Month: July 2022

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful).3 5,500 words. Story link.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

3. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021)1 has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
* (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 5th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously caused them to level a city, the relationship is more complicated than that) before the alien, who Dave calls Old Salty, arrives (this is the point where the story should have started):

At 2:00:00.00, the paranymphic glider touched down on the roof. Had Dave’s phone shown the time to be a hundredth of a second earlier or later, he would have assumed it was wrong, and never mind that it took the time straight from Earth’s master atomic clock. A Brot who said two o’clock sharp meant two o’clock sharp.
Old Salty got down from the glider and walked/moved/flowed toward Dave. He/she/it looked something like a prune, something like a sea sponge, something like a slug. Several eyestalks stuck up from his/her/its front end; they looked every which way at once. The alien’s underside had lots and lots of little tiny legs.
He/she/it said something in his/her/its own language. Inside his head, Dave heard (he supposed he heard; that came closer to describing it than anything else), “I hail to you say, my hypothetical friend.” People who were able to work in Brot establishments and make Brot widgets picked up on the meaning in Brot noises. To the rest of mankind, those remained alien gibberish.
“Good to see you, Old Salty,” Dave answered. The Brot didn’t mind the nickname. He/she/it could understand the same smallish set of humans who could follow the speech and subspeech of his/her/its kind. Communication had been dicey when the aliens first landed: lots of pointing and pictures. Little by little, things got better. Not good, not yet, but better.  p. 33

The rest of the story has the same clunky delivery.
Dave quickly learns that this will be the Old Salty’s last visit (it is returning to its home world), and he then takes the alien on the scheduled tour of the premises. We see that the business makes gadgets with an unknown function for the Brot.
Throughout the story Dave walks on eggshells but, before Old Salty leaves, they have a drink together (the aliens can drink both methyl and isopropyl alcohol) and Dave presents the alien with a going away present of four plastic figures (these are California Raisin toys given away with American fast food meals in the 1980s and 90s). They have “Made in China” on the base, and Dave comments that the “peasants” who painted the toys would have had little or no comprehension of what they were. Old Salty leaves soon afterwards.
The story ends (spoiler) with the alien back on its home world. Old Salty arrives at his swarmsister’s house and gives her kids presents—the gadgets that were made by Dave’s company (“Made on Earth”). We see that these aren’t alien miracle devices like the paranymphic glider which Old Salty used to arrive at Dave’s business, but are actually cheap disposable toys. The story then makes the leaden point that humanity is to the aliens as the Chinese workers were to Western consumers in the last century, i.e. “peasants”.
The story closes with Old Salty wondering if humanity will ever spread out into space and find races that we can view and/or treat in the same way as the Brot treats humanity—but the alien doesn’t expect that will happen any time soon.
This is a dull and old-fashioned piece, and the idea of this kind of economic imperialism rolling through the galaxy is just dispiriting. I note in passing that (a) the repeated use of “he/she it” for the aliens rather than “they” or “it” is clumsy and (b) there seems to be no piece of American cultural ephemera so obscure that US writers will not shoehorn it into a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 4th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell (Analog, November 2015) opens with Fu-Hau calling a computer tech-type called Jayden to say that one of her patients has just died and that the upload to a virtual reality afterlife has not worked. As Jayden types in his report later on, the “subject has failed to coalesce on upload and has no VR form at present”.
Jayden quickly takes control, and the point of view switches from Fu-Hau to him as he works on the on the dead woman’s file. As he does he sees a strange corruption in the code and, when he later talks to what he thinks the virtual copy of the woman, gets odd responses:

“Hi Angela. My name is Jayden.”
“I am-was Angela. True. Yet it is also true that I’ve burst into existence only now, from the seed state of humanity. I am an unfurling of consciousness from the enfolded places into something greater.”
Whoops. Not out of the danger zone yet. He should get to work on that file next. He shifted his gaze to the other screen and swallowed hard. The mystery file was humongous. An extra eight gig, easy.
Meanwhile, the stream of words continued. “Much self was coiled up tight in other dimensions, unexpressed in the ordinary facets of the physical world, and suppressed by what was once the core identity. No longer. I am free. I know now.”
He’d been thinking what to do with the mystery file. “Know what?”
“Curled inside mundane words are worlds of meaning. I should not expect you to understand.”
He realized he was holding his breath. He tried to think what to say. He wanted to ask something.
“A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
Holy hills she’d gone on random shuffle. Whatever he’d been starting to think this might be, some advanced mind . . . He took it all back. It was like a whole jug had been poured over his head. This gibberish was his call to action. That mystery file had to go.  p. 48

