It’s Smart to Have an English Address by D. G. Compton (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) sees Paul Cassavetes, a celebrated 84 year old pianist on his way to visit Joseph Brown, a composer he knows. As Cassavetes is driven there we see (his driver is doing 130mph in the slow lane, among other things) that we are in a near-future world.
When Cassavetes arrives at Brown’s house he is taken into a soundproof room (the need for such security seems odd to Cassavetes), and Brown plays his new sonata. Afterwards, as two men discuss the work, it becomes apparent that the piece is only an excuse for Brown to see Cassavetes about another matter, and another visitor joins them. Dr McKay, who works with XPT (experiential recordings of brain waves which are then superimposed onto another person to let them relive the experience of the person providing the recording), tells Cassavetes that they want to “record” him playing Beethoven. Cassavetes isn’t keen but before he can explain this to them (spoiler) he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage.
This is a very descriptive story (it takes three pages for Cassavetes to drive to the house), and better characterised than other SF of the time, but I just don’t see the point of it all.
* (Mediocre). 5,750 words.
Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus
Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) is set on Titan, where a couple, Jax and Maddy, do science work on the geology of the planet and its slug-like aliens. In the background there are rumbles about a possible nuclear war on Earth between PacRim and EC.
The second chapter switches the point of view from Jax to Maddy (as does the fourth). She is worried about her family in Paris, a likely target, and this causes an argument between them. Maddy later thinks about a embryo of theirs she has in cold storage, but about which she hasn’t told Jax.
The third chapter sees Jax observing the slugs on the surface when Maddy calls: there has been a war on Earth and her parents are dead. She wants to leave Titan for the Moon or the L-5 colonies, so Jax calls their boss at Sun Group, who tells them that Naft and Russia came through alright and that he can send a ship for them later if they want.
The last chapter sees Jax lie to Maddy about the timescale of a likely pickup. Later on Maddy goes out on the surface and opens the canister holding the embryo, destroying it.
I guess this okay for the most part—if you are interested in dysfunctional relationships against a backdrop of a dysfunctional Earth—but it just grinds to a halt. I’d also have to say I’m not a fan of overly contrived writing like this:
They cycled through several iterations of crash and burn, learning each other’s boundaries, before they settled into a kind of steady state. Still, their relationship felt to Jax like a living entity, a nonlinear filter whose response to stimuli was never quite what you thought it was going to be. p. 68
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.
Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress
Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2020) opens (after a somewhat irrelevant introductory passage where a young woman gives birth in the back of a truck) with a grandmother telling a young child called Jennie to stop repeating what is said to her (Jennie turns out to have “selective savant memory” or “echo-memory”).
We then see that the grandmother is highly protective of Jennie and has never lets her go out to play but eventually, when the child turns eight, she has to go to school. Before this Gramma shows her, as a warning about the world, a graphic news clip about a young girl who has been murdered. On the way to school Gramma continues the child’s education when they pass wealthy professionals helicoptering into their workplace:
Gramma stopped tugging at Jennie’s hand. “Okay, I guess you need to know some things before you start school. I should of said it before. The aliens, ‘Lictorians’ the government calls them, have all kinds of fancy tech. They landed in China, so the Chinese got the tech and then sold some of it to companies in America. All that means is rich people got richer, like always. But this time, way way richer. And those of us on the bottom lost more and more jobs to the Likkie robots and AI and supertrains and all the rest of it. I used to have a good factory job at Boeing, before automation. Between the Likkies and your grandfather, I lost everything. And welfare just gets less and less. So now you understand.” p. 135
This future world of economic inequality is the backbone of the story (although the explanation for the way things are is fairly superficial and never really explored in any detail—why would the masses not vote for change, for example?)
Jennie is tested at school and put into Ms Scott’s class for gifted children, where she meets Imani, the alpha female of the class, and then Ricardo, who modestly identifies himself as a “genius.” As Jennie settles into her education we find out more about the world around her, and her grandmother’s precarious financial situation. Then, one day on the way to school, the nearby robot factory blows up and Jennie learns about “T-boc”, the Take Back Our Country rebels who target the wealthy or “blingasses” living with their robots behind Q-field force shields.
In Jennie’s teenage years there are more significant developments. On one occasion she is told by her grandmother that her mother is being prosecuted for murder. Gramma takes Jennie to the city where the trial is but leaves her alone in a rented “coffin room” with instructions not to leave, but Jennie slips out to an internet café and finds that her mother, apparently a prostitute, is on trial for the murder of a client. Later Jennie also learns about an aunt called Grace, but Gramma refuses to tell Jennie anything about her. Then, in her final teen years at school, she comes home one day and finds that Gramma has been murdered.
All these events take place against a background of closer bonds with her school friends, gang problems at school, and what is now an insurgency between T-boc and the government/rich.
The second part of the story sees Jennie discover a valentine card (presumably sent to her mother) in her dead grandmother’s papers, which prompts a car journey with her friends to two log cabins in the middle of nowhere, one of which is burnt out. On return she meets Grace at her grandmother’s house. Grace has inherited Gramma’s property, and Jennie ends up going to stay with her.
