Tag: 3*

Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

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Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany (If, June 1967) opens with its thirty-ish narrator, Cal Svenson, meeting a young woman called Ariel while beach-combing. During their conversation, she asks him what he is looking for:

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral.
When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”  p. 48 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

During this encounter1 we learn that both of them are modified to live in the ocean (gills, webbed feet and hands, etc.). Ariel also asks Svenson about the underwater accident he had twenty years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and living on the land.
The next part of the story sees Svenson visit a friend, a widower called Juao, whose children Svenson has encouraged to join the Aquatic Corp. They talk about a man called Tork, who is planning to lay cable through an volcanic region of the sea floor called the Slash (where Svenson had his accident). Then, that evening, Ariel vists Svenson at his house and takes him down to a beach party where he meets Tork. Tork quizzes Svenson about the Slash, and tells him they are going to lay a power cable there tomorrow. Later on the aqua men and the boat-bourne villagers go out to sea to hunt marlin.
The final section (spoiler) sees Svenson saying goodbye to Juao’s kids as they get onto the bus to go to Aquatic college. While he is doing this he sees a commotion down at the quayside, and it turns out that several aquamen have been killed in an underwater eruption, including Tork. Svenson goes to the beach to find Ariel.
This is an evocatively written piece (the description and characters are much better than that of other 1960s SF) but it isn’t much more than a slice of life piece with an artificial climax grafted onto the end (and not a particularly convincing one either—it’s a silly idea to lay power cable in a known volcanic zone, and too convenient to have an explosion while Tork is there). Notwithstanding this the story is a good read for those that want something with more depth than usual.
*** (Good). 6,750 words.

1. One of the other members of my group read pointed out (it went over my head, or I just forgot) that the driftglass may be a metaphor for how life shapes people. If that is the case, it’s a pity that the story didn’t end more organically with Tork succeeding, and the observation that some material is polished (Tork), and some is left broken and jagged (Svenson).

The Golem by Avram Davidson

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The Golem by Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1955) opens with an android arriving at the porch of an elderly Jewish couple and sitting down on one of their chairs. As he tries to deliver his apocalyptic warnings the pair variously kvetch, interrupt and ignore him:

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband. . . . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time.  pp. 113-114 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

Later the android says something rude to the wife and the man slaps it across the face and breaks it. Then the couple talk about golems, and the man sorts the internal wiring exposed when he hit the creature. The golem is more submissive when it is repaired, and the man tells it to mow the grass.
This is quite amusing to start with but it tails off at the end.
*** (Good). 1,800 words.

Luminous by Greg Egan

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Luminous by Greg Egan (Asimov’s SF, September 1995) gets off to a pretty good start with the story’s narrator waking to find himself handcuffed, and with a woman slicing into his biceps to get a data storage device. He tells her it is a “necrotrap,” and that the data will be destroyed if it is removed from his body—so she pauses and gets on the phone to order medical equipment which will fool the device. During this, he manages to spray her with his poisoned blood and, after she starts vomiting uncontrollably, eventually agrees to free him to get the antidote. As he departs he tells her there isn’t one, but that she’ll recover in twelve hours or so.
The next part of the story is something of a gear change, a flashback to a conversation between the narrator and a female student called Allison during a philosophy of mathematics course years earlier. This introduces the story’s gimmick, which is, if I’m not oversimplifying (note to self, write up Egan’s stories more promptly), that arithmetic may have different rules in other parts of the universe and this will fundamentally affect the nature of reality there.
The story then skips forward to the present, and we find the narrator is in China to meet Allison, who has arranged for them to have time on a supercomputer called Luminous to investigate this alternative arithmetic. We also get more math theory, and learn that (a) the other arithmetic system can theoretically be extended into our reality and (b) that this can be used for commercial advantage (there is a company called Industrial Algebra who are pursuing the pair to obtain their discovery so they can use it for financial gain—IA were behind the earlier biohacking attempt on the narrator).
The main part of the story occurs after they meet a Chinese professor and are taken to his laboratory:

