Month: January 2023

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with a constable, in a far-flung outpost of what seems to be an Asian empire, summoned to see one of the village elders called the “Judge”. When he arrives the constable is told that five boys have gone missing (one of them is the Judge’s grandson), and that a young woman who lives on the other side of the mountain may be responsible.
When the constable later arrives at the village where the boys went missing he speaks to an old woman who subsequently takes him to “the girl who eats butterflies” (a habit she acquired after her brother died in suspicious circumstances, possibly involving roving young men):

The young woman was crouched by a large spider web stretched between whorls in the tree bark. She did not appear to notice them. But could she even see them, he wondered, for butterflies of every color of the rainbow fluttered around her hands and face, some even trying to alight on her eyelashes. They beat the air with light wings. The young woman’s attention, though, was intensely focused on the lines of the spider web. Near the web’s center, a butterfly struggled against the threads that bound it. The young woman’s delicate fingers pulled the creature’s quivering body from the sticky strands. The insect beat its crimson wings furiously as the girl plucked its legs free, one by one. She examined the lines of red and black, glowing in the afternoon sun. Then, as gently as she removed the insect from the web, she folded it into her mouth. Her sharp teeth bit into the butterfly. The wings twitched fiercely, then not at all. Legs crunched and divided between the river stones of her teeth. Antennae hung over her lip. She looked up and saw them watching her. Her tongue slipped out to catch the ends of the legs and swept them into her mouth. She chewed for a moment, then swallowed.

Further developments (spoiler) see the constable (a) read his predecessor’s report about the brother’s death, which indicates there were signs of foul play, (b) surreptitiously observe the woman and see her turn into a spider, (c) get punched in the mouth by the Judge when the latter runs out of patience, and (d) write a letter to the woman (who reads it and then nods to him).
Finally, the Judge, his servants, and the constable go to the woman’s house. When they finally force their way into the building they see five cocooned bodies hanging from the ceiling. The woman vanishes, the servants take the bodies back to the village, and the Judge is bitten by a snake and dies.
The final scene sees the constable kill a rat that he has seen once before in his office:

The constable shifted in his seat. His muscles coiled and he sprang across the room, his teeth sinking into the fur and flesh. Venom quickly stilled the rodent’s twitching. The constable withdrew his fangs and tried to take the paralyzed creature into his mouth. It didn’t fit. He unhinged his jaw and swallowed the animal whole, the tail the last bit to slip past his lips and down his gullet.

This piece gets off to an intriguing start but eventually devolves into a fairly standard were-animal/shapechanger story, and one with an ending that pretty much comes out of nowhere (there are, at best, a couple of vague suggestions that the constable is a were-snake). I also have reservations about were-animal or shape-changer stories that don’t adhere to conservation of mass principles (I know this will sound daft, but I can suspend disbelief if a person turns into a person-sized spider or snake, but not if the creature is much smaller).
** (Average). 6,050 words.

Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Two, 2008) starts with an augmented chimpanzee called Sly working at a potters’ wheel in what appears to be a zoo enclosure. When a passing school kid bangs on the window, Sly loses his temper and throws clay at his tormentor; then the chimp writes “Ass” on the window and makes explicit sexual gestures at the teacher.
Later, one of the chimp’s handlers, a sympathetic man called Vern, comes to talk to Sly about his behaviour, and tells him that his supervisor has instructed him to take Sly’s clay away as a punishment. The chimp almost loses control again but channels his rage into his wheel and, while doing so, makes a vase. Vern takes the vase away to be oven fired, and also takes Sly’s clay—adding “I’m not cleaning your mess” (hinting to Sly that he will still have the clay he threw at the window).
This is a pretty good scene (***+ quality), but it is a fragment (imagine reading two pages of Flower for Algernon). Awful title.
** (Average). 1,000 words. Story link.