It will be pretty obvious to most readers that a nascent AI that has come to life during the dead woman’s upload process, so I’m not quite sure why Jayden is dismissing the idea (probably because the writer wouldn’t then be able to expand the piece into a novella1).
Eventually, Jayden manages to prune the excess from the file and the old woman coalesces. Jayden welcomes her to her afterlife in VR, and then goes home. The story closes with him in the parking lot remembering that he has forgotten to delete the mystery file. . . .
This didn’t grab me as I’m not interested in stories about stereotypical computer types (or their Jordans, caffeinated water, or Chinese take-out littered work spaces—it’s one of those stories with that sort of detail), or in story about a newly born AI and its cod-profundity (I’m pretty sure I read enough of those in the cyberpunk era).
The story is also a fragment that reads like the beginning of a longer piece (and now is, see below).
* (Mediocre). 2,050 words.

1. This piece forms the beginning of Prell’s novella, Uploading Angela (Analog, May-June 2021). The beginning of the novella is almost identical to this story (although the point of view in the first section of the original short story is changed from Fu-Hau to Jayden in the novella).
The introduction to the novella wrongly identifies the earlier story as Emergency Protocol (Analog, September-October 2017).

Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019) opens with (for the first few pages anyway) a fairy tale-like beginning where “a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman”. We see that Eva and Dee live in a forest, and watch their lovey-dovey domestic routine until husband Dee goes missing. Then Eva travels into the nearby town (which has a church belfry) to make enquiries, and sees that it has been largely laid to waste. Eva then learns that Dee has been taken by interplanetary slavers.
At this point the story becomes something else entirely, and we see Eva tap a command on her wrist and summon Sister (her AI “sister” spaceship) and its drones to search for Dee. The rest of the first part sees Eva track down the slavers and then fight a high tech battle with the AI captain of the Consortium ship, which she eventually wins (we learn during this that Eva is a fearsome Kairi Primarch). She retrieves her husband, and they fly home in Sister. Meanwhile, the evidence of the destroyed slaver ship is sent to another solar system.
This first quarter of the story eventually turns out to be a set-up for the remainder of the piece and, while this section is okay action/combat SF, it turns out to be a longer setup than is required for the next part of the story; I’d also add that the first four or so pages (the fairy tale/domestic part) are a little dull, and tonally dissonant when compared with the rest.
The final three-quarters of the story (which takes place some time later) is a different, and much superior, kettle of fish, and begins with a robot, a Valencian Knight, arriving with a summons for Dee. In the conversation that follows there is a lot of information imparted, but the gist of it is that Dee used to be Grandmaster Lucochin on the planet of Valencia, and the new Queen is demanding his presence at the Greatwood there. Although Dee tries to refuse the summons, he and Eva soon have a speck of Corewood implanted in them and fly up to Knight’s ship to travel home via the onboard Vineyard. (Sister covertly follows the pair after dropping them off there, but has to make her own way):

His wife squeezed his fingers to get his attention before signing, “Smells wonderful.”
“It’s the Vineyard,” he explained. “The ship is grown around it to infuse it with the vine’s atoms. It gets into every part of the vessel and flowers. Even when they’re not flowering, the mirror Vineyard on Valencia, or other ships, might be, so ships end up smelling like this all the time.”
They were in the corridors now. Petrified carbon curved under and around them, the same color as his wife’s startlingly light brown eyes, the whorls and rings rippling through the surface a testament to the ship’s advanced age.
This Vineyard was one of the massive fleet his people maintained to trade and lay seedlings in space to create Arbors, so that ships could travel ever further by navigating from one Arbor or Vineyard to another. No matter how far they explored, all other ships, seedlings, and Arbors, remained permanently entangled with Valencia and each other, allowing Valencians to travel vast distances in an instant and trade reliably with many other colonies.

The pair soon pass through the Vineyard portal and arrive on Valencia—almost immediately, Dee discovers that his Lucochin estate and all the people on it have been liquidated rather than taken over by one of the other houses (Dee served the former King, and his attempts to encourage democratic reform saw his lands confiscated and him exiled). The intrigue continues that night when the pair are gassed as they sleep, and Dee awakens to find that Eva has been taken hostage. Then, when Dee is taken to see the Queen, he discovers that she is his ex-wife. The Queen tells him there is a blight causing the Greatwoods and the Vineyards to die and, if he does not cure them, he and Eva will both be handed over to the Consortium slavers from the first section (who have subsequently discovered who destroyed their ship).
The description of the chess-based Valencian society in this part of the story is pretty well done (the ranks appear to go from Grandmaster down to Pawn, with the oppressed masses below the latter; the various characters often wear masks to hide their facial expressions; they complete “moves”, etc., etc.). Also well done is the Game of Thrones-like intrigue that takes place between the various houses. Another strength of the story is the Greatwood/Vineyard handwavium, and the hint that Valencia was originally settled by a generation spaceship full of “First Gardeners”.
Indeed, one of the best parts of the story involves Dee entering the Greatwood to discover why it is dying:

The Greatwood’s iridescence dimmed to a shifting, multicolored glow as he exited the transport and four Knights surrounded him. He was marched alongside the Queen into the low-hanging needle-leaves that spun and glinted in the wind, until they reached the Barrier, which kept all but the Grandmasters from entering. A cylindrical drone swept over to verify his seedling, then retreated to its charging station somewhere beyond the Barrier. He walked into the heart of the Greatwood, sensing the Queen’s unwavering gaze on his back. At the transport hub a short distance from the Barrier, he got into one of the small carts and let it take him on its pre-programmed route to the Coretrees. The sweet, musky perfume of the flowering vines draped on the trees surrounded him like a blanket, but for the first time, he caught the dank scent of rot underneath it all. Purple, red, golden, and green seedpods peeped between the branches, but many were shriveled and blackened, and heaps of spoiled pods had burst open on the ground. He heard the rustling of small animals in the undergrowth, but sobered by what he’d seen, he focused on clearing his mind for the task ahead.
The enormous stand of Coretrees rose out of the deep forest like a monolith, entwined trunks and quantum vines woven together into one massive, flowering, windblown, pulsing glare that forced his mask to its maximum setting. But there were also large dark areas within the Coretrees, where saplings had faded and died. More than ever before.
As the cart halted, a vibration prickled his skin, and heat blasted him. He made his way to the nearest annex in the group of hollowed-out beds at the roots of the Coretrees. He lay down, heart hammering in his chest at the thought of what he was about to do, adrenaline making his fingers shake as he wrapped a Corevine around the hand implanted with the seedling. The needle-leaves sank into his arm, tiny stinging points.
Instantly, he was weightless, his body free of pain and filled with the euphoria of the joining. His mind squeezed with energy and impressions, even as it grew to include every scrabbling life in the Greatwood, every vine curtain on every Vineyard ship, every needleleaf that draped over his paralyzed body, every quark in every Arbor floating in the silent dark.

The climax of the story (spoiler) later takes place at a meeting of Grandmasters where Dee manages to instigate a coup by telling the various Houses that he is the only one who can repair the Greatwood and maintain their space-wide Empire. He also tells them the masses must be enfranchised.
(If I recall correctly, the problem with the Greatwood has something to do with exchanges that he and the previous King had with the sentient trees that comprise it—something about feeding them emotion rather than logic and puzzles, although there is also a reference to problems that Dee left unfixed before his exile. Whatever the explanation was, it wasn’t particularly convincing.)
The story ends with Dee meeting Sister, who has been quietly subverting various AI systems and ships to get to the planet and rescue Eva. They collect her and go home.
This is a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, but the best of it, which is very good in parts, outweighs its flaws. It also struck me that this writer has more in common with previous generations of SF writers than current ones—there are flashes of C. L. Moore here, the sensory stuff about the Vineyards; Jack Vance, the odd and complex Valencian society; and Iain M. Banks—the AI/robot superbeings, and Dee’s “free the masses” politics. The story is also quite heavily plotted, and Garcia’s storytelling is largely brisk and clear (clearer than I’ve been above, I fear, but there is a lot going on in the story and I read it a couple of weeks ago).
A writer to watch, I think.
*** (Good). 16,450 words. Story link.

The Keys to December by Roger Zelazny

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Keys to December by Roger Zelazny (New Worlds #165, August 1966)1 begins with the birth of Jarry Dark, a modified human who needs a specialised environment (in his case, a temperature of -50°C and gravity of 3.2 gees). When the planet for which he has been designed is destroyed by a supernova, his sponsoring company, General Mining, provide hermetically sealed environments for him and all the other genemods like him.
The rest of the first few pages sees Jarry and the other 28,000 of his kind form the December Club: they pool their money, Jarry makes even more for them on the markets, and they finally buy their own world and start terraforming it.
The next part of the story sees the 28,000 arrive on the planet and enter cold sleep, although small groups are rostered to stay awake for short periods to supervise the twenty World Change machines and their three thousand year task.
During Jarry and his wife Sanza’s first shift, they see the effect the changes are having on the planet’s wildlife:

One morning, as they watched, they saw one of the biped creatures of the iodine forests moving across the land. It fell several times, picked itself up, continued, fell once more, lay still.
“What is it doing this far from its home?” asked Sanza.
“Dying,” said Jarry. “Let’s go outside.”
They crossed a catwalk, descended to the first floor, donned their protective suits and departed the installation.
The creature had risen to its feet and was staggering once again. It was covered with a reddish down, had dark eyes and a long, wide nose, lacked a true forehead. It had four brief digits, clawed, upon each hand and foot.
When it saw them emerge from the Worldchange unit, it stopped and stared at them. Then it fell.
They moved to its side and studied it where it lay.
It continued to stare at them, its dark eyes wide, as it lay there shivering.
“It will die if we leave it here,” said Sanza.
“. . . And it will die if we take it inside,” said Jarry.
It raised a forelimb toward them, let it fall again. Its eyes narrowed, then closed.
Jarry reached out and touched it with the toe of his boot. There was no response.
“It’s dead,” he said.

Later, Sanza expresses doubts about what they are doing to the planet:

“It’s funny,” she said, “but the thought just occurred to me that we’re doing here what was done to us. They made us for Alyonal, and a nova took it away. These creatures came to life in this place, and we’re taking it away. We’re turning all of life on this planet into what we were on our former worlds—misfits.”
“The difference, however, is that we are taking our time,” said Jarry, “and giving them a chance to get used to the new conditions.”
“Still, I feel that all that—outside there”—she gestured toward the window—“is what this world is becoming: one big Deadland.”
“Deadland was here before we came. We haven’t created any new deserts.”
“All the animals are moving south. The trees are dying. When they get as far south as they can go and still the temperature drops and the air continues to burn in their lungs—then it will be all over for them.”
“By then they might have adapted. The trees are spreading, are developing thicker barks. Life will make it.”
“I wonder. . . .”

This conflict limns the rest of the story. After they do a solo shift each, they spend the next one together, and see that the planet’s life has started to adapt. They find strange signs outside their stations. Also, around the same time, one of the other watchers develops an alcohol equivalent which they use to celebrate the millennium.
On later shifts the atmosphere has changed enough for the pair to spend short periods outside, and they see further markings outside the stations, and dead animals that appear to have been left as offerings. This latter, which occurs around twelve hundred years in, leads Jarry and Sanza to suspect that the animals they know as Redforms are becoming intelligent.
When they subsequently visit the tribe of the creatures to investigate they see several of the creatures being attacked by a large bear-like creature. Jarry kills it with a laser, and then dismounts the sled to examine the Redforms, only to be attacked by a second bear he hasn’t noticed. After he recovers from the bear’s initial blow he stabs it in the throat with a knife. At the same time Sanza drives the sled into it and kills herself in the crash. As Jarry starts walking back to the station with her body one of the Redforms retrieves his knife from the body of the bear.
On his return he wakens the executive, and asks him what he should do with Sanza’s body, as none of them have yet died on this world. They suggest burial or cremation and, when Jarry chooses the latter, they let him borrow the large aircar: he takes her to a mountain top, gets airborne again, and uses the laser to level it—the “first pyre this world has seen.” Jarry then goes back into cold-sleep.
The next time Jarry wakes (spoiler) he reads a report stating that the Redforms will die out at the current rate of terraforming. Then, when he goes to visit the Redforms, he sees they now have fire and spears, and opposable digits on their hands (the rate of evolution is the story’s one weak point). After Jarry subsequently manages to learn how to speak to the Redforms, he wakens the executive committee once more, and asks for the project to be slowed down to give them a chance. When he fails to convince them, Jarry proposes waking the membership for a vote, but no-one seconds him. Later though, after he destroys two stations, they agree. To make sure he isn’t double crossed, Jarry tells them that he has trained the Redforms to use laser projectors to destroy the remaining stations if he does not visit by dawn. One of the committee members, after realising they are beaten, asks him a question:

“Why did you do it, Jarry?” he asked. “What are they to you that you would make your own people suffer for them?”
“Since you do not feel as I feel,” said Jarry, “my reasons would mean nothing to you. After all, they are only based upon my feelings, which are different than your own—for mine are based upon sorrow and loneliness. Try this one, though: I am their god. My form is to be found in their every camp. I am the Slayer of Bears from the Desert of the Dead. They have told my story for two and a half centuries, and I have been changed by it. I am powerful and wise and good, so far as they are concerned. In this capacity, I owe them some consideration. If I do not give them their lives, who will there be to honor me in snow and chant my story around the fires and cut for me the best portions of the woolly caterpillar? None, Turl. And these things are all that my life is worth now. Awaken the others. You have no choice.”
“Very well,” said Turl. “And if their decision should go against you?”
“Then I’ll retire, and you can be god,” said Jarry.

