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”.)
The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente
The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022)1 has a beginning that suggests (more or less correctly) that the story is going to be an overwritten myth:
There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.
We subsequently learn about (a) the woman (Ruby-Rose Martineau, middle aged, dead baby, parents run a butterfly farm, eating the sin of America), (b) the teenage waitress Emmeline (pregnant by the older and widowed owner), and (c) the diner (various items of décor). Then we see the diner’s clientele watch TV, and news of the trial of a man called Salazar.
Eventually, Ruby-Roses’s huge meal arrives and, as she works her way through it, she thinks about her past and how she came to be selected for her current task.
Many pages of description later, Ruby-Rose finishes her meal. She then goes outside—where (spoiler) the rest of the customers beat her to death. When a new customer arrives in the diner car park and sees Ruby-Rose’s body, a blood-spattered Emmeline tells him it’s okay, and “It’s the beginning of a new era. We’re all better now.” The TV in the diner shows the news that Ruby-Rose was behind a hedge fund Ponzi scheme.
I had no idea what the point of this was. Two suggestions in one of my Facebook groups were (a) that it is a Christ-allegory (she dies for their sins) or (b) it is similar to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, with its themes of scapegoating and conformity.2
Another story that illustrates the adage, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.
* (Mediocre). 5,600 words. Story link.
1. This is a 2022 Hugo Award short story finalist.
2. This is one of the Wikipedia interpretations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:
→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)
>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy
>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum
→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)
This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.
1. This won the Nebula and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. It’s a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.
A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L. Davitt
A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L. Davitt (Analog, January-February 2021)1 has as its protagonist Dominic Vadas, a solo prospector who works on Titania (a moon of Uranus), humanity’s farthest away outpost. The only company this committed loner has is an AI called Enara, who interrupts his work to tell him that there is an incoming message from their bosses, the UN Space Control Agency—they ask Vadas to fuel up his ship and intercept an exo-solar object that has entered the solar system. There is then further disruption to Vadas’s routine as he prepares to depart, when he gets a message from a woman claiming to be his daughter. After the ship gets underway Vadas sends a reply that describes his short relationship with the woman’s mother and how it ended. Vadas later learns that he is not only a father, but a grandfather too.
The rest of the story sees Vadas receive further messages from both the woman and UNSCA as he approaches the exo-solar object. As Vadas gets closer to the object it soon becomes apparent that it is (spoiler) a spaceship of alien construction and, after some cautionary hand wringing from UNSCA, he goes EVA to explore. Then, after an external and internal examination of the object, Vadas takes samples back to the ship and comes to the conclusion about what the alien object is:
Back on the Resolution, he examined his finds in the airless vacuum of the cargo bay, using a microscope. UNSCA had yet to call in to scold him, for which he was grateful. They might not, once he sent them his current results. “Bacteria,” he finally assessed.
“Some of them might still be viable,” Enara noted. “Some have formed endospores. Control will likely assess this as a weapon of biological warfare between long-gone civilizations.”
Dominic thought about it as he stripped out of his EVA suit. Thought about his daughter, whom he’d never met. The grandson he hadn’t known he had. A shot through the dark of time, a chance connection of genetic material spanning worlds. Like all life, really. “Panspermia,” he said out loud, sitting down by the controls. “That’s what this is. Not a weapon. I’d be willing to bet that whoever they were, they sent these out by the thousands. Hoping that someday, they’d land on a planet with decent temperatures and at least the start of an atmosphere. And when they did, they’d eject their payload and start life on that planet. And that life would adapt to its surroundings, and adapt its surroundings to it. Slowly. Very slowly.” p .51
After this intuition the object comes to life, deploys solar sails, and starts heading towards Uranus for a gravity assist that will slingshot it further into our solar system. UNSCA greets this news with alarm and wants him to boost the craft out of the system, but Vadas sends a broadcast stating that humanity should pause and give the object a chance before treating it as hostile—i.e. be open to possibility. Then he asks his daughter for photos of his grandson.
This is a solid piece that successfully combines an interesting character study, a relationship dilemma, and an interesting SF story.
*** (Good). 8,000 words. Story link.
1. Winner of the novelette category in the 2022 Analog Readers’ (Analytical Laboratory) Poll.
Tangles by Seanan McGuire
Tangles by Seanan McGuire (Magic The Gathering, 2021)1 opens with the dryad narrator and her tree arriving on a new “Plane” (I assume this is one of many realities in a fantasy multiverse). She has come to the Kessig forest to free the tree from her service:
They had taken another five steps when the tree spoke again, saying, Here. Stop.
Wrenn stopped. They drove their roots deep into the ground, and bit by bit, she began to pull herself out of the home that had been hers for so long. As she pulled, her awareness of the great tree dwindled, until she felt like a tooth that had been loosened in its socket, still part of the body but awaiting only one last sharp blow to knock it out entirely.
Then, with a final yank that she felt all the way to the bottom of her stomach, she uprooted herself and was no longer joined with Six. Six, who was no longer the majestic, towering treefolk he had become during their time together—trees had no gender as such, but dryads did, and upon discovering the concept in her mind, he had considered his choices and decided he preferred the masculine2—was now a mature, healthy, beautifully twisting Innistrad oak, his branches reaching for the clouded sky.