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear

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Tideline by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF, June 2007) opens with Chalcedony, a damaged combat vehicle, prospecting for “trash jewels” as it works its way along the beach in what eventually turns out to be a devastated future world. Then it meets a feral child called Belvedere. Belvedere asks the robot what it is doing, and Chalcedony tells him that it is gathering “shipwreck beads” to make necklaces. We later find out that it intends making 41 necklaces, one to commemorate each of the members of its combat unit, all of whom are now dead.
A relationship develops between the two, beginning with Belvedere picking up a chain with a Buddha figure on it and passing it up to the robot—Chalcedony has a damaged leg, which makes it difficult to stoop to ground level—and it reciprocates by microwaving a bag full of seashells and seaweed for the child. Chalcedony tells Belvedere to eat the seaweed too (“rich in nutrients”), the first instance of the robot mentoring and caring for the child over the following days and months (and which includes, at one point, the robot saving his life by killing two men who attack him). During this period Chalcedony also tells Belvedere stories about the members of its platoon.
Over the course of the story Chalcedony’s batteries run down—the solar charge it gets each day isn’t enough to keep it at full power—and it is also stuck between the cliff and the sea. The robot realises that it will not survive the approaching winter, so it works as quickly as it can on finishing its memorial necklaces before then.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the robot use some of the last of its precious energy reserves to save the life of an injured German Shepard found by Belvedere:

When the sun was up and the young dog was breathing comfortably, the gash along its haunch sewn closed and its bloodstream saturated with antibiotics, she turned back to the last necklace. She would have to work quickly, and Sergeant Patterson’s necklace contained the most fragile and beautiful beads, the ones Chalcedony had been most concerned with breaking and so had saved for last, when she would be most experienced.
Her motions grew slower as the day wore on, more laborious. The sun could not feed her enough to replace the expenditures of the night before. But bead linked into bead, and the necklace grew—bits of pewter, of pottery, of glass and mother of pearl. And the chalcedony Buddha, because Sergeant Patterson had been Chalcedony’s operator.

When Chalcedony wakes the next day after being recharged by the sun, the robot sees that Belvedere has finished assembling the necklace; Belvedere hands it over so Chalcedony can finish the job by hardening the links. Chalcedony then tasks Belvedere to go on an errantry, to find people to learn the platoon members’ stories and to wear the necklaces that commemorate them. When Belvedere asks what sort of people he should give them to, Chalcedony replies:

“People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”

This is a slow burn piece that is effectively done, but the degree of anthropomorphism in the story is both (a) its weak point (do we really believe a sentient war machine is a “she”, or would be grieving its comrades and making necklaces to remember them?1) and (b) its strength (this kind of sentimentality goes down big with SF readers in general and awards voters in particular2).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words. Story link.

1. The more you consider the way Chalcedony behaves, the less likely it all seems.

2. This story won the 2008 Hugo, Sturgeon, and Asimov’s Reader’s Poll Awards. Of course.

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, 20th May 2020) opens with Anna, an ex-academic who used to work in AI research, arriving at an orbital fortress after being abducted by the military. After seeing the wreckage of several spaceships she learns from the Marshal commanding the military that the AIs that control these vessels have been committing suicide. He then tells her that he wants her to communicate with them mind to mind to find out why (even though her academic partner Rabia died from this process during their research).
When the Marshall takes her to see one of the surviving ships, Proteus Three, Anna sees how radical the previously discussed modifications have been:

They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
[. . .]
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”

The story ends (spoiler) with Anna communicating with the ship until she starts having convulsions. The Marshal breaks the link and then, after Anna recovers, she tells him the modifications that they have made to the spaceships have left the AIs with suicidal levels of dysphoria.
This story has a colourful setting and some interesting detail (the background war, the fish-dragon pets, the orbital fortresses, etc.), and the amorphous, water-like spaceships are intriguingly strange—but the resolution is too abrupt, and leaves the story feeling like an extract from a longer work. I’d also add that the reason for the AIs’ suicides reduces what is here to a simplistic trans message.
** (Average). 3,900 words. Story link.