Jarry does not go back into cold sleep afterwards, and spends his remaining time with the tribe. The story is not explicit about whether or not he gets his way, although my suspicion is that he does.
This is a very good and emotionally affecting story, and it is probably one of favourite Zelazny pieces. I’d also note that it is a work that combines his stylistic prowess with a heavyweight theme—I often find his stories are often heavy on style and poetry and larger than life characters, but are sometimes light on content. In this case, I suspect the terraforming/extinction theme was influenced by the ecology movements of the time.
**** (Very Good). 8,900 words. Story link.

1. Because this was published in a British magazine it did not appear on that year’s Hugo or Nebula ballot, but did appear on the latter when it was subsequently reprinted in the Wolheim/Carr Best of the Year. The story should probably have one or the other awards, although Harlan Ellison’s Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes would have been strong competition.

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is set in a near-future world where an artificial asteroid has infected humanity with a xenovirus that causes people to mutate into shamblers (later described by the narrator as “monstrous eldritch crayfish things”). After humans change into shamblers they migrate to the oceans and disappear into the deeps.
All this SFnal content is, however, largely in the background at the beginning of the story, as we can see in the opening scene where Elisabeth the narrator and her son Jack go to the beach. Although biocontainment staff are disposing of a shambler there (“remove him efficiently and with good technicality”, according to the guard), the focus is on Elisabeth’s prickly interaction with a neighbour:

[Jack] points a fat finger down the beach. “Shambla, mumma? Is it? Shambla?”
Alea coos and chirps. “They’re speaking now! Such fun.”
“He’s speaking,” Elisabeth says, bristling. “Jack’s a boy unless he eventually decides otherwise.” She adjusts Jack’s hat. “He’s two now. Yes, Jack, it’s a shambler.”
Alea settles back on her towel, with a curve to her lips that looks more amused than chastened.
[. . .]
A ways down the beach, a small knot of spectators has gathered about ten meters back from a distinctive shape. It’s crawling for the surf, red-and-blue flukes rippling from its bent back. A guard is busy zipping into a hazard suit, white with what looks like a gasoline stain across one knee. The shambler seems to sense its time is limited; it scoots a bit faster now, dragging a wet furrow behind itself. The whole thing is quite macabre.
“Is hubby back from his little trip?” Alea asks.
“What?”
The ejection is more forceful than she intended it. She was distracted by the shambler, and by the sputter and whine of the buzzsaw the guard will use to dismember it.
“Benjamin,” Alea clarifies. “Is he back from Australia?”
“Not yet.” Elisabeth shifts her gaze to Jack, who is meticulously pouring fistfuls of sand onto his tiny knees. “My brother is coming to visit, though. He’s an artist.”
Alea smiles dryly. “Here to freeload while he seeks inspiration, I suppose? Every family has one.”
“He’s quite successful, actually.”
“Oh.” Alea gives a pensive moue. “I think we’re all artists, in our own way.”
Elisabeth imagines gouging out her eyes and filling the holes with sand. “What a lovely thought,” she says.

The rest of the story is a slow burn that is largely a study of the tough but tetchy Elisabeth and her relationship with Jack (who we later learn has a genetic condition) as (spoiler) her personal and the wider world fall to pieces. During this slow disintegration her artist brother Will turns up, and we find he has become interested in the shamblers and has started painting them. Later on, he finds a ledge on a cliff that they use to drop into the ocean but doesn’t report it.
Meanwhile, there is background detail about the rest of the world—the increasing chaos, the haves who get immunomods to stave off infection, and the have-nots who do not. We also learn that some people have started joining anthrocide cults, and are voluntarily infecting themselves with the xenovirus. This division in how people are responding to the crisis becomes obvious when her brother brings a new acquaintance round for a drink (“Will is always fucking meeting people”, thinks Elisabeth):

The air is fresh and electric, and it seems impossible that the world is ending, but that is where the conversation invariably leads.
“You see, this is not like the other plagues and pandemics,” says the ex-sommelier, in a faint Romanian accent. “This is their photo negative. Their chiral opposite.”
“Well, it came by artificial meteor,” Will says, with a buttery smile. “That’s quite unique.”
“It came with purpose,” their guest says. “In my opinion, it’s a gift.”
“How do you figure?” Elisabeth asks, more bluntly than usual.
“In my opinion,” the man repeats, “humanity has been offered a way to save itself.” This prompts her to verify, again, that the front gate’s biofilter reported him clean. “To save itself from itself,” he continues, stroking the small bones of his dog’s head, “and this time, the downtrodden lead the way.”
Will gives an alarmed smile. “That’s quite the idea.”
“First shall be last, last shall be first, et cetera.” Their guest places the dog in his lap. “We left the poor behind, over and over, but now they finally get to leave us behind.”
“By becoming monstrous eldritch crayfish things,” Elisabeth says. “Such luck.”
“By growing iridescent armor and returning to our primeval birthplace,” the ex-sommelier says. “They are safe in the ocean while the old world burns. Or they would be, if we stopped senselessly hunting them down.”

