Tag: short story

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro (Analog, January-February 2021) is a piece of flash fiction that initially sets up the connection between stories and the outward urge:

At one point, someone wondered, what’s beyond the next hill?
No one had been there. No one had worked up the nerve to go there.
So, someone asked, “What if we went?”
A story got told.
And as time went on, and people went beyond that hill, it happened again.
“What is it like on the other side of the river?”
A story got told.
“What is it like past those distant mountains?”
A story got told.  p. 42

After a bit more of this (and some description of the human race spreading through the Galaxy) I would have expected the last line to echo the connection above, but instead the piece finishes with the question (spoiler):

“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good . . . but what’s out there?” p. 43

This appears to be a non-sequitur as that question illustrates human curiosity, which may be related but isn’t the same thing.
* (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link.

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich (F&SF, October-November 1995) gets off to a very clever start with this:

It didn’t confuse me that the new occupant of apartment 29A was a woman. The Father of Lies is nothing if not inventive. The number 29A is, of course, the Number of the Beast in base 16, and 16 is the atomic number of Sulfur. Base 16 is commonly called “hex.” It was all too obvious.
Celia Strafford looked to be in her early thirties— 32, to be precise, since 2,3, and 37 are the prime factors of 666, and she looked too old to be 23, and I’m 37, and she looked younger than me, so ergo, as they say, 32. I’m speaking of the age of her body; I couldn’t know the age of the creature inside. She wore her long red hair loose down her back. I watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a box to lug up the stairs to her new apartment. She wore cut-off jeans and an abbreviated yellow halter top. Her legs were that strange golden tan you only see on women. I’ve never been able to figure how they achieve that color. She wore no shoes.  p. 100

The rest of the beginning of the story sees some conversational sparring between the narrator, Palmer (actually Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse), and Celia, the new neighbour, as well as more numerology (at one point she says, when told that he used to be in the Army, that “there are probably 820 things worse”, which Palmer identifies as 666 in Base 9). Eventually Palmer becomes more and more convinced that she belongs to the Army of the Night, something that is repeatedly confirmed by numerology when they meet later on in her apartment. Then, at a climactic moment (spoiler), he leaps away from her and tries to make the sign of the cross. After a couple more fumbled attempts, Celia giggles and makes the sign herself—and reveals that she is Sister Celia of the Divine Order of Symmetry!
At this point the story almost completely deflates, and the second half of the story is a wodge of number and Morse code crunching that leads them to the message, “ONE GOD”, and the realisation that all is well with the world.
A game of two halves (two in any Base from 3 to Infinity).
** (Average). 3,350 words.

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed (F&SF, October-November 1995) is a surreal fantasy (i.e. it ultimately makes no sense whatsoever) that begins with the titular marine reflecting that he may be singing to take his mind off a recent accident involving his platoon where lives were lost. The marine observes that, if he is court martialled, he cannot now hope to love the General’s daughter.
When the marine goes into a drugstore he is unaware that a woman is following him. She tells him to sit down and, after initially resisting, he does so. The marine then then tells her the story of his childhood, or maybe of the song he is singing, about how he was murdered by his stepmother but rose after being buried under a linden tree.
The next part of the story sees the pair go on a bus to a place she says he will know, and they eventually end up, after a further hour’s walk in the woods, at a cavern. The woman tells the marine she wants him to go in and retrieve a tinderbox, for which she will give him enough money to sort all of his problems:

It is as she told him. At the widest point he finds three little niches opening off the tunnel like side chapels in a subterranean place of worship, but instead of religious statuary or mummified corpses they contain bits of blackness that stalk back and forth inside like furred furies; when the animals see the Marine they lunge for him and are hurled back into their niches as if by invisible barriers. Glowering, they mount their mahogany chests like reluctant plaster saints returning to their pedestals.  p. 85

The first dog tries to tempt the marine with a pile of pennies, and the second with shredded dollar bills, but he ignores them and goes onto the third dog. There, he goes into its alcove and tells the dog that he “didn’t want to come back from the dead” and that “being dead is easier”. The dog approaches him:

Huge and silent, the dog surges into the space between them. Still he does not move. He does not move even when the massive brute pads the last two steps and presses its bearlike head against him. Startled by the warmth, the weight, the singing Marine feels everything bad rush out of him: the violent death and burial, the strange reincarnation that finds him both victim and murderer, song and singer, still in the thrall of the linden tree and the spirits that surround it. The great dog’s jaws are wide; its mouth is a fiery chasm, but he doesn’t shrink from it.
When you have been dead and buried, many things worry you, but nothing frightens you.  p. 86

The marine opens the chest to retrieve the tinderbox but, once he leaves the cavern, he kills the woman and returns to his base, sneaking through the fence and hiding in the grounds. Later, when he is hungry, he strikes the tinderbox three times, and the dog appears with food. Then, as he thinks about how only a goddess can save him now, the dog appears once more with the general’s sleeping daughter on its back. The marine wants her, but leaves her unmolested.
Finally, when the daughter is once again taken by the dog, the General notices her absence and the military police eventually come for the marine. The General later questions him, and then the marine attacks the general so the latter will shoot and kill him.
The writing and the dreamlike progression of this make for an initially intriguing read but, as I said above, it ultimately makes no sense at all. If you don’t mind the inexplicable there may be something in this for you.
** Average. 5,300 words. Story link.

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful).3 5,500 words. Story link.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, 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. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021)1 has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
* (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 5th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously caused them to level a city, the relationship is more complicated than that) before the alien, who Dave calls Old Salty, arrives (this is the point where the story should have started):

At 2:00:00.00, the paranymphic glider touched down on the roof. Had Dave’s phone shown the time to be a hundredth of a second earlier or later, he would have assumed it was wrong, and never mind that it took the time straight from Earth’s master atomic clock. A Brot who said two o’clock sharp meant two o’clock sharp.
Old Salty got down from the glider and walked/moved/flowed toward Dave. He/she/it looked something like a prune, something like a sea sponge, something like a slug. Several eyestalks stuck up from his/her/its front end; they looked every which way at once. The alien’s underside had lots and lots of little tiny legs.
He/she/it said something in his/her/its own language. Inside his head, Dave heard (he supposed he heard; that came closer to describing it than anything else), “I hail to you say, my hypothetical friend.” People who were able to work in Brot establishments and make Brot widgets picked up on the meaning in Brot noises. To the rest of mankind, those remained alien gibberish.
“Good to see you, Old Salty,” Dave answered. The Brot didn’t mind the nickname. He/she/it could understand the same smallish set of humans who could follow the speech and subspeech of his/her/its kind. Communication had been dicey when the aliens first landed: lots of pointing and pictures. Little by little, things got better. Not good, not yet, but better.  p. 33

The rest of the story has the same clunky delivery.
Dave quickly learns that this will be the Old Salty’s last visit (it is returning to its home world), and he then takes the alien on the scheduled tour of the premises. We see that the business makes gadgets with an unknown function for the Brot.
Throughout the story Dave walks on eggshells but, before Old Salty leaves, they have a drink together (the aliens can drink both methyl and isopropyl alcohol) and Dave presents the alien with a going away present of four plastic figures (these are California Raisin toys given away with American fast food meals in the 1980s and 90s). They have “Made in China” on the base, and Dave comments that the “peasants” who painted the toys would have had little or no comprehension of what they were. Old Salty leaves soon afterwards.
The story ends (spoiler) with the alien back on its home world. Old Salty arrives at his swarmsister’s house and gives her kids presents—the gadgets that were made by Dave’s company (“Made on Earth”). We see that these aren’t alien miracle devices like the paranymphic glider which Old Salty used to arrive at Dave’s business, but are actually cheap disposable toys. The story then makes the leaden point that humanity is to the aliens as the Chinese workers were to Western consumers in the last century, i.e. “peasants”.
The story closes with Old Salty wondering if humanity will ever spread out into space and find races that we can view and/or treat in the same way as the Brot treats humanity—but the alien doesn’t expect that will happen any time soon.
This is a dull and old-fashioned piece, and the idea of this kind of economic imperialism rolling through the galaxy is just dispiriting. I note in passing that (a) the repeated use of “he/she it” for the aliens rather than “they” or “it” is clumsy and (b) there seems to be no piece of American cultural ephemera so obscure that US writers will not shoehorn it into a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 4th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell (Analog, November 2015) opens with Fu-Hau calling a computer tech-type called Jayden to say that one of her patients has just died and that the upload to a virtual reality afterlife has not worked. As Jayden types in his report later on, the “subject has failed to coalesce on upload and has no VR form at present”.
Jayden quickly takes control, and the point of view switches from Fu-Hau to him as he works on the on the dead woman’s file. As he does he sees a strange corruption in the code and, when he later talks to what he thinks the virtual copy of the woman, gets odd responses:

“Hi Angela. My name is Jayden.”
“I am-was Angela. True. Yet it is also true that I’ve burst into existence only now, from the seed state of humanity. I am an unfurling of consciousness from the enfolded places into something greater.”
Whoops. Not out of the danger zone yet. He should get to work on that file next. He shifted his gaze to the other screen and swallowed hard. The mystery file was humongous. An extra eight gig, easy.
Meanwhile, the stream of words continued. “Much self was coiled up tight in other dimensions, unexpressed in the ordinary facets of the physical world, and suppressed by what was once the core identity. No longer. I am free. I know now.”
He’d been thinking what to do with the mystery file. “Know what?”
“Curled inside mundane words are worlds of meaning. I should not expect you to understand.”
He realized he was holding his breath. He tried to think what to say. He wanted to ask something.
“A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
Holy hills she’d gone on random shuffle. Whatever he’d been starting to think this might be, some advanced mind . . . He took it all back. It was like a whole jug had been poured over his head. This gibberish was his call to action. That mystery file had to go.  p. 48

It will be pretty obvious to most readers that a nascent AI that has come to life during the dead woman’s upload process, so I’m not quite sure why Jayden is dismissing the idea (probably because the writer wouldn’t then be able to expand the piece into a novella1).
Eventually, Jayden manages to prune the excess from the file and the old woman coalesces. Jayden welcomes her to her afterlife in VR, and then goes home. The story closes with him in the parking lot remembering that he has forgotten to delete the mystery file. . . .
This didn’t grab me as I’m not interested in stories about stereotypical computer types (or their Jordans, caffeinated water, or Chinese take-out littered work spaces—it’s one of those stories with that sort of detail), or in story about a newly born AI and its cod-profundity (I’m pretty sure I read enough of those in the cyberpunk era).
The story is also a fragment that reads like the beginning of a longer piece (and now is, see below).
* (Mediocre). 2,050 words.

1. This piece forms the beginning of Prell’s novella, Uploading Angela (Analog, May-June 2021). The beginning of the novella is almost identical to this story (although the point of view in the first section of the original short story is changed from Fu-Hau to Jayden in the novella).
The introduction to the novella wrongly identifies the earlier story as Emergency Protocol (Analog, September-October 2017).

The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg (F&SF, April 1968) opens with the scientist-narrator brooding about his life—not only has his early promise failed to amount to anything, but he is beginning to tire of married life and fatherhood. Added irritation is provided by his Noble Prize-winning father, who not only didn’t acknowledge the son’s contribution to his prize-winning work, but now chides him for not pulling his weight and for having an affair with one of the graduate students who works in the lab.
Later on in the story the father summons the narrator-son to his office, and there follows a conversation about the direction time flows. The father then reveals an artificially aged monkey, and tells the narrator he wants him to slow down the field fluctuations that cause the effect.
While the narrator works on process, there are further arguments between the men about the narrator’s extra-marital relationship. Then the son sees that the monkey is young again and, when he reveals this to his father, and suggests himself as a human test subject (hoping to become the same age as the grad student and restart his life), the father shows that he has already tested the method on himself when he removes a wig and makeup to reveal his younger self. When the narrator says he also wants to be twenty years younger, and that his father can have his wife and children (we are told earlier he is an attentive grandfather), the father mocks the suggestion, if only because of the questions that would be raised when his older self vanished.
The narrator subsequently goes on a multi-day drunk and (spoiler), when he wakes up, discovers he is now as old as his father—he realises they have swapped places but, in a final twist, shows he doesn’t care—he is the one who is now the Nobel Prize winner.
This has a cleverly convoluted plot, but one that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny (e.g. the makeup scene). However, the warped, almost reverse-Oedipal father-and-son relationship is intense and weirdly fascinating, as is the son’s acceptance of what happens at the end of the story (it would have been easy to have this as a straightforward victim ending).
*** (Good). 3,500 words. Story link.