Magnificent Maurice or the Flowers of Immortality by Rati Mehrotra

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Magnificent Maurice or the Flowers of Immortality by Rati Mehrotra (Lightspeed #126, November 2020) concerns a cat and a witch that live in a cottage between the roots of Yggdrasil:

It stands at the nexus of worlds, dark matter coiling around its roots, the rim of the universe held aloft by its ever-expanding crown. Its branches bend spacetime, its cordate leaves uphold the laws of physics, and its tiny white flowers grant immortality.
Let us be more specific. One flower grants immortality, two flowers cause a prolonged and painful death, three flowers the obliteration of an entire species. It does not pay to be greedy.

The story is mostly about Maurice the cat who, apart from having to defend the tree from various interlopers, has other problems to deal with:

Time flows differently here. Maurice is not immortal, and neither is the witch. They are also not as young as they used to be. There are other cats now, milling about the cottage, meowing for the witch’s attention. One day, one of them will take his place.
But not yet. Oh, not yet. Maurice raises his head and casts a yellow-eyed glare at the tortoiseshell that has just landed on the edge of the roof. To his astonishment, she does not retreat. He allows his fur to stand up, his lips to curl away from his sharp white teeth.
“Good morning, Maurice,” she says smoothly. “Surely the roof is big enough for both of us?”
Maurice’s astonishment turns to rage. A mere kitten, challenging his territory! The roof is his. The tree is also his. He will die defending it. The witch knows this, knows how good he is at his job, and yet she has allowed these . . . these . . . children to invade his home!
He rises in all his torn-eared, ragged-furred glory and arches his back, hissing like a storm of bees.
The tortoiseshell regards him, unfazed, out of bright green eyes. “There’s chopped sardines for snack. In case you want to join us.” She turns to leave. “My name is Butterscotch,” she tosses over her shoulder. She leaps down, as silently as she came.

The next part of the tale sees Maurice telling the other cats about his first battle, and how he used one of his nine lives to create a doppelganger that helped him defeat the demon beetles that attacked the tree (we also learn that subsequent battles mean he now has only one life left). Then Time passes: a God visits the tree in an attempt to steal one of its fruit so it can form a new Galaxy; meanwhile, Butterscotch and the other cats bring Maurice treats and try to ingratiate themselves.
The story eventually comes to a climax when a human called Ulhura visits the tree to steal a flower which will grant her dying lover immortality. When Maurice defends the tree, she manages to imprison him in a cage. Maurice is conflicted and does not know whether to use his last life to burst out of his enclosure and attack her, or grant her wish—then, after considering the matter, he decides to offer her a job (the witch is old like him, and would welcome an apprentice). As Maurice and Ulhura discuss the pros and cons of immortality (mostly cons, according to Maurice) and the job offer, the tree is attacked by vampire corpses: Maurice manages to convince Ulhura to release him, and the other cats also join the battle to repel the invaders. All ends well.
This is a charming, if slight, tale. But definitely one for cat lovers.
*** (Good). 4,550 words. Story link.

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld, December 2020) is set in a Galactic Empire future, and opens with Pinander at college reciting one of his set texts. After this, he meets his friends for lunch:

Pinander’s mind expands with activated Lore. He sits with Jain and Philo.
“Alright?”
A penitent Jain hunches over her steaming bowl.
Philo studies a scroll. “I’m not going to make it,” he says.
“Where are you?” Pinander says.
“The Temple Odes.”
Pinander explains the Temple Odes were songs. “Some verse lends itself to silent reading, but not the Odes. You should be reciting or singing.”
Jain giggles in her soup steam.
Pinander reckons Philo is doomed. Intelligence goes a long way in the imperial service exam, but shyness can hobble you. There are soundproofed study rooms for students like Philo, but to pass the exams you must study constantly: at meals, in showers, in the loo, to and from study groups, as you drift off to sleep. There’s a lot of verse like the Odes. If you don’t recite or sing, Lore will go un-activated, remaining useless noise in your skull.