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers. A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber—and just as a finely machined grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam of matter.
The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation—and the whole system could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new “hardware” optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxiliary supercomputers controlling the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

They then use their allotted half-hour to get the computer to map the extent of the “far side” and then discuss whether to contain it (so it can never be extended into out reality) or destroy it. Time constraints mean they chose the latter but (spoiler) the alternative mathematical reality begins to fight back . . .
There are several pages of back and forth in the struggle that ensues between the Luminous program and the alternative math, but they can’t contain the latter and eventually a spike of its reality reaches the lab they are in:

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything I’d felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept of numbers had finally snapped into place—but with an adult’s understanding of everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning-bolt revelation—but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked—
—except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all impossible.
Quicksand.
Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the room—counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and four; four and two, five and one.
I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency—for sanity . . . but everything added up. They hadn’t stolen the old arithmetic; they’d merely blasted the new one into my head, on top of it.
Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics—the arithmetic that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic—enough to let us glimpse what we’d been trying to destroy.

After this the narrator and Allison stop their attack, and the spike retreats. Then Allison realises that they can execute a program that will stop anyone using this other reality but which will not affect it. All ends well.
This is all a bit of a mixed bag—the good parts are very good (the opening, the computer battle with the alt maths, etc.) but unfortunately is stitched together with pages of dry math lectures and wild hand-wavium.
*** (Good). 13,000 words.

Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold

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Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold (Unknown, March 1939) opens with a hen-pecked husband (his wife is constantly nagging him about their unattractive daughter’s dowry) fishing on a lake when he makes an unusual catch:

He pulled in a long, pointed, brimless green hat.
For a moment he glared at it. His mouth hardened. Then, viciously, he yanked the hat off the hook, threw it on the floor and trampled on it. He rubbed his hands together in anguish.
“All day I fish,” he wailed, “two dollars for train fare, a dollar for a boat, a quarter for bait, a new rod I got to buy—and a five-dollar-mortgage charity has got on me. For what? For you, you hat, you!”
Out in the water an extremely civil voice asked politely: “May I have my hat, please?”
Greenberg glowered up. He saw a little man come swimming vigorously through the water toward him; small arms crossed with enormous dignity, vast ears on a pointed face propelling him quite rapidly and efficiently. With serious determination he drove through the water, and, at the starboard rail, his amazing ears kept him stationary while he looked gravely at Greenberg.  pp. 68-69 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The little man explains, when Greenberg makes fun of his ears, that he is a water gnome and uses them to swim. There is further back and forth between the two (mostly about the gnome’s fish-keeping, rainfall, and other water related responsibilities) before Greenberg loses his temper and tears the gnome’s hat to pieces. The gnome retaliates by telling Greenberg that, given his poor attitude, “water and those who live in it will keep away from you.”
The rest of the story flows from this curse, and later sees Greenberg flood his bathroom when he jumps in a bath and the water jumps out, embarrass himself in front of a potential future son-in-law (he can’t shave for the occasion, and chases his soup out of the bowl onto the table), and have to drink beer instead of water.
After further domestic complications the story resolves when Greenberg talks to a (presumably Irish) cop called Mike, who thinks he may have solution. The final scene (spoiler) has the pair on the lake dropping huge rocks into the water (to get the gnome’s attention) and then presenting him with a sugar cube wrapped in cellophane in exchange for the removal of the curse.
This is a pleasant and logically worked out fantasy story, but it doesn’t feel like the classic it is supposed to be (part of that may be because of the character’s attitude and the piece’s dated domestic circumstances, and the fact that it feels a little padded).
*** (Good). 7,850 words.