Wrenn subsequently searches the forest for a new tree and, as she does so, the villagers from a nearby settlement start hunting her (they fear she is a “white witch”). Accompanying them is a mage called Teferi, who finds her before the villagers do and makes her acquaintance. Then, when Teferi detects a demon behind them, he unleashes a magic spell that vanquishes the beast but also distorts the forest around them—and they end up locked in some kind of maze or Mobius strip (after walking for a time they eventually find themselves back where they started).
By now Wrenn urgently needs to find a tree to help contain the fire within her, so she gives Teferi advice about how to view and untangle his spell, as well as adding her magic to his. He (spoiler) succeeds in undoing the spell’s effects and they return to their original location. They also find that, during this process, Teferi has “bent” time, and a nearby sapling has aged and matured into a tree which is suitable for Wrenn.
This is a competently done story but an uninvolving one—possibly because the plot feels like various game moves rather than something which develops organically.
** (Average). 5,150 words. Story link.
1. This is one of this year’s (2022) short story finalists for the Hugo Award. Magic The Gathering is a fantasy game
2. Even trees are choosing their own gender nowadays. Hurrah.
Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter
Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, 28th July 2021)1 is a story which is presented as screenshots of a text message conversation. The initial exchanges between the two people profoundly disturb the recipient because of the amount of personal detail that the sender knows about them. However, as the story progresses (spoiler), we subsequently discover that the sender is a male physicist who has developed a device that allows him to contact his other selves in the multiverse (hence his intimate knowledge). Later on we learn that he is looking for a timeline where his other self successfully transitioned to become a woman, so he can question them about their life and discuss his own gender dysphoria. Gaby, the person receiving the messages, has completed that transition.
This piece has a novel presentation and a neat idea, but it takes a while to get going (i.e. to get to the point that Gaby accepts what is happening), and then goes on for too long. It is also quite a wandering, narcissistic conversation, and occasionally descends into twitter/bumper sticker philosophy (“life is a fucking hard thing, and sometimes it’s happy, and sometimes it’s miserable; “life is hard, capitalism sucks, the world is dying”, etc.).
This is an original piece in some respects but the SFnal idea at its heart is amateurishly executed.
* (Mediocre). 2,600 words. Story link.
1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award in the short story category.
Sample Return by C. Stuart Hardwick
Sample Return by C. Stuart Hardwick (Analog, July-August 2021)1 opens with the protagonist Katy and her fellow crewmember, Xavier, in the process of launching an impactor probe towards Jupiter. Although this part of the operation is successful, the Proteus, the craft designed to collect the samples the impactor probe will cause to be ejected from the Jovian atmosphere, has a launch malfunction. Katy (whose mother has just died) quickly suits up and goes EVA to free the craft, even though they are in a high radiation zone.
Initially Katy just tries to dislodge the explosive bolts holding the Proteus to their ship, Jovian Queen, but her actions soon become wilder:
She jerked her safety line, setting the brake on her take-up reel so her line went slack. He hauled on his tether to reel her in, but as she drifted within reach of the webbing, she swept the shears forward and cut it, then jiggled her line to reset the brake and feed her slack back down into the take-up reel still attached to Proteus.
“Katy, no!”
Xav grabbed for her, but the line popped taught, and she spun and sailed down toward the hub.
“Dammit, Katy! Get back up here before you get yourself killed!”
He was probably right. She was probably committing suicide, but if she had to die to save the mission, then she had to. That was a calculation she’d made long ago, before they’d ever left Earth, long before that . . .
And goddammit anyway! If the mission failed now she’d be written off as hysterical, but if Xavier were down here, they’d already be writing his heroism up for the feeds back home. After all, they’d say, what was one life—any life—compared to iron or steam or stone tools or fire? The world’s monuments were filled with the names of men who’d died for less. Who’d left families and fortunes and nations behind. Who every one shared the same dying wish: that it all hadn’t been in vain.
But Katy wasn’t dead just yet. It would be dicey now, but if she could free those pins quickly enough—before the Queen started her burn—she might still be able to make it. Maybe. p. 130
Katy doesn’t make it back, of course, and departs with Proteus for a Jovian fly-by. The rest of the story (spoiler) sees her spend the next few days debugging faults on the probe while her suit AI fills her full of anti-radiation meds. Then the impactor probe hits and the capture pods start deploying from Proteus to capture the samples. Katy manages to jump into one of pods, and hopes that she will survive until the Jovian Queen returns to pick them up. However, Katy is ultimately rescued by a skiff the ship’s crew have built to rescue her, and it turns out, although she is ill, that she has been sufficiently shielded from radiation by the chunk of the metallic hydrogen blown out of the Jovian atmosphere. Katy has a final sentimental vision of her mother.
This is a fast paced adventure with plenty of rivets, reckless action, and miracle escapes—it may appeal to some, but I thought it rather far-fetched. I’d also hate to be on a spaceship with someone like Katy, who would likely not only kill herself, but take others with her.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.
1. This was the runner up in the novelette section of the Analog Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.