We learn that the students spend several years in an aestivation facility dubbed “The Crypt” before they come to college, during which time a huge body of knowledge called the Lore is downloaded into them. Afterwards they have to activate it by reading or reciting or singing various texts.
The rest of the story sees Philo commit suicide, and Jain drop out, but only after she passes on the revolutionary idea that there was another context written for the Lore by a poet called Sinecure. Further academic and counter-revolutionary intrigue follows (a Professor makes a cryptic remark that takes root in Pinandar’s “activated mind”) and the story eventually proceeds to an ending (spoiler) where Pinander manages to track down a scroll written by Sinecure and uses it to gain a dual view of his Lore and the Empire.
The core idea of this story is a bit unlikely, and much that follows is either a hand-wavey development of that idea or a rather over-elaborate description of college students and parental pressure and revolutionary intrigue in a far-future Imperial Empire (i.e. too much description and not enough story). It also has an ending that seems a bit unfocused. Ultimately, I guess I liked this, but it takes some getting into, and I’d understand if people bounced off it.1
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This story got a mixed response in one of my Facebook groups.

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #373, 3rd December 2020) sees a young girl meet her lover in a deserted garden in the middle of a city; there, she gives them a pale red rose and they make love.
Later, as the young girl and her sister are getting magic lessons from their mother, the sister mentions that there are pale red roses growing in the deserted gardens, and that it appears like “the sort of magic a foolish young girl might make, if she were slipping away from her house to meet her lover in the middle of the night.”
The young girl continues to meet her lover there (the deserted garden is now full of roses) until, eventually, the Inquisition comes to question her about her liaison. The story then ends (spoiler) with the lover being hanged and the girl witnessing the event, whereupon her magic causes water to pour out of her and wash everything away.
This tale of forbidden and doomed love was too slight and too dreamlike for me.
* Mediocre. 1500 words. Story link.

Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A. T. Greenblatt

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Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny #34. May-June 2020) opens with the would be “Super” (superhero) of the story, an accountant called Sam Wells (who has some ability to produce fire, although not always in a controlled fashion), interviewing to join his local “Super Team”. Most of the assembled superheroes seems unimpressed or uninterested in him:

 “I would really be grateful if I could join you,” Sam says, clasping his hands behind his back to stop them from shaking.
Twenty-four pairs of eyes turn to look at him again. But this time they aren’t empty stares. This time, they are filled with heartache and grief and despair.
“Okay,” says the man in gray, “I’ll go get the papers you need to sign.” He drops his gaze and in an afterthought adds, “Congratulations.”
And just like that, Sam’s a member of the Super Team.
The hours of standing in front of the mirror, practicing control, paid off. Except there are no introductions or chocolate cake. No smiles or welcomes.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman in magenta tells him before heading to the exit.
Twenty-four pairs of eyes have found something else to look at. Twenty-four pairs of feet shuffle out. And soon all that’s left in the room are twenty-four empty chairs and Sam.
Watch Sam burn.

This uninspiring beginning to Sam’s superhero career takes another nose-dive when he finds out from Miranda, the Supers’ Office Manager, that they have hired him to be their accountant. However, over time, and with the help of Miranda, he learns to control his talent and slowly integrates into the team. After further complications (e.g., he is refused service in a shop because of what he is, then Lance, the team precognitive, warns him that he shouldn’t stay with the team), he becomes the hero of the piece (spoiler) when he rushes into their burning headquarters after it has been set alight by an arsonist. After this Sam learns to accept what he is and how his life has worked out.
I’m not really interested in superhero stories (especially movies, which are usually endless and violent power fantasies), but this is a reasonably well-done variation on the trope—and one which views super powers (especially only partially controllable ones) as a curse or disability more than a boon. And, of course, the story still manages to squeeze in a couple of scenes where the Team use their superpowers!
*** (Good). 10,200 words. Story link.

