5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a man finding his bride to be has gone, after which he decides to go ahead with the post-wedding party anyway. As the story unfolds we find that she was a bird-like creature of alien origin, and that she has left him 5 eggs to incubate.
At the party we see the narrator greet and talk to a couple of guests and then, towards the end of the event, he can’t find the eggs. Eventually (spoiler) he finds cracked, empty eggshells in the kitchen, and finds a recipe card for Caesar salad (needing a similar amount of eggs). He then realises that the note was left for the cook by his avian fiancée and, at this point, he remembers her hilarity at cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus.
For the most part this is a quirky but enjoyable enough story, but it morphs into a weak and contrived black joke at the end (and not one that is saved by referencing Shakespeare).
* (Mediocre). 2,650 words.
Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman
Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a woman in hospital getting a hypodermic syringe inserted between her bottom eyelid and eye. The rest of the narrative is a surreal nightmare-ish piece where she sees things (even though her eyes are bandaged), thinks there is a dog under her bed, learns she was probably in a car accident, and talks to a ten-year-old boy, and a nurse with an odd verbal tic.
The story finishes with her overhearing a doctor’s conversation (spoiler), which gives her the impression she is continually being wounded so the hospital can re-use her for ophthalmologist training courses (I think).
I didn’t get this at all the first time around, and even on reread I’m not sure it is particularly clear, or convincing.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words.
Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna
Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna (Orbit #2, 1967) is the second of three posthumous stories that were published by Damon Knight in his Orbit anthology series and, off the back of McKenna’s story in the first volume, The Secret Place, I thought I’d have a look—it gets off to a cracking start with a group of men in a lifeboat dying of thirst and contemplating cannibalism:
On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.
All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959.
Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.
Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the others and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.
Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give. p. 37-38
We then get an account of the men’s recent conversations, which include such topics as whether human flesh boiled in seawater absorbs salt or not, and who they should eat. As they quarrel further, the youngest of them, Whelan, thinks he sees green fields in the distance, steps off the boat, and drowns.
After this the tension increases, and they eventually draw lots to see who they are going to kill. The viewpoint character, Kinross, picks the losing coin but, as they are discussing cutting his throat over a bucket to avoid losing any of his blood (“Damn you, Fay, I’m still alive,” Kinross says) one of the other men, Kruger, tells them of another way to get as much fresh water as they want.
Kruger goes on to explain how their reality, which he essentially describes as a consensual hallucination called the “public world,” can be left behind, and that they can go to a place of their own creation, giving the example of a patrol of soldiers lost in the Tibesti highlands of Africa who slipped from one world to another and later returned. Kruger gives other examples of this phenomenon, and his remarks cause much discussion and disbelief. But Kruger persists, saying that they can break through to this other world because, as he puts it, “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east” (their position).
Eventually, he manages to convince the men to make an attempt, and they lie down and relax and listen to Kruger’s hypnotic voice. Then they make the transition.
All of this takes up the first fifth or so of the story, and it’s an impressive beginning. The next section, where the men investigate the strange world they have arrived in is also quite interesting. Initially it appears that this world is not quite fully formed, and one of their number, Silva, concentrates and tries to make the tree they pick fruit from more “detailed.” Then a grey mist appears and Kruger’s disembodied voice (he is lying unconscious elsewhere) warns Silva to stop. When Silva doesn’t do so he is struck blind. Later, Kinross and Garcia realise that all directions of travel lead back to the (unconscious) Kruger and the stream, and they also realise that they have lost all sense of time, and day or night.
So far, so Unknown Worlds, and this continues when Kruger (whose unconscious body is now in a cave) summons Kinross and tells him he cannot quench his thirst, and that he needs to share Kinross’s body in order to do so. Kruger also says that incorporating Kinross’s worldview will make their reality more stable and detailed.
When Kinross refuses an argument ensues, during which Kruger confesses to setting the bomb on the boat so he would have a chance to break through to this reality. Kinross tells Kruger that he may have made this world but that he isn’t going to help him get all the way into it. Kinross leaves, despite Kruger’s attempt to make him to stay.
