Tag: 3*

Lunatic at Large by Ron Goulart

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Lunatic at Large by Ron Goulart (F&SF, February 1977) is one of his ‘Jose Silvera’ stories about the planet-hopping writer-for-hire. This one opens with him and a new client, the actress Mary Elizabeth Trowbridge, arriving at a film premiere on Barafunda naked in her aircar:

“And let’s see who’s in the aircar which is just now landing on the A-List landing yard!” boomed a voice immediately outside their cabin windows.
Silvera found himself staring into the lens of a robot video camera and the bright blue eyes of a grinning lizard man in a purple dinner jacket. “Oops,” said Silvera. “Black the windows, stupe.”
“Miss Trowbridge,” replied the voice of the aircar, “had earlier expressed a wish to see the myriad stars of the Barnum System night sky whilst being—”
“That was a prior mood,” said Silvera. “Black the damn windows.”
“It looks like our beloved novelist, Mary Elizabeth Trowbridge, spread-eagled under a dark saturnine man I don’t recognize, folks,” boomed the lizard announcer.  p. 87

The above gives you an idea of the tone of the story, which is mostly about Silvera attempting to recoup an overdue payment from a lizardman literary agent called Mazda. Mixed into this are the various manoeuvrings of the KAML (Kill All Monarchs League) and the possibility that the planet’s ruler, Prince Lorenzo, may be an android. All this is mostly irrelevant though, as the plot is pretty much an excuse to string several amusing scenes together (my favourite is probably the fight scene that takes place in a pub after Silvera smirks at a dandy who “playfully inserted the lighted table candle into [the] handy orifice of yonder serving wench android.”
Minor stuff but quite funny (if you don’t mind the rude humour).
*** (Good). 5,550 words.

The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter

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The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter (Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2010) starts with the narrator, a British civil servant, visiting an old female college friend (and lover). They discuss an alien object called the Incoming which has entered the solar system and appears to be headed for Earth. Later in the conversation he reveals that the current scientific analysis shows that it actually headed for Venus.
The next section sees a later visit to see her at the Goonhilly telescopes, where she and others are attempting to contact the aliens, a controversial undertaking:

Our British Shouters are a mild bunch, but in rowdier parts of the world there has been trouble.” The loose international coalition of groups called the Shouters was paradoxically named, because they campaigned for silence; they argued that “shouting in the jungle” by sending signals to the Incoming or the Venusians was taking an irresponsible risk. Of course they could do nothing about the low-level chatter that had been targeted at the Incoming since it had first been sighted, nearly a year ago already. Edith waved a hand at Arthur. “If I were a Shouter, I’d be here today. This will be by far the most powerful message sent from the British Isles.”
I’d seen and heard roughs of Edith’s message. In with a Carl Sagan–style prime number lexicon, there was digitised music from Bach to Zulu chants, and art from cave paintings to Warhol, and images of mankind featuring a lot of smiling children, and astronauts on the Moon. There was even a copy of the old Pioneer spaceprobe plaque from the seventies, with the smiling naked couple. At least, I thought cynically, all that fluffy stuff would provide a counterpoint to the images of war, murder, famine, plague and other sufferings that the Incoming had no doubt sampled by now, if they’d chosen to.

At the end of this section there is another revelation, which is that there are signs of life on Venus: a hole in the atmosphere has opened up where the Incoming is expected to arrive.
The climax of the story jumps forward in time once more, and (spoiler) they talk about how the Incoming attacked the Venusians, but were in turn destroyed by a gravity wave created by the latter’s destruction of Neptune. They also note that Mankind have been ignored throughout the war.
This is a good, if open-ended, piece, even if it is little more than an interesting notion combined with some philosophical musings about humanity. The story is told, appropriately enough, from offstage—which mirrors humanity’s place in the scheme of the story.
*** (Good), 4,850 words.

In Saturn Time by William Barton

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In Saturn Time by William Barton (Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark crater they find hard white rock (frozen water?) under a thin film of black matter.
The rest of the story telescopes forward at roughly four year intervals, and each time deploys an event vignette: Jensen is in orbit with the 1977 Apollo 29 when the Russians land on the Moon; in 1980 he is with President Udall, Vice President Mondale, and California Governor (and the next Democratic President after Udall) Jerry Brown, watching an (enhanced ) Saturn 5M lifting a moon base station; then, in 1984, he is on a mission taking a seventy-year-old Walter Cronkite to the Moon:

And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, [Cronkite had] chuckled softly and said, “This kinda reminds me of Paris . . .”
Uh. Paris.
“Sure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a goddamn typewriter . . .”
Then, sitting on the Extended LM’s floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he’d whipped out a kid’s folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first space flight.  p. 273 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

There are various other events: Jensen is the first man on Mars; a partly reusable Saturn 5R is launched; Jupiter’s moon Callisto is orbited, etc.
This is a well enough done piece but it’s really just a techo- fantasy for thwarted space geeks, and one that exists in a world that is completely devoid of any sense of realpolitik (there is no explanation as to why the voters would happily spend the colossal amount of money needed to fund an Apollo program on steroids, and the piece also posits the election of four Democratic Presidents succession).
For dreamers.
*** (Good). 5900 words.

Upstart by Steven Utley

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Upstart by Steven Utley (F&SF, February 1977) has a (vaguely Malzbergian) opening in which the captain of an Earth spaceship becomes increasing irritated with the intermediaries of the superior alien race which has snatched his ship from FTL flight:

“You take us in to talk to the Sreen,” the captain tells them, “you take us in right now, do you hear me?” His voice is like a sword coming out of its scabbard, an angry, menacing, deadly metal-on-metal rasp. “You take us to these God-damned Sreen of yours and let us talk to them.”
The Intermediaries shrink before him, fluttering their pallid appendages in obvious dismay, and bleat in unison, “No, no, what you request is impossible. The decision of the Sreen is final, and, anyway, they’re very busy right now, they can’t be bothered.”  p. 61

The captain eventually loses his temper and physically (and brutally) fights his way through to the Sreen and a climactic encounter.
The amusing last paragraphs crystallise this tongue-in-cheek story’s points about humanity’s belligerence and exceptionalism. (Spoiler: when the titanic Sreen, “masters of the universe, lords of Creation,” etc., ask the captain who he is, he thrusts out his jaw and asks “Who wants to know?”)
This is a slight piece, but it raises a wry smile or two.
*** (Good, if minor). 1200 words.

The Doctor by Theodore L. Thomas

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The Doctor by Theodore L. Thomas (Orbit #2, 1967, as by Ted Thomas) begins with a medical doctor called Gant waking up in a cave he shares with his “wife” and son:

The barest glimmerings of dawn filtered into the cave, and the remnants of the fire glowed at the mouth. Gant went to the fire and poked it and put some chips on it and blew on them. It had been a long time since he had had such a vivid memory of his old life half a million years away. He looked at the wall of the cave, at the place where he kept his calendar, painfully scratched into the rock. It had been ten years ago today when he had stepped into that molybdenum-steel cylinder in the Bancroft Building at Pennsylvania State University. What was it he had said? “Sure, I’ll try it. You ought to have a medical doctor in it on the first trial run. You physicists could not learn anything about the physiological effects of time travel. Besides, this will make history, and I want to be in on it.”  p. 8

It soon becomes apparent that he is stranded in the past with a tribe of cavemen, and we follow him during his day and see him hunt, attempt to treat various members of the tribe for their medical problems, and generally navigate life in the past with this aggressive and brutish lot (something that is accentuated by the ending).
This is an intriguing story, but it is overly compressed (it almost reads like a synopsis of a longer work) and should have been a longer story.
*** (Good, but too short).