Tag: novelette

Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer

Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) opens with Station Commander Ennie Niagara of Kenlon Station having dinner with the Ijt ambassador, an avian like alien. Niagara listens to the Ijt’s account of the previous commander’s fall from grace (a food related incident involving the serving of ghost peppers), and learns that his actions were designed to get rid of the Joxto, a troublesome race of aliens, from the station. The conversation closes with the ambassador’s news that the Joxto are on their way back.
Multiple plot elements and characters are then introduced to the story: two aliens, Qasi and Baxo, set off the fire alarms when they try the human custom of fondue (the latter creature is unknown to the rest of the station, and lurks in the air ducts); then a spaceship arrives with a Captain Vincente, who comes with official news of the Joxto’s imminent arrival; meanwhile, a body is found in engineering, which turns out to be the previous station commander . . . .
After this the stories trundles along while the investigation proceeds. More characters are introduced (two security officers, Mackie and Digby, as well as a Dr Reed). There is an alien fruit ceremony that Ennie attends before later going to her office and finding a piece of fruit that Bako, the “ghost alien” has left there. Then Vincente gets news from Earth that there is an assassin on the station looking to kill the Joxto.
After the fruit left in the commander’s cabin is identified as a particularly delicious one from Tyfse, a planet destroyed previously by the warring Joxto and Okgono, this all eventually resolves (spoiler) in the station’s garden ring. There we find out that Fred the gardener is plotting with the remaining surviving Tyfsian to sell the fruit it has saved from its planet, in return for assisting it to kill both the Joxto and Okgono. The story closes with Ennie confronting both races about the genocide.
This is an okay story, I guess, but it’s plodding as its title, goes on too long, and generally felt like a dull “Sector General”1 story with trendy pronouns:

“That is because I have not yet added the [fondue] heat source,” Qasi said. “I wished to test my understanding of the processes and equipment, and also refine my selection of sauces, before I invite an entire party to participate in the experience. I will even invite the commander!”
“What is the heat source, though?” Bako asked. Ey rotated eir head upside down so ey could peer at the underside of the pot, long whiskers bent back. “Some sort of thermal pod?”
“No!” Qasi said, her long tail twitching behind her from the excitement. “This is the very best part.”
She pulled out a small metal can, took the lid off, and slipped it between the legs of the stand under the pot. Then she grasped the small pull-tab on the side between two claws and pulled.
Flame jetted out of the top of the can, engulfing the pot. Bako skittered away on all eir two dozen legs, screeching in alarm. “It’s supposed to be able to be modulated,” Qasi said, trying to get close enough to see without burning her own whiskers. “I probably should have read the instructions.”
“Fire!” Bako shouted. “You made a fire! On a space station! This was a terrible idea, Qasi!”  p. 79

I can see why you might use these pronouns for a human character, but why use them for (to our view) a genderless alien instead of “they” or “their” or “its”? It’s an unnecessary distraction.
Another thing that irritated me by the end of the story was the continuous mention of food. There are numerous occasions where various characters are eating, and one of these, where a minor character is stuffing a burrito into his cakehole, just destroyed my suspension-of-disbelief. I thought, ‘They are still eating burritos on a distant space station hundreds of years from now?’
I also didn’t much care for the lazy contemporary dialogue and thoughts that the characters sometimes express. Apart from the likes of “Holy shit that’s good” and “crap ton of energy,” we also have twaddle like this:

The coffee machine was, in one of humanity’s oldest and most sacred covenants, fair game, with the caveat that if you finished the pot, you set it to make another.  p. 84

I usually look forward to Palmer’s work but this was disappointing.
** (Average, barely). 15,150 words.

1. The ‘Sector General’ series, by James White, were stories about a hospital in space which treated different types of aliens. There is a list on ISFDB—read those instead.

Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

Evolution by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Evolution by Nancy Kress

Evolution by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, October 1995) begins with an edgy conversation between two mothers over a garden fence about a hospital doctor who has been murdered.

Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.
I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Sean and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothesbasket.
“Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“Have the police arrested anybody?”
“Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers. There are only five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”  p. 322 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This gritty soap opera feel is maintained throughout much of the rest of the story.
We later find that this crime has occurred in a near-future where widespread drug resistance has caused a partial breakdown of the health system, as well as vigilante resistance against the doctors and hospitals who dare to use the one remaining drug, endozine, that has any anti-bacterial efficacy.
Later on in the story Betty’s son Jackie is linked, by an old high school friend who tries to recruit her to the pro-endozine side, to the vigilantes who are violently opposed to its use. We then find out, when the Betty can’t find her son, that the latter’s biological father is a hospital doctor called Salter (there is also some detail about their estrangement, and how Betty did prison time as a teenager when she shot out the windows of Salter’s house and injured a caretaker—I did say it was soap opera-ish).
When Betty goes to the hospital to see Salter to enlist his help in finding Sean (spoiler) there is an overly compressed scene where the news of endozine’s failure is revealed (the CDC have identified a resistant bacterial strain) and, after a huge data dump about this, (the obviously sick) Salter announces he has a solution—which is another bacteria to attack the resistant one. He gets Betty to fetch a syringe, and injects her, and then they leave the hospital just before it is blown up.
Betty then spreads the protective bacteria to everyone she meets.
This story doesn’t entirely work, mostly because the SFnal substance of it is crammed into the long single scene just described—and not in a particularly reader-friendly way (it’s Jargon Central in some places). And there are also a couple of questions that are not answered. Why did Salter get sick if he had the cure? Why does Betty’s vigilante son end up, at the end of the story, with the woman who tried to recruit Betty? On the other hand, some will appreciate the grittiness of the piece (and perhaps its current relevance), and there is some effective writing:

I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do.
I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of [prison]. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.
And it doesn’t work.  p. 335 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

**+ (Average t0 Good). 9,000 words.

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the “Highway”. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the “ghosts” but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty’s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That’s what this one said.
“Save it for a gawker’s tour,” I told her. “I’ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You’re fine, and then you’re dead.”
“This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I’d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
“This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?
“It’s good to see you,” Bloom said to me.
“Don’t let me interfere with this reunion. I’m out of here,” Havana said. “I don’t need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn’t fix the Highway’s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon’s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom’s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was “mapped” as a starting point) was “raped”. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story’s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:

You’ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.  p. 187 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (“Highway,” “Big R,” “go flat,” etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I’m not sure it’s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on For White Hill by Joe Haldeman

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman (Far Futures, edited by Gregory Benford, 1995) opens with the (unnamed) narrator stating that he is writing this memoir in English, a language from “an ancient land of Earth.” In the story’s leisurely opening chapters we find that he and a woman called White Hill are part of a group of twenty-nine artists that has gone to Earth to take part in a competition to design and build a commemorative artwork that will serve as a reminder, after the Earth is reterraformed, of the devastation caused by the Fwyndri. This alien race, with whom humanity are still at war, released a nanoplague on Earth which turned most plant and animal DNA into dust.
All this background information is given in little snippets though, and initially the story is mainly concerned with the developing relationship between the two characters, their sexual attraction, and the differing sexual mores of their two cultures (although, to be honest, they seem pretty much like an ordinary 20th Century couple1). There is also quite a lot of discussion about art as they wander around their base in Amazonia (and this is the kind of thing you would find in endless 1970’s artist colony stories):

She scraped at the edge of the sill with a piece of rubble. “It’s funny: earth, air, fire, and water. You’re earth and fire, and I’m the other two.”
I have used water, of course. The Gaudi is framed by water. But it was an interesting observation. “What do you do, I mean for a living? Is it related to your water and air?”
“No. Except insofar as everything is related.” There are no artists on Seldene, in the sense of doing it for a living. Everybody indulges in some sort of art or music, as part of “wholeness,” but a person who only did art would be considered a parasite. I was not comfortable there. She faced me, leaning. “I work at the Northport Mental Health Center. Cognitive science, a combination of research and . . . is there a word here? Jaturnary. ‘Empathetic therapy,’ I guess.”  p. 215 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