The story runs along in this general direction for a bit longer before Kinross and Garcia follow the stream to a pit, where they end up rescuing an Australian woman called Mary who has wandered into their world through another rift. At this point the story becomes very strange, and we start to see various (aboriginal or Dreamtime?) spirits—black dwarves and pearly-gray women—hiding in the undergrowth. Later, a Peruvian wanders into camp and, when Kinross later discusses this with Kruger, they realise that their world is rotating over the Earth, gathering up other susceptible travellers. Kinross also asks Kruger about the spirits:
“I have other questions. What are the black dwarfs and pearly-gray women?”
“Nature spirits, I suppose you could call them. I stripped them from Mary and Bo Bo, husked them off by the millions until only a bare core of nothingness was left. What those two are now I couldn’t describe to you. But the world is partially self-operating and my load is eased.” p. 78
The rest of the story sees more arrivals, including a climber called Lankenau who, when told what has happened to him, doesn’t want to go back to the real world. The narrative then becomes even more esoteric and mystifying: there is talk of magic rather than the Second Law of Thermodynamics operating in this world, and discussion that the spirits shed by people are unlived experiences or regrets. Later, Kinross stops placing daily sacrifices of fruit on Kruger’s altar, which causes a widespread frost and cold. Then there is a baffling exchange between Kinross and a Spanish-speaking woman which causes Garcia to warn Kinross not to come to the village. Finally, Kinross goes to Kruger’s altar, where he sees headless pigeons and blood, and smashes his fruit offering down hard enough to burst while saying it is “for Mary.” Then all sorts of (possibly magic realist) madness breaks free, which I won’t bother describing because—as it made no sense to me—it may not be pertinent information (although, at one point, a “red-capped mushroom” emerges from the Earth, so maybe that provides a clue, as may the fact that Kinross eventually ends up in our world with a blood-thirst).
This has a great start, interesting middle, and utterly baffling ending,1 but I’m not sure I’d bother with it unless you are a fan of puzzle stories that require multiple readings. And probably a friendly English professor.
* (Mediocre). 22,800 words.
1. There are perhaps some clues about what is going on in the story at this site, but the most useful one—a letter from David Tell at the bottom of the page with an explanation for the ending—has been partially deleted by a helpful webmaster (a village is obviously missing their idiot).
The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice
The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice (Orbit #1, 1966) isn’t so much a story as an account of a mother of four’s various domestic problems and accidents. In a mainstream story these would mostly be the fault of the children, but here they are ascribed to the “loolies”:
Anyhow, to the inevitable queries—Why are they called loolies? Where do they come from, et cetera?—I can only reply through a mouthful of clothespins, I haven’t time to hat this over the head with a rolled-up research paper. I guess they’re called loolies for the same reason that brownies are called brownies. It is their name. Maybe they come from the same place. Et cetera. Wherever that is. However and whereas a brownie is a good-natured goblin who performs helpful services at night (that’s what I need, begod, a reliable brownie, with an eyeshade and some counterfeiting equipment) a loolie will leave you lop-legged. And probably already he has. I’m not sure a loolie is a goblin either. p. 85-86
Deliver all this in Rice’s high-energy, madcap style1 for half a dozen pages, until which time the loolies turn their attention to the wife’s less than helpful husband, and you are done.
Not bad, just froth that would have been better off in Good Housekeeping.
* (Mediocre). 2,150 words.
1. For better examples of Rice’s solo humorous style, I recommend The Elixir (Unknown Worlds, December 1942), or The Magician’s Dinner (Unknown Worlds, October 1942).
Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm
Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm (Orbit #1, 1966) opens with two humans and a long-lived alien called Staeen closing in on a wrecked and tumbling spaceship that appears to be abandoned. Throughout their craft’s approach to the wreck, which they intend to investigate, we learn various things about Staeen, including the fact that he is tulip-shaped, is very long lived, can survive unsuited in space, and is able to sense the men’s emotions. Staeen also, in common with the rest of his race, feels a paternalistic concern for the men (who they call Flonderans):
When the Flonderans had come to Chlaesan, they had been greeted with friendliness and amusement. So eager, so impulsive, so childlike. The name Earthmen was rarely used for them; they remained the Flonderans, the children. It amused Staeen to think that when they had still been huddling in caves, more animal than man, his people already had mapped the galaxy; when they had been floundering with sails on rough seas, engrossed in mapping their small world, his people already had populated hundreds of planets, light-years away from one another. p. 14
When the three of them go aboard the wreck they come to realise that the missing crew used all the lifeboats to abandon the ship, a course of action that would only have kept them alive for a few hours longer because of the limited oxygen carried. Mystified, they leave. However, when they return on a further search, Staeen picks up various vibes that make him realise that the crew left the ship “in the madness of fear,” but he does not tell the humans as he thinks they will not accept his discovery.
