Tag: short story

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, a bioengineer, getting a commission from a client to make a dragon for Chinese New Year:

People had been asking for dragons for a while, but this client—I think he was a hedge fund manager who was starting a new entertainment streaming service, but possibly he was an entertainment streaming service CEO who was starting a hedge fund. Did I mention I’m bad at paying attention in meetings?

The first dragon was about the size of a cat, and since the client had refused delivery, I kept him. I fed him crickets and mealworms, shaved carrots and diced peppers, crunchy cat kibble, and occasional cans of sardines. The dragon grew plump, developed a habit of begging at the table, and shredded my sofa and curtains with his claws. He also liked to lie across the back of my shoulders when I was working, like a tiny scaly heating pad. (Despite the scales, he wasn’t a reptile; I had thought a warm-blooded dragon would have a more interesting personality. There are scaled mammals, like pangolins.) He ran around the house with a little galumphing hop.

After the first dragon is rejected by the client—no wings, no fire, wrong colour, wrong size, etc.—she starts work on a second dragon. This one—larger, with feathers, teeth (although still no fire due to potential insurance problems)—is also rejected. After this, her business partner fires the client. The partner takes the second dragon home while the narrator keeps the first, which she names Mr Long.
Time passes. The dragons prove popular when each of them is out and about, which leads to further work for her and her partner’s company.
The last part of the story (spoiler) has the narrator hear of a fire at the CEO’s company: she realises that he must have found someone to create a fire breathing dragon for him. Then, sometime later, when she hears rumours of a strange creature in the wild (“the Palo Alto Hippogriff”), she realises that she had better go and find it (fire breathing dragons and dry Californian forests are not a good mix). With the help of her dragon she does so. Minor problems with their ex-client ensue.
This has a slight story line, but it is an entertainingly told piece.
*** (Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Heart is at Capacity by T. J. Berry (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) is narrated by Paul, the android partner of a young woman called Rebecca:

My heart is at capacity. I’m scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. I don’t have the power to love Rebecca any more than I already do, and it is not enough for her.
I spend the day before my appointment creating economic projections for a developing nation’s STEM investment. Picking up an extra side gig means my upgrade won’t impact our household budget. I don’t want Rebecca to feel that the opening of my heart comes at her expense.
My numbers reveal that this young country will recoup their STEM investment within a generation. There’s a statistical certainty it will bring up their GDP by 5-7 percent in a year or two. My numbers also say that my upgrade will allow me to devote 9 percent more processing power to Rebecca’s needs. We don’t have a GDP-like measurement in our relationship, but my nested flowchart says that if I identify and satisfy a greater percentage of her needs, she will recognize my usefulness and love me more.  p. 131

Of course (spoiler) that latter conclusion (his being more useful will make her love him more) is obviously erroneous, and this becomes apparent during the rest of the story, where their interactions become increasingly suboptimal:

Rebecca kisses me on her way out in the morning, tight-lipped and perfunctory. Not the warm, open-mouthed kisses of our middle days together. I don’t push for more. Nor do I mention the lunch that’s in her satchel. In my experience, explicitly telling a partner what you’ve done for them elicits a negative reaction. Better to work silently and unnoticed than to demand praise that will only be offered resentfully.  p. 133

Paul’s solitary reflections, and his analysis of their interactions—which are acutely observed alternating with entertainingly wonky—occur during the same period he meets and interacts with Ashira, a more basic android partner (“Do you want some feedback?” he asks her after a limp handshake). Through these exchanges we learn more about the androids’ history and their use as human partners.
Eventually, Paul goes to get his upgrade (secretly paid by himself from the odd jobs he does when Rebecca is working or asleep) and, when it is complete, he instantly realises that Rebecca has a new, human partner. After they split up (or, more accurately, Rebecca dumps him) Paul moves on to a new relationship with a male bartender. He still thinks about Rebecca, but is reluctant to delete his memories of her because of the “valuable data mixed in” with them.
This is a smartly observed story that provides an intriguing and witty view of human relationships.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,300 words. Story link.

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with “Asimov was a Bigot” graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:

There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It’d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men’s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn’t dig an escape before their time ran out.  p. 152

One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager’s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB’s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don’t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic—if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom’s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, “What you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung”).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB’s brain isn’t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB’s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don’t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn’t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov’s expense:

If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov’s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his “laws of robotics” that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots—if confronted with such a choice—must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important.  p. 156

Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (“scrofulous”), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don’t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves “human”. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov’s robot stories—didn’t The Bicentennial Man become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
* (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link.

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the narrator watching three-armed alien Ashtenga play basketball. After this we find out that the narrator has been brought in to report on whether the Ashtenga should be admitted into the professional leagues on Earth (there are conflicting views on the matter).
The rest of the story is a rambling and starry-eyed description of people and aliens playing the game, its history, and all of this is intermingled with a lot of what can only be called simplistic and patronising messaging about inclusion. This latter begins with the narrator doubting his own views:

I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.
I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.
I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that moment a younger person looks at me, already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.
I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.
An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball—that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming. p. 39

There is a caricature in that passage for sure, but it isn’t the one suggested.
What the story is specifically about is eventually made explicit (although this is telegraphed pages earlier):

Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional.  p. 42

Mmm, goodbye women’s sports then. I’m not sure that these matters are going to be resolved in such a straightforward manner—see the recent troubles in American swimming and British cycling.
Finally, after more interminable detail about the game, and a match where the Ashtenga trounce a human team, the story finally equates the idea of transgender inclusion with the desegregation of basketball in the middle of last century:

Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after?  p. 45

In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.
Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins And Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.
He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.
I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever.  p. 46

I particularly dislike sports stories, and “message” stories even more, so this piece was a double fail for me. I’d also add that what makes most message stories so irritating is that (like this one) the complexities of the issues raised are never addressed (and in this case we have the bonus of people who have concerns about trans inclusion in women’s sport being likened to racists).
I wonder why it is that writers think their ability to string a sentence together means they are possessed of a some particular wisdom.
In conclusion I’d also add that, even putting the facile message of this story to one side (although that is probably the only reason it got published), this is a flabby, meandering, and tedious read.
– (Awful). 6,450 words.