The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh

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The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh (F&SF, April 1995) opens with the young female narrator and her mother on a train station platform waiting to be transported to Oklahoma in the mid-1800s. As the narrative unfolds we learn that, in this alternate world, Lincoln didn’t die but was seriously injured and incapacitated. Subsequently, his deputy Seward ordered that “recalcitrant Southerners” be deported (although it seems that the narrator and mother’s offence was to allow their slaves to remain living with them after emancipation).
When the train arrives there is a crush during which the narrator’s mother dies, but she is told by a soldier to leave the body behind and get on the train. On board she is befriended by a young woman who, when they arrive at their destination (spoiler), secrets her away through a door, but only after a madwoman runs down the platform screaming that the deportees are being starved on the reservations.
The narrator subsequently learns she has been saved by Quakers, who are running a version of the Underground Railroad for deported Southerners. They tell her they will help her get to her sister.
The final paragraphs of the story have her offer to help their organisation, but she is refused as she is a “slaver” and thus “evil”. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Quakers would have been so explicitly judgemental about her.
This is a predominantly descriptive, slow-paced story, and feels a little like an extract from a longer work. It’s fairly good, I guess, but I’m mystified as to how it won a Hugo Award.
*** (Good). 5,500 words.

The Black Ferris by Ray Bradbury

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The Black Ferris by Ray Bradbury (Weird Tales, May 1948) sees Hank taking his boyhood friend Peter to a carnival to show him a supernatural event involving the owner:

Mr. Cooger, a man of some thirty-five years, dressed in sharp bright clothes, a lapel carnation, hair greased with oil, drifted under the tree, a brown derby hat on his head. He had arrived in town three weeks before, shaking his brown derby hat at people on the street from inside his shiny red Ford, tooting the horn.
Now Mr. Cooger nodded at the little blind hunchback, spoke a word. The hunchback blindly, fumbling, locked Mr. Cooger into a black seat and sent him whirling up into the ominous twilight sky. Machinery hummed.
“See!” whispered Hank. “The Ferris wheel’s going the wrong way. Backwards instead of forwards!”
“So what?” said Peter.
“Watch!”
The black Ferris wheel whirled twenty-five times around. Then the blind hunchback put out his pale hands and halted the machinery. The Ferris wheel stopped, gently swaying, at a certain black seat.
A ten-year-old boy stepped out. He walked off across the whispering carnival ground, in the shadows.  p. 2 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The kids follow the boy to Mrs Foley’s house (Foley is a widower who lost her son some time ago). Hank explains to Peter that Cooger is obviously the same person as an orphan called Pikes, who started living with the old woman the same time as the carnival came to town, and that Cooger/Pikes are up to no good. Hank and Peter then knock at Mrs Foley’s door and tell them what they have seen, but she doesn’t believe them, and throws them out. As they leave they see Cooger/Pikes in the window making a threatening gesture.
The story later sees Hank phone Pete to organise a second expedition to intercept Cooger—during which they fail to catch him, ending up on a chase through the town to the carnival. Cooger gets on the Ferris wheel to revert to his normal age but, in the middle of the process (spoiler), the boys attack the hunchback and prevent him stopping the wheel at the appropriate time. The wheel keeps on turning and, when it does eventually stop, all that is left of Cooger is pile of bones beside the loot he stole from Mrs Foley.
This has a pretty good gimmick at its core (and one, I believe, that Bradbury reused in his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962) but the piece is obviously an early work (the opening paragraph tries too hard, and he seems to be in a huge rush to get through the story).
Not bad though.
*** (Good). 2,800 words.

Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller

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Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller (F&SF, August 1959) begins with two (hairless) parents discussing, over their oatmeal, the dangers in commuting to the city to get food. Thereafter we get other hints that this is a post-holocaust or post-Collapse future when a discussion about a possible trip to the beach has mention of the boardwalk having been used for firewood and, when the couple’s three-year old comes in from outside, he is described as having down growing along his backbone (the woman wonders “if that was the way the three year olds had been before”). The child also bites a small chunk out of his mother’s shoulder when she chastises him for knocking over his oatmeal.
After this setup the couple decide—partly because they think it’s Saturday, partly because it’s a nice day—to go to the beach: they fill the car with only enough petrol to get there, and take a can’s worth for the return trip (which they plan to hide while they are on the beach). They also take weapons: a wrench for her, and a hammer for him.
On the drive there they see only a solitary cyclist and then, when they get to the beach, no-one at all. Later on, however, three men appear and threaten them, saying they want the couple’s gasoline. There is then an altercation during which the husband kills the leader with his hammer and the other two run off. Then the couple realise that the child has disappeared.
The remainder of the story sees the couple searching for the kid, and the husband eventually bringing him back. At this point the wife notes that they have time for one last swim (this with the attacker’s body still lying nearby). Then, on the way home:

He fell asleep in her lap on the way home, lying forward against her with his head at her neck the way she liked. The sunset was deep, with reds and purples.
She leaned against Ben. “The beach always makes you tired,” she said. “I remember that from before too. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
They drove silently along the wide empty parkway. The car had no lights, but that didn’t matter.
“We did have a good day after all,” she said. “I feel renewed.”
“Good,” he said.
[. . .]
“We had a good day,” she said again. “And Littleboy saw the sea.” She put her hand on the sleeping boy’s hair, gently so as not to disturb him and then she yawned. “I wonder if it really was Saturday.”  p. 174 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This is an effectively dystopian piece, but its impact will probably be blunted for most readers by the many similar tales that have appeared since. I suspect, however, this story was notably grim for the time, and it foreshadows later new wave stories.
*** (Good). 4,100 words. Story link.

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick

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Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, July 1999) opens with the supervisor of a time travel event called The Cretaceous Ball, which is held in the past, describing the family at one of the tables. The wealthy couple seated there have a daughter, Melusine, who is eyeing Hawkins, the young palaeontologist assigned to their table. They also have a son called Phillipe, who is wildly enthusiastic about dinosaurs.
Later on, and after the supervisor is called back to the future to deal with an incident (TSOs—Time Safety Officers—have busted a couple of waiters for trying to pass information from the future to the past), he returns and is accosted by Hawkins, who reports that Melusine has been hitting on him. Matthews begs to be relieved of his hosting duties, and the supervisor tells him to write a memo about the incident and avoid his tent for the rest of the evening.
The supervisor subsequently takes over as the family’s host, and he gives Phillipe a serrated dinosaur tooth just before an aging T. Rex called Satan is drawn to the enclosure in front of the protected dining area by a blood lure. Satan subsequently charges the armoured glass and the boy is hugely impressed. After the supervisor has finished talking to the boy about his job ambitions, he recovers a fallen napkin for Melusine and gives it to her—inside there is a promotional leaflet with a note saying to meet at a specific tent later—but signed not with the supervisor’s name but with Matthews’.
The final piece of the setup takes place shortly afterwards, when the supervisor sleeps with Melusine in Matthews’ dark tent; she is unaware of who she is with. Meanwhile the supervisor, thanks to a note from his future self, thinks about Matthews outside the compound—where he is about to be killed by Satan.
The denouement of the story unwinds the setup (spoiler), and this begins when the supervisor reads Hawkins’ memo later on. This reveals that Hawkins is the grown up Phillipe, and that he isn’t Melusine’s brother but her son, who was transported back in time so the grandparents could bring up him and Melusine as sister and brother. Then the supervisor realises that he is Phillipe’s father—that the boy is the result of the encounter he has just had with Melusine—and he sits down to send a note to himself in the past that will prevent his son’s death. However, before he can do that, a much older version of himself turns up and advises against his intended actions (saying, among other things, that the mysterious “Unchanging” will remove humanity’s ability to time travel). The older man finally hands the supervisor a version of the memo that simply tells of Hawkins’ death, and the story closes with the supervisor making a decision about which one to send.
This is a very cleverly plotted and inventive story but it is also a little unengaging. This is maybe because the supervisor is an unlikeable character, and it’s hard to care what his decision will be, and also, perhaps, that the story is pretty tightly packed and everything seems to rush by (which makes Swanwick’s stories the mirror image of much of today’s bloat).
Although it’s a good enough story it wouldn’t have been my choice for the 2000 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. 1
*** (Good). 4,550 words.

1. The story’s other award nominations can be seen on its ISFDB page. It seems to have been fighting it out with another Swanwick story, Ancient Engines (Asimov’s SF, February 1999).