White Hill’s occupation surfaces again at the end of the story.
After a couple chapters of these two mostly just talking to each other, the story finally gets going when they get a visitor who helps them plan their travel itinerary, at which point the story changes from an extended conversation into a travelogue. They go to Giza and the pyramids, and then by airship to Rome (which is now encircled by a wall of bones collected by the local monks). Then they learn they have to go back to Amazonia because “the war is back.”
At this point the story changes direction completely, and the pair return to discover that the Fwyndri have tampered with the sun’s internal processes and that it will become progressively hotter—eventually turning into a red giant. Earth will become increasingly uninhabitable and, when the sun finally expands, destroyed. The couple also learn that there is no way off-planet as all ships have been requisitioned (and ships from elsewhere will take too long to arrive). The pair decide to stay in Amazonia and continue with their work. They eventually sleep together.
The rest of the story charts their developing relationship and their projects. While they work on these latter, terraforming machines cool the Earth so much that snow ends up covering what was originally a desert. Then, when they are caught in one of the storms that frequently occur, White Hill is badly injured—she loses and eye and suffers serious facial injuries—and the narrator has to tend to her until she heals enough to undertake a “purge” and re-enter the safe underground areas for surgery.
After a couple more chapters about her recovery and their relationship, there is another right angle plot turn, which has him come back to find she has left to do “Jaturnary” work for a hundred people who are going off in a spaceship to cold sleep through the expansion of the sun. There is a place for him, but he knows that the therapy she will provide to keep the cold-sleepers sane will eradicate her personality (no, me neither), so he does not go.
If this synopsis seems all over the place, it is because the story is little more than a collection of deus ex machina plot developments (which are there because, I believe, the story is handily based on Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet2). There is also a considerable amount of flab here (there is endless chatter about the couple’s relationship), and a kitchen sink full of SF furniture (aliens, nano-plagues, exploding suns, cold-sleep, etc.) All in all, it struck me as very much the kind of story you would expect to see in a collection edited by another writer (which it was) and where, I suspect, the brief was, “write what you want!”
There are parts of this that are readable enough, but it is a mess, and average at best.
** (Average). 16,600 words.

1. These boy-meets-girl love stories clutter up quite a lot of Haldeman’s work, if I recall correctly.
2. Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet is here, along with explanatory notes.

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts—not entirely clearly—with a female astronaut1 called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun’s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—”
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal—at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her “27.6 gravities”—death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov’s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
* (Mediocre). 8,300 words.

1. The character is supposed to be female but she comes over as a shouty, impulsive man in drag, to be honest.

Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly

Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s SF, June 1995) begins with the return of Kamala Shastri to Tuulen station, a matter transmitter installation in lunar orbit, after three years on the alien planet Gend. The story then flashes back to the period when she first arrived on the station to go outbound.
In a data dump start (you are pelted with information in the first few pages, which is not unusual for a Gardner Dozois’ Asimov’s SF story) the narrator Michael meets her on her initial arrival at the station, and we get a stream of detail about both her, the space station, and the future they inhabit. The one essential piece of information is that humanity now has limited access to the Galaxy courtesy of the Hanen, an alien race of dinosaur-like creatures who operate the station’s matter transmitter.
However, before Kamala can make her “superluminal transmission” (matter transmission jump) to Gend, one of the “dinos” called Silloin tells them that there will be a short delay because of technical problems. Michael decides to distract Kamala by launching into a “Tell me a secret . . .” routine with her that results in further data dumps that provide details of both their childhoods: he tells her about the time he swapped the crosses on the graves of two of his teachers who died in an accident (later switching then back), then Kamala starts telling him a story about an old lady she visited when she was a child, before being interrupted by Silloin, who informs them that the matter transmitter is now serviceable.
In the main part of the story we then discover, as Kamala is getting ready for the transfer, that the matter transmitter works by copying bodies and duplicating them at the destination station. However, to satisfy a nebulously explained concept of balance and “harmony,” the original bodies have to be destroyed. And that is Michael’s main purpose on the station—to press the button that will destroy Kamala’s original body after her duplicate is created on Gend (I can’t remember if there is a reason why this can’t be done automatically, or by the dinos).
Of course (spoiler) there is the inevitable problem, and Michael retrieves a screaming Kamala from the sending booth after what seems like an unsuccessful transmission—it is apparent that the process is a highly traumatic event for the original—only for Silloin to later find that the duplication process at Gend has been successful. This means there are now two copies of Kamala in the universe.
The dinos subsequently get in a flap about the conservation of harmony, etc., eventually threatening Michael with Earth’s expulsion from the transmission network if he doesn’t destroy the original Kamala. After some to-ing and fro-ing (during which the dinos reproach Michael for his “baby” thinking, and look like they may kill Kamala themselves), Michael forces Kamala into an airlock, and spaces her in a graphic scene:

I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch.
I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur.  p. 25-26

This last section obviously makes this story one that references Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations (that’s if you define “references” as “conduct an ill-informed and partisan attack”).1 If this isn’t about the Godwin story, then what we are left with is misogynistic torture porn.
Even before this attempted takedown of the Godwin story I didn’t much care for this piece. I’ve already mentioned the data dump start—who wants to hack their way through that when they start a story?—and the “Tell me a story” digressions—though I can see the need for these to pad the piece out, it is a pity they do not contribute something tangible to the story (e.g. Kamala could be a more sympathetic character).
The story has other problems too, including the Dino’s nebulous and hand-wavey comments about “harmony” and “balance,” which set up an unconvincing Trolley Problem (kill Kamala or something worse might happen). There are also science explanations that would shame a 1930’s pulp:

Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing J could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10-31 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.  p. 15-16

Thank you, Professor—do you have any equations to go with that?
I thought this a poorly put together piece, and was later horrified to find that (a) not only did everyone else on my group read rave about it2 but (b) that it won a Hugo award too (and was a Nebula finalist). It seems that all you need to do to woo voters is produce a story with space stations, dinosaurs, and self-referential genre content.
* (Mediocre—and I’m being generous.) 7,800 words.

Notes:
1. In Kelly’s story the spacing scene (with its “die, you weepy bitch”) and the later “think like a dinosaur” comments suggest that the author thinks Godwin’s story is a misogynistic one.* This analysis seems to miss the fact that Godwin’s story is a Trolley Problem** (sometimes you may only have two dreadful choices, pick one) and that Marilyn Lee Cross, the story’s stowaway, was specifically an attractive young woman because that would produce the most visceral response in the original Astounding readership (who, I might add, were of the “women and children first into the lifeboats” generation, and would generally have been appalled at the story’s conclusion).***
If Godwin’s story was meant to be misogynistic it would look entirely different: Barlow would hector Cross about her stupidity, lecture her at great length about the physical limitations of the universe that will result in her death, and the spacing scene would be as explicitly brutal and unpleasant as that in Kelly’s story. None of this happens in the Godwin piece. Instead, Cross is portrayed as sympathetic character (the cheap gypsy sandals, the lost childhood kitten, the final heart-breaking conversation with her brother, etc.) and her death is presented as something that will be devastating to not only her family but to Barlow the pilot.
* That said, misogynistic as a description is a better than Cory Doctorow’s ludicrous suggestion in a 2019 Locus article that the story is “a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”
** The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter. In the latter clip I suspect most of today’s SF fans would end up on the do-nothing left hand track (where five people are killed instead of one) because they would be too busy wringing their hands (see the recent Hugo winning As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang, this generation’s The Cold Equations, and you’ll see what I mean).
*** Campbell spoke about the reason a young woman was selected for Godwin’s story in his collected letters. See The Cold Equations review on my sfmagazines.com site, footnote 7.

2. That Facebook Group Read discussion thread is here.