The final act of the story involves the three of them subsequently encountering a Thosar spaceship, a race who only pass through the galaxy every twelve thousand years, and who mankind have never come into contact with. Staeen explains to the men that the Thosars are huge creatures, and that they will send representatives to the ship but stay outside. When they get close enough to be seen (spoiler) the humans go into a blind panic and accelerate their ship away at a pace that almost kills the three of them. Staeen eventually manages to turn off the drive but, when the men come around, they get into their suits and flee through the airlock, dragging Staeen with them.
Staeen then floats in space contemplating his demise, and concludes that the human’s panic response must be down to a previous visit to Earth by the Thosars in prehistoric times, where they inadvertently terrified the primitive humans and some sort of genetic or race memory was laid down.
There is much to like in the first part of this story—it is a readable example of a traditional SF tale, the kind of thing you could easily imagine finding in Analog—but the ending is just ridiculous. Apart from the fact that the reason for the human’s terror is never specified (the Thosars have one eye and there is a brief mention of “Bi—”), you would hide in the ship if something terrified you, not jump out the airlock to a place you are even more exposed. And the generational chicken-fleeing-from-chickenhawk response that Staeen uses to explain the human’s behaviour could not have been imprinted on mankind in one visit. It all just falls apart.
PS According to Staeen, Staras eku Flonderans means “poor, short-lived Earthmen.”
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words.
No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven
No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) jettisons his (more usual, in my experience) breezy, lightweight approach in a more serious piece that starts with Martin coming back to his automated “HappyHome” to find his partner has left his son to run wild, with toys and dishes and mess everywhere. After he finds his son in bed asleep, Martin goes outside to find his wife Anna, who is having some sort of breakdown or dissociative episode in the communal reflecting pond.
Martin is later contacted by a man called Daniel, who says he can explain what has happened to his wife. When they meet he suggests that Anna has become “decohesive”—a result of her being a “Leaper” one of the first astronauts to use a quantum matter transmission device to explore the Galaxy.
The rest of the story sees a physicist called Lina from the LEAP program turn up, and Anna have further episodes where she forgets to pick up the child from nursery, or leaves him in the car, etc. Then Martin and Daniel meet again, and we get more of Daniel’s outsider hand-wavium about the LEAP process. He finally explains that that it doesn’t account for the “chaos” of the human mind when scanning a subject for quantum transmission, causing personality changes in those transported.
The final scene (spoiler) has Martin return home to find Lina the physicist there again, and to be told that Anna has decided to go back out again because she wants to be among the stars.
I found this dull, unengaging stuff, partly because of the makey-up science (shoving “quantum” and “chaos” in there does not make the hand-wavium believable), and partly because I just didn’t care about Anna, who seems to spend most of her time pretentiously staring at the stars or reflections of them in water (I exaggerate, but that’s what it felt like).
* (Mediocre). 9,600 words.
I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia
I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) starts with an android called Reznikov being abused by his female owner until a friend of hers calls the police and she is arrested. After this Reznikov rips out his transponder and lives wild until he meets another woman and starts living with her. The rest of the story details their relationship (and the woman’s reservations about him) until they eventually have children—at which point the “story” grinds to a halt.
This story is similar to the kind of work you find on Tor.com (I suspect Reznikov is a metaphor for a certain type of emotionally shutdown man) and it has MFA/writer’s workshop stamped all over it. Apart from the fact there is little in the way of structure or an arc, I could have done without the omniscient author comments, e.g. “This is a story about a creature that was incapable of telling stories about itself.”
* (Mediocre). 2,850 words.
The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan
The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2012) starts with Fry, a female member of a spaceship crew in orbit around Jupiter, breaking her leg.