Shortly after this Elisabeth asks the visitor to leave, and later on her brother is ejected too (Jack later falls ill and, when Elisabeth checks the house’s video feeds, she sees that Will has smuggled some shambler carcass into the house to get one of the colours he needs for a painting of one of the creatures).
The final arc of the story sees Jack’s health continue to decline, but this is due to his genetic condition and not the xenovirus. Then, while Elisabeth has a bath, she starts thinking the impossible:

“Wash you knees,” Jack suggests.
He is sitting on the heated tile beside the tub. She can’t deny him, not so close to the end, not when his little limbs might give out at any moment. He’s playing with a bright red fire truck that used to be his favorite. The fact feels disproportionately important now. She feels the need to recall everything about Jack, every habit and preference. He has only been briefly alive, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Wash you knees, mumma,” Jack says again.
Elisabeth rubs at her kneecap, feeling the gooseflesh around the bone.
“Wash, wash, wash,” she sings. “Wash, wash, wash.”
“Good washing,” Jack decrees, in an uncanny imitation of the nanny’s synthetic lilt. “Good job.”
“Thank you, Jack. I thought so, too.”
Jack returns to his toy. Elisabeth reaches forward and drains the bath a bit, listening to the gasp and gurgle of exorbitant water waste, then adds a shot of hot water. She stirs with her hand until it’s tepid throughout. Climbs out dripping.
“Jack,” she says. “Do you want to come inna bath, bubba? With your fire truck?”
He is momentarily suspicious, but the novelty wins out. He lets her peel off his clothes, hold him fruitlessly over the toilet, carry him back to the tub. He gives a squealing giggle when she skims his feet through the water, holding him under the armpits. She sets him down carefully and clambers in after him.
“Lots of animals live in the water, Jack,” she says. “Should we play pretend?”

Elisabeth then researches ways of disabling their immunomods. Then she gets back in touch with Will. When she tells him what is happening with Jack, he agrees to help.
The final scene sees her meeting Will at the shambler ledge on the cliff. He gives her the injectors that will disable the immunomods and infect her and Jack with the xenovirus. After Elisabeth and Jack change, they shuffle off the ledge and fall into the sea. There is a great payoff line:

But when they are far from any shore, the smaller hooks itself to the larger. They dive together, toward a city that might exist.

Although this is a quite a slow burn to start with (I had to take a break in the middle as I was beginning to lose focus) it comes to an ending that is both emotional (all those interactions between Elisabeth and Jack come to a moving culmination) and transcendent (the final hint that they will have another kind of life beneath the waves). It is also at this point that you realise that this wonderful story is about Elisabeth and her son as much, if not more, than anything else.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 14,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for their 2021 stories. It is the best of them by a country mile.

The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele by Eric Norden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele by Eric Norden (Starsongs and Unicorns, 1978; F&SF, September 1980) is a very amusing, but now probably politically incorrect, story that begins with a writer called O. T. Nkabele, originally from Senegal, submitting his story Astrid of the Asteroids to F&SF. It is rejected, which brings forth a follow-up letter from the writer:

Esteemed Editor Ferman:
I’m afraid, as is sometimes unavoidable in all great publishing enterprises, that there has been a clerical error on the part of your staff. I have just received a letter, bearing what can only be a facsimile of your signature, returning my manuscript ASTRID OF THE ASTEROIDS, which I know you will be most anxious to publish. At first I was sorely troubled by this misunderstanding, but I soon realized that one of your overzealous underlings, as yet unfamiliar with my name, took it upon himself to reject my work unread. Thus I am resubmitting ASTRID, as well as two more of my latest stories, with instructions that they are for your eyes only. Do not be too harsh on the unwitting culprit, dear Editor Ferman, as such debacles are not unknown in literary history. The initial reception of James Joyce’s Ulysses is but one case in point. . . .
I should appreciate your check to be made out to cash, as I have not as yet opened a banking account in this city.
Hoping to hear from you forthwith, I remain,
Your obedient servant,
O.T. Nkabele, Esq  pp. 84-84