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer

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Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer (Uncanny #36, September-October 2020) is set in a world where text is never permanent but constantly changes:

In his Physics, Aristotle declared that textual transmutation accelerates over time, and that its rate depends on the length of the manuscript. No one questioned this doctrine until after Gutenberg, when it was found that even moveable type metamorphosed on its racks. Galileo Galilei was the first to test Aristotle’s assertion by rigorous experiment, creating multiple copies of manuscripts of various length, as well as printed books, and examining them against correctors’ copies repeatedly over a period of a decade. He determined, first, that all texts transmute at the same rate, roughly one word out of every fifty in a year; second, that this rate does not change with time; and third, that all changes are what he called “sensible,” meaning that they fit logically within the framework of the larger document and do not betray themselves by presenting apparent gibberish. Indeed, it was his assertion that the Holy Bible would be no less prone to sensible transmutation than secular texts that eventually led to his censure and permanent house arrest.
But it was Isaac Newton who demonstrated that textual transmutation was an inherent property of writing itself, devising his three Laws of Impermanence and describing mathematically the forces that make them inevitable.

Interwoven with the conceptual development of this idea are two other narrative threads: one is a story of a lawyer and a client family who have only two original copies of their father’s will (both of which have suffered 25 years of transmutation); the other concerns a letter from the estranged wife of Philip, the grandfather of that family, to her friend:

I’m writing this in a hurry and I’m going to put it someplace safe. I hope to God that you’ll never have to read it, that I’ll be able to tell you in person. But I thought I’d better get it down on paper in case the worst happens.
I’m frightened that Philip wants to kill me. He threatened to do it right after the divorce, and I almost went to the police, but he never repeated the threat, and I thought I was safe.
But today I’m not so sure. A neighbor on the island who’d been down at the port said she saw a tall man with a beard and a coat that sounded just like Philip’s, and I’m afraid he’s come here to do what he said he’d do.
I’m going to try to get away right now, to hide somewhere on the other side of the island. But if, God forbid, I wind up dead, remember: it’s Philip who killed me.

During the story (spoiler) this letter metamorphoses into one that is more vague (this second version suggests that, if anything happens to her, Philip is “morally responsible”) and then, finally, into a suicide note.
This is a conceptually clever piece of ideation that is well developed (I liked all the scientific references to scientists we know for other discoveries) and has a neat twist ending. I suspect it will appeal to, among others, admirers of Ted Chiang’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,100 words. Story link.

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

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The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #311, 27th August 2020) sees a geomancer returning to the magical university where she studied twenty years after a disaster that occurred there. She meets her former tutor/advisor, and they go to the walled up “Vault of Potions”—the site of two recent deaths—with the with the aim of opening it and forcing the university to deal with the contamination that has been festering inside ever since:

I’d handed those very stones to the professors who were standing in the entrance walling up the Vault, me and Ev Minor, shin-deep in the floodwaters with that eerie pink glow from the spilled potions’ ill-fated summonings getting brighter every second. That was the night everything I owned washed away and it was the least of my troubles. That was the night we lost Alden Glasshand, my first-year Incantations professor, and two students whose names I’ll never forget but whose faces I can never remember, pulled under the waters by the vortices that had suddenly surged beneath their feet when the powerful magics in the potions were accidentally combined. That was the night we slept on the top floor of the Library and didn’t know if we’d get down in the morning.

The only complication in this otherwise straightforward account is (spoiler) an alchemy professor who intervenes and stabs the narrator’s tutor as they are in the process of opening the vault (the alchemist wants them to leave it alone so the university can continue on as before). The narrator subdues her, and then makes what I presume in the story’s point:

“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you anymore. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

The setup/resolution structure of this piece is too simple,1 and seems constructed with the sole purpose of delivering the story’s message. That said, the setting and events are evocatively described.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I’ve found that a lot of BCS stories feel rather fragmentary.