The Deeps by Keith Roberts

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The Deeps by Keith Roberts (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a short data dump that describes an over-populated future Earth where the cities have spread towards the coasts and moved under the seas.1 The rest of the story concerns two undersea residents, Mary Franklin and her daughter Jennifer,2 and begins with the teenager going to a party (“And for land’s sake child, put something on . . .”)
There is really not much plot after this (spoiler): we follow Jennifer to the party and get some description of the undersea colony before the narrative cuts back to her mother, who later becomes increasingly concerned when Jennifer doesn’t return on time, eventually going out to search for her. The story ends with both mother and daughter floating underwater above a deep, dark void, and her daughter telling her to listen to the sounds of the Deeps. Mary does so, and almost becomes hypnotised to the point she runs out of oxygen:

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary firmed reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled; Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.
The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it. Just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.  p. 191-192

Although there is not much in the way of a story here, the description of the settlement is pretty good, probably Arthur C. Clarke level stuff, and Roberts skilfully generates enough atmosphere and mood to make up for the not entirely convincing idea of sounds luring people to the Deeps (scattered through the text there are rumours about the phenomenon, and recalled conversations with Mary’s husband about how there may be a racial memory drawing humanity down there).
It’s an effectively  hypnotic story.
*** (Good). 7,000 words.

1. In his early period Roberts worked through a number of conventional SF themes before doing his own thing: alien invasion in his first novel, The Furies; psi powers in his third, The Inner Wheel, and in some short stories, Manipulation, The Worlds That Were; time travel in Escapism; androids in Synth; and post-nuclear holocausts in many others.

2. Roberts used the name Jennifer in another undersea story called The Jennifer, (Science Fantasy #70, March 1965) although that one is about Anita, a teenage witch, being taken by a mermaid to see a gigantic sea serpent. Still, it’s worth a look, if you can cope with Granny Thomson’s Northamptonshire accent (it gives them the vapours on one review site). His cover painting for that story appeared on another issue.

Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) is one of her ‘Hainish’ stories, the most famous example of which is The Left Hand of Darkness. This story also takes place on the world of Gethen, a.k.a Winter, and, after some accomplished and elegant scene setting, the piece soon becomes a coming-of-age story about of one of the children of this planet, Sov Thade Tage em Ereb. Because Sov is an androgynous Gethenian, the process of growing up involves, in part, a fascination with the concept of “kemmer,” the periods after adolescence when Gethenians change into males or females to reproduce:

No, I hadn’t thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we have no gender and no sexuality, our hormones don’t give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where’s Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your porridge. When’s Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and what have you been up to while I was away?  p. 290 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Eventually Sov ages enough to show the first signs of kemmer, which involves temporary physical changes and some discomfort, something Sov later discusses with a friend called Sether, who is going through the same thing:

We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going along side by side at an easy walk.
“Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?” I asked without knowing that I was going to say anything.
Sether nodded.
After a while, Sether said, “Listen, does your pisser get. . . .”
I nodded.
“It must be what the Aliens look like,” Sether said with revulsion. “This, this thing sticking out, it gets so big . . . it gets in the way.”
We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, “I’ll tell you what I hate, what I really hate about it—it’s dehumanizing. To get jerked around like that by your own body, to lose control, I can’t stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy and die if there isn’t anybody else in kemmer? That they’ll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?”
“They can’t,” I said, shocked.
“Yes they can.”  p. 295

After a brief visit to the Fastness, which appears to be some spiritual seat of higher learning (and where Sov learns how to “untrance” and sing), the remainder of the story follows Sov’s first visit to the kemmerhouse. We see how the Gethenian sexual change is triggered (Sov becomes a female after being exposed to the male pheromones of one of the cooks at her Hearth), and learn of the various lovers she takes afterwards.
This a very well written piece (there is so much textual detail that it almost feels like a tapestry) but the story is ultimately little more than an extended alien biology lesson (although the kemmer process will be of interest to those that have read The Left Hand of Darkness).
*** (Good). 7,950 words.