story, which devolves into a sub-Hollywood cyberpunk thriller with good guys and bad guys. I lost interest halfway through.2
* (Mediocre). 21,600 words. Story link.

1. Stephen King does a much better job of putting his readers in the heads of genuinely unpleasant characters, and you can’t help but think that if he wrote this story that Brian would have been portrayed in a considerably more realistic way. In particular, the absence of the n-word in a story that is about a racist terrorist shows the extent to which the author or editor or publishers (or all of them) are self-censoring. Now, I can understand that any one, or maybe all, of the above may not want to use language like that in their work or magazine (and I’m not particularly keen on having to read it). But, if that is the case, I’d suggest that you may want to avoid using racist characters like this as convenient stereotypical villains, because all you are doing is presenting a filtered and unrealistic version of such people.

2. I think Jim Harris may have lost interest before I did: he wrote a long blog post listing all the suspension-of-disbelief problems he had with the story. I note that he mentions that Irvine is a comic book writer: I should have picked up on that from the mindless action in the second half, if not from the poor conceptualisation in the first.

L’Enfant Terrible by Mark H. Huston

Posted on by Paul Fraser

L’Enfant Terrible by Mark H. Huston (F&SF, May-June 2022)1 begins by describing the plight of a creature who finds light painful and who isn’t used to time flowing in a linear fashion. After some more description about her attempts to orientate herself in this strange world, she is caught while hunting for rats in the area around her den:

Around her came entanglement. The light still assaulted her; the entanglement remained. She struggled. This was not like the hold of the Old Ones, or the gentle arms of the nest, these were tiny, strong entanglements, they smelled like the traps from yesterday/tomorrow.
Cage.
She remembered the word cage. How did she know that word? She was scooped up, she reached out to touch a mind and failed. She felt the cage confine her. Bite! Tear. But the cage was too strong. It smelled like the cage should smell, and she despaired.
The light went out, and the pain stopped.
Time made its way to tomorrow.  p. 189

She is questioned by a wizard, the master of the apprentice who claims to have caught her at the docks, and, after a brief interrogation, the wizard leaves through a portal to seek expert advice on what kind of creature she is (the claws suggest a sea creature but she has vestigial wings as well). After the wizard leaves the apprentice speaks to her and we learn, after he takes down a book from the shelves to show her a portal spell, that he was responsible for her arrival in this world. Then, as he approaches her cage to show her the book (spoiler), she uses a hooked claw to catch him by the nose. She discovers she can easily control his mind, and forces him to recast the spell. Eventually, after several failed attempts, he manages to open a huge portal that slices through the wizard’s rooms:

She looked through the portal and saw an Old One, floating nearby. She called to it, and she could see it responding. It came to the portal. Since her world was gray and featureless, there was nothing to reference the size of the Old One. It grew and grew and then grew more, still not making it to the opening. When it finally arrived, it dwarfed the circular portal. A tentacle reached, but hesitated. Instead, its body moved closer, and it placed its eye to the opening. She knew that from the Old One’s perspective, this looked like a tiny circle of light and strange vibrations suddenly appearing in its world. The Old One attended her request, responded to her call, and peered into the opening like a human looking into a telescope.
She was so happy that she briefly loosened her grip on the human, and of course he began to scream as his fear rose, unrestrained by her power.
“It’s a monster, it is huge! By the Gods and Goddess, I swear I will never perform a forbidden spell again!”
The eye of the Old One moved as it peered into the room. It shifted to the screaming boy, the books and bookcases, the table with the cage, and finally to her. “CTHYLLA!” Its voice shattered everything in the room. Glass bottles burst, their contents spilling out, bits of strange creatures and foul smelling fluids tumbling to the floor. The windows shattered, wood splintered, and the Earth itself shook. The human cried out, louder and louder.  pp. 196-7

At this point the wizard returns and launches a spell at the Old One that appears to use all his energies. Blinded, the creature retreats, and Cthylla then attempts to control the exhausted wizard. But, as she grapples with him, the apprentice kicks her back through the portal.
The story concludes with Cthylla talking to the gigantic Old Ones about what she has found, and how tasty the flesh and thoughts of the creatures on the other side of the (now closed) portal are. Then, as the story cuts to the wizard berating his apprentice and summoning a killing spell, a portal opens and an Old One looks in. . . .
This is a well told story, and I particularly liked the way that it goes from an intriguing, small-scale beginning to a titanic end (and one suggestive of a vastness that lies beyond the immediate world portrayed in the story).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,300 words.