Grace is a dress designer and Jennie eventually becomes, over the next couple of years, a famous and wealthy model with a rich boyfriend. We now see how the rich live behind their Q-shields, and later get a brief glimpse of one of the enigmatic Lictorians at a fashion show (which suffers a T-boc cyberattack that sets some of the models’ clothes on fire). Grace and the friends that Jennie makes in this rich society are, needless to say, selfish, shallow types unconcerned about the welfare of the less well off.
The third leg of the story sees Ricardo tell her (in a rare call—she has lost touch with her childhood friends) that Imani’s mother and brother have been murdered in a gang-related incident. Jennie visits them and there is some social awkwardness. Then, after her trip, when a wealthy boyfriend’s robofactory is blown up (along with a demand for UBI—universal basic income), and a T-boc supporting village razed in reprisal, his vicious response (“Barbecue T-boc! Yum!”) provokes Jennie to leave him, give up modelling, and join T-boc.
Jennie becomes increasingly involved with the group, and eventually takes part in an operation that kills sixteen humans. When a pro-UBI Senator is shot, however, Jennie confides her growing doubts about T-boc’s strategy to an elderly woman psychologist, who tells Jennie she also wants T-boc to change direction. Their conversation is overheard by one of the other cell members, and they are eventually put on trial. During this the cell leaders get Jennie to use her echo-memory to repeat every conversation that she and the old woman have had.
It’s in this part of the story that my interest began to fade. Before this it is a reasonably good piece about a young woman growing up in a deprived and challenging environment, but the T-boc section is boilerplate resistance/us-and-them material populated with two dimensional characters. Unfortunately much worse follows in the final part, where (spoiler) Jennie flees T-boc and goes back to the log cabins to hide with her friends. When T-boc sends a helicopter to bring them back, and the pilot moves to kill them, who should pop up but her mother Cora, who shoots the pilot. If this co-incidence isn’t enough, she also commits her own terrorist attack on the rest of the story, blowing it up with revelations of her infection by a meteor-borne space virus in the 1970s, which made her near-immortal and of interest to the Lictorians (who seem to be the ones that were behind her earlier jail break). And we also learn that Cora was Gramma’s mother!
More plot explosions follow, including an extraction by the Lictorians, and Jennie telling their alien ambassador about her echo-memory, which indicates she also has the mutation. After negotiations she agrees to co-operate with the aliens and help with their research (we find the reason they are here is to try and get the secret of immortality for their own people) but only if they agree to several demands—at this point in the story we get Jennie’s mini-manifesto: nullify Q-shields, unless the government taxes robots and provides UBI; set up a foundation to aid small business; sell the US advanced tech like the Chinese; etc., etc. Oh, and the Semper Augustus/tulip mosaic virus stuff mentioned by Ricardo early in the story gets trotted out again.1
As I mentioned above, for the first half/two-thirds or so this isn’t bad but it goes spectacularly off the rails at the end. Jennie’s naivety about what T-boc becomes isn’t convincing, and the story never really has anything sensible to say about how to fix the structural inequalities of the world it sets up, short of trotting out the idea of UBI, which sounds like a good idea but may have its own problems (Finland trialled it and then stopped2).
The main problem, though, is that the final immortality section is just a huge deus ex machina that creates an ending at odds with the rest of the story, and introduces a huge new subplot in the last few pages. A kitchen-sink piece, and probably longer than it needs to be too (by the time you get to the end of the story a lot of the preceding detail about Jennie’s life is completely irrelevant).
* (Mediocre). 40,300 words.3
1. The Wikipedia page on the Tulip mania, perhaps the first speculative asset bubble, is here.
2. The Wikipedia page on Universal Basic Income is here.
3. As this is on the borderline (40,000 words) between a novella and a novel I’ve gone with Asimov’s categorisation as a novella.
The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch
The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:
“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.” p. 163 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words.
Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel
Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel (Asimov’s SF, April 1995) opens at a party where Henry, a poet, meets Nell, an architect. They start dating:
Those first moments were so abstract, urban and—formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn’t really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the university. Nell and he met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.
But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.
Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted, from memory, his poem about growing up in the country.
They kissed with a careful passion. p. 233
Well, at least they didn’t tell each other, “You complete me.”
They get married, and Nell begins a two year building project, a major construction in Seattle called the Lakebridge Edifice. They are given an apartment on the Alki-Harbour Island Span and, while Nell plays with her cement mixer, Henry writes his nature-based poetry:
In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings
in concentrated silence, measured pace
as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings
of our semi-permeable high arch living space.
While I, raised young among the cows and maize,
garden the terrace by my hand and hoe
and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,
she makes our living—and your living too.
Near twilight, I osmose from room to room
feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her p. 234-235
The project is a triumph, and Nell then is offered a commission to build a lunar colony. Nell asks Henry to come with her, but he is concerned about what the lack of nature on the Moon will do to his poetry:
Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.
This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.
The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there—and nothing comes. Nothing. I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn’t any life there.
He must stay.
But Nell.