After this there is a lot of scene setting, most of which is about her being a “two-stepper” (an unmodified human) in a crew of “octos” (I presume these are humans that have transitioned to being octopuses; we find later that others have become Nautiluses, but I can’t remember seeing any particular reason why people would do either).
Arkae (the octo narrator) then visits Fry in hospital, and learns that her sponsors on Earth want her back dirtside. Fry decides to transition (presumably to avoid having to go back) and gets Arkae to contact Dove, a Nautilus lawyer.
Most of the rest of the story is a lot of waffle that includes: how octos live together as a group; Arkae’s team finding that there are missing sensors in the ring (the big job everyone is on are the preparations for observing a comet pass by Jupiter); and the bad feeling that exists between the two-steppers and octos. Eventually (and not soon enough for me) Arkae gets a message from Fry saying she has—surprise!—become a Nautilus instead of an octo, and has joined the Jupiter colony, who are going to hitch a lift on the comet and seed the Oort.
There is very little in way of story here, and most of it seems to be Arkae endlessly talking about everything and nothing:
Fry had worked with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed—two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi—more than will admit to it—have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.
Blah, blah, blah—and this goes on for twenty pages or so. Bafflingly, this won the 2013 Hugo for Best Novelette (and topped the Locus Poll): I don’t know if this was because it was a bad year for short fiction or whether this got the trans and/or minority and/or Fans are Slans vote.1
* (Mediocre). 8,850 words.
1. Fans have, in the past, viewed themselves as a mocked minority, and so have a tendency to identify with persecuted minorities in SF stories (especially when they are supermen in hiding), e.g. the Slans in A. E. van Vogt’s novel of the same name.
How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring by Joanna Russ
How Dorothy Kept Away the Spring by Joanna Russ (F&SF, February 1977) has a young girl called Dorothy dreaming of adventures in a winter landscape with the Hunter, Clown and Little. Together they go to save a Princess from a tyrant. After they succeed, the Princess blows away:
Thank you for saving me, she said in a damp, rushing voice like water falling under stone arches. I am very grateful to you.
The Clown dropped to one knee. The pleasure is all ours, lovely lady, he said. She patted him on the head, and a little cloud from her hand caught on his hat and trailed from it like a breath.
They walked out of the castle. At once the fierce, grinning wind lifted the Princess and whirled her away in ragged, torn streamers.
What a shame, said Dorothy. Little nodded.
She was beautiful, declared the Clown sadly. I never saw anyone so beautiful before. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. p. 58
At the end of the story Dorothy wants to keep away the spring but the three of them tell her she can’t. Then the Hunter says she doesn’t have to. When she arrives home in the (real) snow her father tells her to get back to bed, where she later dies.
There may be allegorical or metaphorical levels to this surreal, dream-like story (I’d guess it may be about puberty and adulthood) but, if there are, they went way, way over my head.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words.
Tiki by L. Sprague de Camp
Tiki by L. Sprague de Camp (F&SF, February 1977) is the sixth1 of his ‘W. Wilson Newbury’ series of stories, all of which concern the eponymous middle level banker and his various supernatural escapades. This one opens at a party to celebrate the opening of a new wing at the local museum (the “Drexel Hall of Crustaceans”), funded by Newbury’s rich boss, and which we find is now home to a large Polynesian idol of the goddess Tiki of Atea.
The rest of the story has Newbury turn up a few weeks later at his boss’s invitation for a personal tour round the new wing. Accompanying Newbury are his son, and the latter’s ne’er-do-well friend, both of who run off ahead and graffiti the idol with a moustache. When Newbury and Drexel get to the idol they hear a muttered threat (“You shall rue your insolence, mortal!”)
Later on, when Newbury and the kids are alone in the museum, the goddess animates the dead giant crabs and they are chased about for a bit until (spoiler) Newbury eventually stops them with a fire extinguisher. No explanation is given for why this would be anyone’s weapon of choice in combating zombie crustaceans.
Nearly all of the Newbury stories had this simple setup/denouement structure, and little in the way of complication or plot. Consequently they weren’t much good, and I always wondered why (a) de Camp bothered writing them, and (b) any editor bought them.
* (Mediocre). 3200 words.
1. Or seventh story. Another of de Camp’s Newbury stories, The Figurine, was published at the same time in the February 1977 Fantastic. The ISFDB page for the series is here.