No Stranger to Native Shores by Matt McHugh (Analog, November/December 2021)1 begins with Minister Geddek asking Nurse Betta if the young child she has in her charge is well before telling her that a ship similar to the one used by the child’s people is approaching (it isn’t obvious that Geddek and Betta are aliens at this point—and that their charge is a human child—but we soon find out). After this brief exchange the story switches to the approaching human ship, Bellerophon, and we are introduced to another of the main characters, a Senator Susan Tristam Cowley of the Allied Human Territories. She and the crew discuss the information they have gathered about the alien society on the planet ahead, and we also learn about an earlier expedition—which included Cowley’s sister and her husband—whose ship, Outreach, disappeared (although it left its “frame” in orbit).
The rest of the story is a cat-and-mouse piece that sees the humans land, meet the aliens, and try to discover what happened to Outreach. Meanwhile, the Minister tells the child, Topper, that they arrived on the planet when Outreach crashlanded there—but does not tell them that the aliens summoned an electrical storm to destroy the ship and subsequently built a research building around the wreckage.
Eventually, Cowley and her crew discover (a) that her sister was pregnant and had a child, (b) that the aliens destroyed the ship, and (c) that the aliens have the child captive. The Bellerophon sends in an armed team in to recover the child, and Geddek’s city simultaneously comes under attack from another alien nation. Betta takes Hopper and makes a run for it (the alien loves its human charge and is is determined not to give up the child) but Geddek intercepts the pair and tells them about the circumstances behind the destruction of the Outreach, his subsequent subterfuge to keep Topper safe, and that giving the child to the humans is the only way he can prevent further bloodshed.
The climax of the story sees Cowley meet Topper—her sister’s daughter—in an emotional scene. Geddek then explains the complex political situation on the planet to Cowley (Topper translates the alien’s clicking and popping speech), and how certain factions want to profit off the wreckage of a second ship. It becomes clear that Geddek is on Cowley’s side, and she arranges for the Outreach’s orbital frame to land and serve as a decoy to draw off the attacking forces. While Geddek passes the position of the frame to the attacking forces, Betta and Topper leave with Crowley on the Bellerophon. Meanwhile, a human couple stay on the planet to work with Geddek. (I may have missed out one or two points in this synopsis as the plot has a lot of moving parts and it’s been a couple of weeks since I read it—but most of it is there).
All things considered this is a pretty good traditional science fiction yarn, but the ending is overplotted, and this sees the story jump through a lot of unlikely hoops—the crash deception plan, the overly neat alien/human exchanges, etc.
A First Contact piece that is almost there.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,150 words. Story link.
1. This placed third in the novelette category of the 2022 Analog Readers’ Poll Awards.
O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)1 opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):
Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O2 cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O2 masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O2 cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O2 generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.
During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O2 arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
** (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.
1. This story was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).
Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim
Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)1 is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:
I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.
Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:
The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.
I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
*** (Good). 12,800 words.
The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood
The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) opens with the narrator, Savannah Myles, on a Western Alliance space station when the alarm goes off. She goes to the flight deck and we learn that (a) the female captain is her ex-girlfriend as of three weeks ago, (b) an alien spaceship moving at 60 times the speed of light is heading towards them (the aliens have somehow managed to message the station to let them know they are coming), and (c) Savannah is now attracted to Ingrid, another crewmember (even in the midst of the this momentous occasion we are told, “Ingrid was 100 percent the opposite of my hard-drinking, up-for-anything-anytime, blowing-off-work ex-husband”).
The rest of the first half of the story seems to be as concerned with Savannah’s interpersonal concerns as it is with the impending First Contact, and one of the other things we get throughout the story is a lot of literary name-dropping:1
I read the recreation activities wipe board. Canasta tournament Saturday. Book
Club tonight. Catcher in the Rye. Good God. We had just finished The Bell Jar. Somebody should write a book where the two depressed 1950s NYC protagonists find each other. Of course, I was a fine one to criticize depression.
I wanted to tell Ingrid a few things. Again. But I couldn’t go down that road. I shared the blame for our problems anyway. I signed up for station duty to escape a nasty divorce and then jumped right back in the water. p. 143
Also mixed in with all of the above are a quirky robot called Yossarian (named after the Catch 22 character, presumably), and various messages from two feuding political parties on Earth, one of which looks likely to be replaced by the other around the time of the alien ship’s arrival (elections are currently taking place).
This all comes to a head when (spoiler) the two political parties’ spaceships arrive at the station at the same time as the aliens do. Then, when the opposition party ship subsequently attempts to dock with the station after being refused permission by the ruling party, it rips a hole in the superstructure. The crew have to abandon the station, and the aliens are not impressed with the squabbling politicians, so much so they make to leave. Only Savannah’s impassioned plea to the aliens that all humans are not the same (they just elect the politicians) stops them leaving.
There is the seed of a decent story here, and some amusing dialogue with Yossarian the robot, but the story can’t seem to decide if it is a First Contact story, a domestic soap opera, a literary salon, or a political satire. Consequently, it is a bloated mess (and one with an odd title).
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words.
1. As well as the two titles above, we also see mention of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ulysses, Things Fall Apart, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, and Bartleby the Scribner (I think this latter is meant to be Bartleby, the Scrivener, unless I have missed some joke). There are also references to Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ursula K. Le Guin (this latter is followed by an unconvincing, “Greatest writer of the twentieth century”.)