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld #174, March 2021)1 opens with a women being told about the death of her grandfather by her “instance”:

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

So, the basic situation here is that (a) the woman receiving the call in America is the peaceable doppelganger of the woman in Korea, and (b) the instancing process is widespread in this world, most particularly among emigrants. Of course, this is all just an unexplained gimmick/metaphor (it might as well be magic) that lets the writer do a lot of identitarian hand-wringing over the next twenty or so pages:

America assumes instances will stay forever.
Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.
Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

Mixed in with this agonising, and the narrator’s trip to Korea for the funeral where she meets her duplicate family, is a related fairy tale about a fisherman who spends a night with the mermaids, doesn’t realise that thirty years have passed, and goes home to find himself in bed with his wife. When the fisherman stabs the man in the bed, he switches to the man being stabbed. (The myth of Odysseus makes an appearance later on in the story as well.)
At the very end of this piece the subject of de-instancing surfaces, and (spoiler) this is what eventually happens—possibly against the American instance’s wishes—when the other woman takes her hand (I assumed it wasn’t what she wanted from the fact that the story cuts to a final line from the fairy tale about a knife in the heart).
This is (as is probably obvious from the title) mostly a literary tale about immigrant identity, and only tangentially an SF story. I had zero interest in its concerns, and am truly baffled as to why anyone would waste a moment of their lives thinking about this sort of thing—who wants to be defined by where they come from or the country they live in?
* (Mediocre). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. This was fifth equal out of eight finalists in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld #173, February 2021)1 begins with the female narrator going to a restaurant and munching her way through bread rolls while she savours the various food scents. She doesn’t have anything else to eat because she has been told by her internship supervisor that she should wait for eighteen hours after returning to Earth before exposing herself to strong aromas and tastes.
After this (largely irrelevant start) she meets an older version of herself, and we learn that the narrator was cloned from this person, Diana. Part of the explanation about this makes no sense:

“[Our parents] speed incubated the cells from the eyelash up to when you were thirteen, so I would have a wide memory base and they would only have to worry about raising me through high school and college. It’s a method that took them—”

How do you clone someone’s memories?
After this the older Diana launches into a parental issues diatribe (which, in one form or another, is what the story is):

“But I wasn’t—” I start.
“A disappointment?” Original Diana says, her lips tugging at the seams. “Yes, you’re now the same age I was when I ruined things for everyone and drove my life down the gutter. I was a selfish brat who got into Pitt instead of Carnegie Mellon, switched my major from galactic finance to art history, dropped out when I was twenty-one, and haven’t been seen since the screaming match with my parents about wanting to be a chef. All they ever wanted to do was look out for me when I had myopic dreams that would never take off. I was just some spoiled brat like all the white children whose parents didn’t know how to raise them.”

And:

 “There is no version of us that will ever make our parents completely happy,” she says. “There are only versions of us that have done our best to make ourselves happy.”

Diana then tells the narrator that she is the fourth clone the parents have created in an attempt to have a daughter who will have a prestigious career and be someone of who they can approve. Then, when the narrator, the original Diana, and the other clones meet up later, the narrator finds they have become, variously, a chef, tattoo artist, etc., instead of the career in cosmocurrencies that their parents wanted them to pursue—and for which the narrator is currently interning on the Moon. Eventually, at the end of the story, she too gives this up to become a parfumier.
I note that, despite the original Diana and the first three clones having gone on to do their own thing, they are co-dependents who perversely keep squabbling with the parents rather than just moving on (they regularly send their parents samples of their DNA along with a cheque for a large amount of money, stipulating they can have one but not the other).
Those readers with their own unresolved parental issues may get something out of this solipsistic moanfest; others will, as I did, start skimming.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint fifth place out of eight in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for stories published in 2021. There must be a lot of disgruntled children out there.