Editor Ferman writes to Nkabele to tell him none of his stories meet the magazine’s requirements, and that manuscripts need to be typed, not hand-written. When the stories are resubmitted (Nkabele has subsequently engaged Ms Rachel Markowitz as a typist), Ferman again rejects the stories, saying that they are entirely unsuitable, pointing out that no-one says “Zut alors!” or “Zounds!” anymore, the Mary Tyler Moore show is unlikely to be broadcast on 31st Century Venus, and Nkabele’s aliens appear to be oversize lobsters who would be uninterested in ravishing Ursula (the love interest of one of the stories). He adds that Nkabele needs to study recent work in the field, such as the Dangerous Visions anthologies, and the annual collections of Nebula Award stories.
Nkabele writes another long letter to Ferman, and we learn about his upbringing in Africa and how he was given access to a missionary’s collection of SF (Father Devlin arrived in 1953 with his 1936 to 1952 collection, but never obtained anything newer than that, hence Nkabele’s dated output). After Nkabele praises various pulp writers—E. E. “Doc” Smith, Nelson Bond, and “the revered” Stanley G. Weinbaum,1 etc.—he resubmits his stories. Nkabele also adds a PS in which he notes the only prominent black writer in the field is Samuel R. Delany, and hopes that Ferman’s obtuseness is not “motivated by racialism”.
The back and forth continues even after another form letter, and then Ferman is ambushed by Nkabele while he is at the hairdresser in Connecticut (Nkabele has travelled from New York). Ferman, after he gets over his surprise, eventually thaws and suggests Nkabele write an essay on how he discovered SF, and also gives him some volumes of current SF writing. Then he finds what looks like a voodoo doll under his pillow, and starts developing headaches. . . .
You can probably guess what happens next and, sure enough, circumstances worsen for Ferman when (spoiler) his dog is eaten (his neighbour sees something that looks like a leopard), and he starts to hear drumming in the night. Then Ferman inadvertently discloses Harlan Ellison’s home address to Nkabele, which draws Ellison into his orbit too (a few rejection letters later Ellison goes bald, and is subsequently eaten by a python—which goes on to attack an old woman as it is “still hungry”—a very funny line).
Finally, Nkabele writes to Ferman dismissing the latter’s superstitious worries in one breath, while explaining how they work and can be ameliorated in another: Ferman takes the hint and finally accepts his stories.
Also included in the same letter is Nkabele’s hilarious response to the modern SF given to him by Ferman (this is an exaggerated version of the Traditionalist/New Wave feuds and other reactionary comment of the time):

I also want to thank you for the novels and collections of short stories. I have not as yet read them all, but I must confess I am shocked and depressed at the profound deterioration in our field since my apprenticeship in Africa. It is obvious that I was blessed with exposure to the Golden Age of science fiction, and that the downward spiral towards decadence and decay has accelerated horrendously since the midfifties. Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, whom I remember from an earlier, healthier stage in his career, particularly disturb me, as they must know the birthright they are betraying. (If I may be permitted a note of levity, the eggs Sturgeon lays are far from caviar!) Certainly, his current stories would never have been accepted by Thrilling Wonder Stories in the glorious days gone by. And this Barry Malzberg you suggested I read—my word, dear Edward, surely he is afflicted of the Gods! The man is a veritable pustulence on the face of the universe, a yellow dog barking in the night. We have another saying in my tribe, “The jackal dreams lions’ dreams.” How true! How tragically true. And how a creature such as Malzberg would cringe and whimper if ever confronted with the shade of Stanley G. Weinbaum, the Great Master himself. And these women, Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ, they should be beaten with stout sticks! I would not give one hamstrung goat for the pair of them. (It is apposite here to reflect on the words of the good Dr. Johnson, who pointed out that “A woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs; it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”) Of all the stories I have read recently, only Kilgore Trout’s Venus on the Half Shell is worthy to bear the mantle of the giants of yesteryear.
Truly, my good friend, the field we love is facing terrible times, and it is indeed providential that I have arrived on the scene to arrest the rot. Perhaps, in fact, there was a Larger Purpose of Father Devlin’s introducing me to science fiction. We shall see.  pp. 94-95

The last part of the story also sees letters from a rational Isaac Asimov to a increasingly superstitious Ferman (one of Asimov’s letters contains a quip that at a recent autograph party he told some “nubile young ladies” that his hobby was “converting lesbians”). Meanwhile, F&SF publishes several of Nkabele’s stories, Ferman becomes an alcoholic, and the circulation of the magazine plummets—it eventually ends up as a mimeographed publication.
This story has some very funny passages and clever lines—and equally as impressive as the writer’s comic ability is his knowledge of SF and the writers involved.
**** (Very Good). 9,700 words. Story link.

1. The story’s original title (it was published in Starsongs and Unicorns, a semi-original short story collection, a couple of years previously) was The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele or The Revenge of Stanley G. Weinbaum. The collection’s contents can be viewed at ISFDB (I’ve already reviewed the excellent The Primal Solution here).