1. This appears to be the first story that Huston has published outside Eric Flint’s 1632 alternate world franchise since he first staring writing in 2006. See ISFDB for further details.

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.1 (Galaxy, April 1953) is set in a future where many humans are now “amphibious”, i.e. incorporeal, and when they need a human body they borrow one:

My old body, which [my wife] claims she loved for a third of a century, had black hair, and was short and paunchy, too, there toward the last. I’m human and I couldn’t help being hurt when they scrapped it after I’d left it, instead of putting it in storage. It was a good, homey, comfortable body; nothing fast and flashy, but reliable. But there isn’t much call for that kind of body at the centers, I guess. I never ask for one, at any rate.

Then the narrator later recalls the time he got conned into borrowing Konigwasser’s body (the inventor of the amphibious process) to lead the annual Pioneers’ Day Parade:

Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.
They’ll have a tough time getting me into that thing again—ever. Taking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and still is the sweetest person you’d ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out.
We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers’ Day parades, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger.

This last passage basically summarises the thrust of the story, which is that most human bodies are unsuitable for the minds that inhabit them—an idea which is examined in a quirky way during the first part of the story (along with the advantages of not having a body, and how Konigwasser discovered the process).
The second part of the story then introduces the “enemy”, the people who have stayed behind in physical form:

Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics— job politics, social politics, government politics.

The enemy manage to trap the narrator and Madge in two bodies that they have taken from the storage centre, and the pair are subsequently tried for desertion. After some witty back and forth between the two sides at the trial, the narrator manages to bluff their way out.
This piece is more quirk and wit than story, but it has an interesting—and sometimes Laffertyesque—perspective on the subject.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. There was some speculation about the Unready to Wear title when we did the group read of this in one of my Facebook groups: a composite suggestion is that the title is a play on “ready to wear”, and that either humans are either not ready (or willing) to wear bodies, or the bodies themselves are not ready for human use.
The “amphibious” description comes from a reference at the very end of the story about the lack of interest among the young for the bodies available at the storage centres:

So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) is one of “Hogben” series,1 a handful of tales about a mutant hillbilly family in Kentucky. Saunk is the narrator (and Gallagher-like inventor2 of extraordinary devices), and his relations are Paw (who is invisible), Maw, Uncle Les (who can fly), Little Sam (a baby who has two heads and lives in a tank), and Grandpa (a monstrosity who lives upstairs). They have a wide range of paranormal powers.
In this story we see the family pestered by a Professor Thomas Galbraith, a biogeneticist who has heard rumours about the family after the Hogben’s recent altercation with the Hayley boys ended up in the news (the brothers said Little Sam had three heads, so Saunk rigged up a shotgun gadget that “punched holes in Rafe as neat as anything”—the coroner’s verdict was that the Hayley boys died “real sudden”).
Although Saunk tries to get rid of Galbraith, the professor becomes insistent after (a) Little Sam’s sub-sonic crying knocks him out, (b) he sees Uncle Les fly away, and (c) he examines the shotgun-gadget. Saunk reluctantly agrees to go to New York with Galbraith if he will keep the family’s secret.
The night before Saunk is to meet Galbraith in town, the family get together:

That night we chewed the rag. Paw being invisible, Maw kept thinking he was getting
more’n his share of the corn, but pretty soon she mellowed and let him have a demijohn. Everybody told me to mind my p’s and q’s.
“This here perfesser’s awful smart,” Maw said. “All perfessers are. Don’t go bothering him any. You be a good boy or you’ll ketch heck from me.”
“I’ll be good, Maw,” I said. Paw whaled me alongside the haid, which wasn’t fair, on account of I couldn’t see him.
“That’s so you won’t fergit,” he said.
“We’re plain folks,” Uncle Les was growling. “No good never came of trying to get above yourself.”
“Honest, I ain’t trying to do that,” I said. “I only figgered—”
“You stay outa trouble!” Maw said, and just then we heard Grandpaw moving in the attic. Sometimes Grandpaw don’t stir for a month at a time, but tonight he seemed right frisky.
So, natcherally, we went upstairs to see what he wanted.  p. 85

The next passage is hugely entertaining, and hints at the family’s extraordinary backstory:

He was talking about the perfesser. “A stranger, eh?” he said. “Out upon the stinking knave. A set of rare fools I’ve gathered about me for my dotage! Only Saunk shows any shrewdness, and, dang my eyes, he’s the worst fool of all.”
I just shuffled and muttered something, on account of I never like to look at Grandpaw direct. But he wasn’t paying me no mind. He raved on.
“So you’d go to this New York? ’Sblood, and hast thou forgot the way we shunned London and Amsterdam—and Nieuw Amsterdam—for fear of questioning? Wouldst thou be put in a freak show? Nor is that the worst danger.”
Grandpaw’s the oldest one of us all and he gets kinda mixed up in his language sometimes. I guess the lingo you learned when you’re young sorta sticks with you. One thing, he can cuss better than anybody I’ve ever heard.
“Shucks,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Thou puling brat,” Grandpaw said. “ ’Tis thy fault and thy dam’s. For building that device, I mean, that slew the Haley tribe. Hadst thou not, this scientist would never have come here.”
“He’s a perfesser,” I said. “Name of Thomas Galbraith.”
“I know. I read his thoughts through Little Sam’s mind. A dangerous man. I never knew a sage who wasn’t. Except perhaps Roger Bacon, and I had to bribe him to—but Roger was an exceptional man. Hearken.
“None of you may go to this New York. The moment we leave this haven, the moment we are investigated, we are lost. The pack would tear and rend us. Nor could all thy addle-pated flights skyward save thee, Lester—dost thou hear?”
“But what are we to do?” Maw said.
“Aw, heck,” Paw said. “I’ll just fix this perfesser. I’ll drop him down the cistern.”
“An’ spoil the water?” Maw screeched.
“You try it!”
“What foul brood is this that has sprung from my seed?” Grandpaw said, real mad.
“Have ye not promised the sheriff that there will be no more killings—for a while at least? Is the word of a Hogben naught? Two things have we kept sacred through the centuries—our secret from the world, and the Hogben honor! Kill this man Galbraith and ye’ll answer to me for it!”  p. 85-86

This initial setup is the best of the story, and the rest is more formulaic fare that sees Saunk alter the shotgun-gadget (which Galbraith has taken away with him) before the professor test fires the device. When he does, everyone in town who has a gold filling gets a toothache. Galbraith gets arrested. The now-invisible Saunk modifies the gun again, and on the next firing the sheriff’s toothache disappears. Saunk modifies the gun once again, and then, when all the townpeople are assembled in the town hall to have their toothache cured, their fillings disappear—along with everything else non-natural in and on their bodies, including their clothes.
The story ends with Uncle Les rescuing Galbraith from the mob. In return he agrees to leave the family alone—but Grandpa reads his mind and sees he is lying, so Paw puts Galbraith in a small bottle which he never leaves.
A weak end to a story that has a highly entertaining first half.
**+ (Average to Good). 5,550 words. Story link.

1. There are five stories in the Hogben series but the first appears to be a mainstream piece only loosely related to the others. See ISFDB for more details.

2. See ISFDB for details of Kuttner’s solo series of stories about Gallagher, an inventor who often can’t remember the purpose or operation of the creations he makes while drunk.

The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell (F&SF, May-June 2022) is a short-short that starts off at an annual lunch for time travellers:

They only ever had it in 1984, always traveling to meet each other in the same place and the same time. Pele, Jordansko, Marissa, and Merc sat at their own table. Plentiful versions of the foursome sat at plentiful versions of their own tables; they occupied every table in the Filipino restaurant, and all the tables on the curb outside. Rumor had it that their final party from the farthest flung future was having brunch on the rooftop.  p. 254

The shenanigans start when Pele pays for brunch, and the others then try to retrospectively beat him to the check with their time-travel tricks. Jordansko tells him Pele he wired the money to him ten years ago; Marissa says she loaned the family who own the restaurant the money to buy it in 1939; Merc shows them photos of a trip back to the dawn of civilization where he invented the idea of the dining industry.
Pele has the last word, however, when (spoiler) he asks them why they think they meet at the restaurant on Father’s Day.
An amusing conclusion to a clever idea.
*** (Good). 850 words.

Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark (Analog, September-October 2020) has an overly long and discursive start that sees Luis watch a dove die while he waits outside Medellín airport in Columbia. The body of the dove is subsequently disposed of by a woman using nanotech.
The rest of the story suffers from the same long-windedness as it goes on to tell the story of Luis and his partner Elena’s attempt to stabilize a over-mined and potentially hazardous mountain (also using, I think, nanotech). However, there have been problems elsewhere in the world with this technology:

Luis took a second to process the metaphor.
He knew that among the Embera-Katio animalism connected three realms of existence, with serpents and other critters of the soil sometimes taking mythopoetic revenge upon mankind by dragging sinners to the lands below. Rarely, though, did others refer similarly to the Six-Cities incident: twelve days when hacked nanotech, the likes of which had been developed to process rare-earth metals with greater ease, devoured cities whole—people, pets, cars, buildings—while the rest of each affected country scrambled to contain the spread. Japan. Indonesia. Benin. Colombia. Madagascar. France. The UN Accord against private access to whole bodies of nanotech research had come swiftly, with only the U.S. and Bangladesh holding out in the initial rush of militarized search-and-seizure, at least until scares hit them in turn. (A prank, as it turned out, in the midwestern U.S.—but near enough the home of an online celebrity that the famed musician had rallied his fan base through social media: enough, for once, to turn the political tide.)  p. 115

Luis later goes out to talk to a holdout on the mountain, an old man called Bidø. The man tells him about a piece of rogue nanotech that killed an ocelot, and he also says that he wants to die on the mountain.
There are other events that occur, and these include, variously: the discovery of the bones of a baby near one of the probe holes; continued funding problems for the project; the disappearance of a young worker and his girlfriend; the arrival of the Feds when illegal nanotech (or somesuch) is discovered on the mountain, etc. etc. Matters are eventually wrapped up (spoiler) when the couple are found on the mountain with Bidø, and we discover there is a family connection. The girl is pregnant, so Bidø finds a new lease of life and agrees to leave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got some of this detail wrong (especially about whether Luis and Elena are using nanotech or another technology to stabilise the mountain) because the story, although well enough written on a sentence and paragraph level, just has too much ephemeral detail and no sense of tension or pacing—so it is very easy to become bored and tune out. And even when the story does come together at the end it seems to be as much a family soap opera as science fiction.
A short story buried in a very long novelette.
* (Mediocre). 14,800 words.

Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, August 2020) opens with a holy man called Gil finishing his meditation to find that Muu (an incorporeal alien “God”, I think) has “already removed the body of Demi”, a pupil of Gil’s who was also his lover. Apparently, Demi “isn’t dead exactly”, but Gil will never see him again.
Shortly after Gil’s loss another pupil turns up on Gilder Nefan (I am not sure why the planet has a similar name). Tim is female—she had previously changed gender several times but “but ultimately chose female because she felt it suited her temperament”—and she subsequently spends most of her time running errands for Gil when not annoying him with a thousand questions. When Gil gets some time to himself, he thinks about Demi and feels sad.
Eventually (spoiler) Tim convinces Gil to let her join him in taking “jithmus” (some sort of alien weed). He warns her of the dangers, but she insists.
During Gil’s trippy experience, he sees Demi and talks to Muu:

Demi—oh, lovely Demi—stood on a precipice in an endless white desert, while the horizon behind him stretched to infinity. Beyond the cliff’s edge spread an infinite blue sky. Demi, bright-eyed and eager. Demi, smiling and reaching out his hand. Gil floated down, down toward the hand, ready to grasp it and never let go. But he was just a photon. And as he raced toward Demi’s palm, the molecules of Demi’s hand spread into their constituent atoms, and the atoms spread into quarks, and each of these minuscule bundles of smeared energy drifted as far apart from each other as stars in a galaxy.
We are all empty, Muu said to him, in thought pictures. Demi was never anything at all, nor will he ever be anything again. The thoughts you have of him are like waves that ripple in a turbulent sea. Sometimes they form shapes and sense impressions. You ascertain meaning in them, but in reality they are just waves in a stormy sea. You mourn his loss, but why mourn when Demi was never anything at all? He has more life in death than you do in life, because now he is infinite.
But, but, but . . . Gil struggled to say. His photon energy leaped from orbital to orbital like stones across a pond. I felt something real, he said, and that was enough . . .
You are a bird, trapped in a room with a single half-open window, Muu said. The escape is just an inch below you, where the window lies open, yet you keep flying headfirst into the glass.
Can I see him? Gil said. Can I speak to Demi, as he was?
But you are him, now, Muu said. You are the photon which reflected off his eye and wound its way into space, where it has been speeding away from Gilder Nefan for eighty million years. All of your senses of him were nothing more than reflected photons and electrostatic pressure.
And what of my feelings? Gil said.
Just waves on a stormy sea, said Muu.
Why do you hurt me? Gil said. Why do you make me suffer so?
It is you who make yourself suffer.

Deep.
Gil wakes to find that the drug has had no effect on Tim and, because of this, she decides to leave the planet. She tries to convince Gil to go with her but he remains and, after she has gone, he eats all his remaining jithmus stash in one go (about a millions times the usual amount).
A tedious and sometimes pretentious piece that offers moping and cod-transcendence instead of a story. The only time this comes alive is during the back and forth between Gil and Tim.
* (Mediocre). 5,650 words. Story link.