What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flames, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes. Oh, yes. p. 241
The agonies of being an artist compel Henry to stay on Earth while Nell goes to the Moon, and he moves to his grandfather’s log cabin to write. He passes up the chance to make a yearly visit, but this is something he agonises about after their regular VR calls. Then, one day (spoiler), he gets a call from her boss saying she has been killed in an accident. He also tells Henry that she left something for him in a crater on the Moon, but that they don’t know what it is. When Henry goes up there he sees it is a sculpture of a garden animated by micro machines (obviously not a very good one if the others couldn’t figure out what it was).
Okay, it’s probably pretty obvious by now that I wasn’t a fan of this: I found it a ponderous and pretentious piece (see above), and one in which the protagonist’s problems are not only self-created, they aren’t that believable (I can just about understand why he didn’t want to go to the Moon for an extended period, but why would you pass up the yearly visit?) What makes the story even more tiresome is that there are screeds of Henry’s really, really bad poetry used as interstitial material (see above for an example) And when we aren’t being exposed to that, we get extracts from Nell’s dry as dust architectural essays (I’ll spare you an extract from those—you’ve suffered enough).
I’m baffled as to how this was both a Hugo finalist and the winner of that year’s Asimov’s poll for Best Short Story.
* (Mediocre). 6,500 words.
Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison
Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:
Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.” p. 142
The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.1
* (Mediocre). 1,800 words.
1.
I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully. p. 139
Tiger I by Tanith Lee
Tiger I by Tanith Lee (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) opens with a woman in a self-driving car en route to a house in the middle of the desert. When she arrives at the gate she talks to Mary Sattersley, the owner, over the intercom and gains admittance. On the short walk to the house the narrator sees a tame lynx and two tigers.
When the pair arrive the narrator and Sattersley have a drink and talk. Sattersley tells the narrator that she is pregnant and will give birth that night, and then invites her to watch. The narrator also learns that the cats on the property can’t speak but they can understand what is being said to them (as she sees when she asks the cheetah on Sattersley’s lap to open and close its eyes).
Later on, after the narrator has had a swim in the pool, the pair meet again and have dinner. The narrator hears Sattersley’s life story, which involves sexual abuse at an early age, many sexual partners during her youth, and then a tryst with an old man just before he dies. She inherited his fortune, and then learned that she was pregnant for the first time. Subequently she has given birth on several other occasions.
The final scene (spoiler) sees Sattersley deliver a tiger cub.
An odd, surreal tale that left me clueless as to what it was supposed to be about.
* (Mediocre). 4,700 words.
See Me Not by Richard Wilson
See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:
He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand. p. 9 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
* (Mediocre). 13,850 words.
Nellthu by Anthony Boucher
Nellthu by Anthony Boucher (F&SF, August 1955) is a page and a half long squib that sees a man meet a woman from his schooldays. Although she was originally homely and untalented, she now has it all: wealth, beauty, talent, etc. When a servant brings the man coffee he realises it is a demon, and quizzes the creature on how she managed to get so much from three wishes. It turns out (spoiler) she did it with one—she made the demon fall “permanently and unselfishly” in love with her. A notion, not a story.
* (Mediocre). 450 words.
The Cold Solution by Don Sakers
The Cold Solution by Don Sakers (Analog, July 1991) is a direct response to an earlier story from the magazine’s history, The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin (Astounding, August 1954). If you have never heard of this latter story it involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on his ship during a trip to take vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board (extra mass) the pilot won’t make it as he doesn’t have enough fuel. So the choice is: (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) confounds reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reactions to the story often miss the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful choices do you choose?) and generally fall into one of two categories: (a) there are engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, or (b) the piece is an intentional piece of misogyny because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic prior treatment in the story, the likely feelings of the readers—who were from a “woman and children first” generation—and the fact that if it was a man no-one would care. That said, the pilot could have shot her first, which would have been a quicker and less painful death.)3 As we shall see, the piece under consideration falls into the first category.
Saker’s story begins in a similar manner to Godwin’s original with a female spaceship pilot finding a young boy who has smuggled on board her ship. The next few pages are a clunky setup of the problem outlined above (along with in-jokes and references to the original—the boy had spoken to a “Technician Godwin,” and the pilot remembers an old story that she read at the Academy, etc.). Eventually, the ship gets closer and closer to the decision point (there are options that give her a little more fuel but not enough) and, just before they get there, she tells the boy she’d give anything to prevent his death—just before dialling up her laser knife to maximum.
The story (spoiler) then cuts to a hospital where both of them are having their limbs regenerated, and we find out that the pilot amputated various of their limbs with the laser knife, before putting them out the airlock to get down to the required mass (I think the amputations include her legs, and one of his arms and both of his legs, but I can’t remember).
This is a silly end to a story that either (a) misses the conundrum at the heart of the original story or (b) decides to dodge it. Or maybe thinks that there is no philosophical problem so large that it can’t be sorted with a big enough spanner.
Worth reading for the unintentionally hilarious ending.
* (Mediocre). 4,100 words.
1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story 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. For a story that responds to Godwin’s story as a misogynistic piece see my review of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly at sfmagazines.com.