A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg (F&SF, July 1975)1 is a meta-story and a piece of recursive SF where the writer describes a story that that he might write but cannot, because “it partakes of its time, which is distant and could be perceived only through the idiom and devices of that era.”
He goes on to say that the story would be about a spaceship that is trapped in a “black galaxy” (I think he means black hole) that results from the implosion of a neutron star:

Conceive then of a faster-than-light spaceship which would tumble into the black galaxy and would be unable to leave. Tumbling would be easy, or at least inevitable, since one of the characteristics of the black galaxy would be its invisibility, and there the ship would be. The story would then pivot on the efforts of the crew to get out. The ship is named Skipstone. It was completed in 3892. Five hundred people died so that it might fly, but in this age life is held even more cheaply than it is today.
Left to my own devices, I might be less interested in the escape problem than that of adjustment. Light housekeeping in an anterior sector of the universe; submission to the elements, a fine, ironic literary despair. This is not science fiction, however. Science fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback to show us the ways out of technological impasse. So be it.

The writer then reflects on his personal life in Ridgeway Park (“I would rather dedicate the years of life remaining (my melodramatic streak) to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class town”) before setting out his notes for the story. These cover various facets of the prospective piece: the characters, which include a female captain and her cargo of “the embalmed”, five hundred and fifteen dead people who will be reanimated at some point in the future; possible sex scenes; data dumps of astronomical physics; a scene where the dead come to life; and, eventually, the open ending of the story—which, as it happens, sees the ship vomited from the black hole after engaging its tachyonic drive, depositing the occupants in Ridgefield Park in 1975 (which neatly ends the story).
It’s very hard to synopsise this as it is much more than a series of events or notes but, perhaps, as well as the passage above, the following will also provide a flavour of what the story is like:

Lena is left alone again, then, with the shouts of the dead carrying forward. Realizing instantly what has happened to her—fourteen thousand years of perception can lead to a quicker reaction time, if nothing else—she addresses the console again, uses the switches and produces three more prostheses, all of them engineers barely subsidiary to the one she has already addressed (Their resemblance to the three comforters of Job will not be ignored here, and there will be an opportunity to squeeze in some quick religious allegory, which is always useful to give an ambitious story yet another level of meaning.)
Although they are not quite as qualified or definitive in their opinions as the original engineer, they are bright enough by far to absorb her explanation, and this time her warnings not to go to the portholes, not to look upon the galaxy, are heeded. Instead, they stand there in rigid and curiously mortified postures, as if waiting for Lena to speak.
“So you see,” she says finally, as if concluding a long and difficult conversation, which in fact she has, “as far as I can see, the only way to get out of this black galaxy is to go directly into tachyonic drive. Without any accelerative buildup at all.”

This is an intense and original piece, but it felt overlong, and I suspect it is a story that people will admire more than enjoy.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

1. The story is dedicated to John W. Campbell.

The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg (F&SF, April 1968) opens with the scientist-narrator brooding about his life—not only has his early promise failed to amount to anything, but he is beginning to tire of married life and fatherhood. Added irritation is provided by his Noble Prize-winning father, who not only didn’t acknowledge the son’s contribution to his prize-winning work, but now chides him for not pulling his weight and for having an affair with one of the graduate students who works in the lab.
Later on in the story the father summons the narrator-son to his office, and there follows a conversation about the direction time flows. The father then reveals an artificially aged monkey, and tells the narrator he wants him to slow down the field fluctuations that cause the effect.
While the narrator works on process, there are further arguments between the men about the narrator’s extra-marital relationship. Then the son sees that the monkey is young again and, when he reveals this to his father, and suggests himself as a human test subject (hoping to become the same age as the grad student and restart his life), the father shows that he has already tested the method on himself when he removes a wig and makeup to reveal his younger self. When the narrator says he also wants to be twenty years younger, and that his father can have his wife and children (we are told earlier he is an attentive grandfather), the father mocks the suggestion, if only because of the questions that would be raised when his older self vanished.
The narrator subsequently goes on a multi-day drunk and (spoiler), when he wakes up, discovers he is now as old as his father—he realises they have swapped places but, in a final twist, shows he doesn’t care—he is the one who is now the Nobel Prize winner.
This has a cleverly convoluted plot, but one that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny (e.g. the makeup scene). However, the warped, almost reverse-Oedipal father-and-son relationship is intense and weirdly fascinating, as is the son’s acceptance of what happens at the end of the story (it would have been easy to have this as a straightforward victim ending).
*** (Good). 3,500 words. Story link.