Muallim by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Muallim by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with Irada, the blacksmith of an Azerbaijani village, repairing Muallim, the robot schoolteacher:

“I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate, Muallim. It will take some work to repair. In the meantime, I can trade it out for your spare chest plate. I still have it here in the shop. But I haven’t had time to fix it. That one is more battered than this one is.”
“How long will it take to fix these dents. An hour?” Muallim asked.
“No. More like an afternoon. I can’t do it now. Can you come back after school? You can wait in the house. You can help my father with his Ketshmits grammar. You know how he loves that.”
“I am scheduled to chop wood for Mrs. Hasanova.”
“Tell her you will chop wood tomorrow.”
She watched Muallim consider this. They must have programmed this gesture into the robot, the way it tilted its watering can of a head to the side and slightly down, just like a human.
“Yes,” Muallim said, “I think that will work. I will stop by Mrs. Hasanova’s and tell her I will come tomorrow.”  p. 36

This opening passage contains a number of hints about various happenings that occur in the story that follows, which alternates between the point of view of Irada the blacksmith, Muallim the robot, and Maarja, an NGO worker who is writing a report on the educational efficacy of the robot in this remote location. In the ensuing narrative we learn that Muallim is being used inappropriately (the wood chopping referenced above, which is causing undue wear and tear); that Muallim is stoned by the village children when it goes to cajole them to go to school; and that the village is generally quite a dysfunctional place where the robot (when it isn’t being attacked by an aggressive rooster) is seemingly making little progress. We also see various aspects of village life, mostly centred on Irada and her widowed and one-armed Mayor father.
When Maarja finally finishes her report it becomes clear that Muallim is going to be taken from the village but, before this happens, she gets an urgent message from one of the children that something has happened to robot. She goes to a local ravine and sees it smashed to pieces two hundred meters below, presumably an act of vandalism.
After Maarja leaves (spoiler) it becomes apparent that the locals have faked Muallim’s destruction using the removed chest-plate (see the passage above) and various scrap metal so they can keep the robot in the village.
This has some nice local colour, but it’s essentially a well done “yokels put one over on the city folks” piece.
*** (Good). 4,950 words. Story link.

Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with a sentient toaster (also described as a “toaster oven slash bread machine”) turning up on the doorstep of the Nadia, who runs an orphanage for abandoned, self-aware appliances (which she calls “quirks”).
After trying to communicate with the toaster, Nadia eventually takes it to the basement where she keeps the other quirks. There are then a few more scrambled conversations before the toaster asks Nadia to reset it (essentially commit suicide, as its self-awareness will vanish if it goes back to the default software).
It later becomes clear, after Nadia makes further efforts to talk with the toaster, that it has lost its friends. We then learn that, because of a debilitating illness that restricts her movements, so has Nadia: she resolves to make friends with the quirks.
There isn’t much to this really, but I suspect it will appeal to those who are fond of stories about sad and/or lonely narrators which have a sentimental ending.1
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words. Story link.

1. More SF readers like this sort of thing than you might think—this was one of the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll short story finalists from 2021 (although those stories are, admittedly, a weak bunch).

The Maw by Steven Utley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Maw by Steven Utley (F&SF, July 1977) opens in Jack-the-Ripper territory:

He came on the midnight air, a mist-man, a wraith stretched across the centuries, a shadow two hundred years removed from the flesh that cast it, a wisp of smoky gray nothingness drifting down out of the sky, settling to earth in the darkness of an alley between two decrepit houses. Behind him in the alley, an emaciated mongrel dog sensed his almost-presence and backed away, growling. He stared at it for a moment, his eyes twin patches of oily blackness floating on a face that was only a filmy blob, then pressed his hands against sooty bricks and dug very nearly insubstantial fingers into cracks in the mortar. Time let him go at last, surrendered its hold on him, gave him over completely to the moment that was 11:58.09 p.m., Thursday, November 8, 1888.  p. 110

The mist-man drifts about the city (we get bits of local colour and Jack-the-Ripper lore) until (spoiler) he arrives at the scene of the Ripper’s last victim. There, the mist-man waits. When Jack and the victim arrive, and he is just about to kill her, the mist-man descends from the ceiling and enters him. The mist-man explains to Jack that he isn’t killing the women for the reasons he thinks he is, but to feed a maw that stretches across people and time.
After Jack finishes butchering the woman (which is described in grisly detail) he leaves, and the last section has him remonstrate with the mist-man for revealing the true reason for his bloodlust. The mist-man says to him, in a biter-bit line, “It was terribly cruel of me, wasn’t it, Jack?”
This piece is more of an atmospheric history lesson than a story, but it it’s an absorbing piece nonetheless.
*** (Good). 2,850 words.

Victor by Bruce McAllister

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Victor by Bruce McAllister (F&SF, July 1977) opens with worm-like aliens landing on Earth; these initially appear to be indestructible, as when they absorb sufficient material or energy they grow and replicate. However, the professor who is the father of the narrator’s girlfriend comes up with a solution—a whistle that, when it is blown and the sound transmitted through loudspeakers, summons huge flocks of birds to eat the worms. The narrator and his girlfriend figure this out after the Professor falls into a coma, and the pair go on to save the world.
These events would, in most SF stories, be the complete arc of the piece—but in this one we are just half way through, and the rest of it telescopes through time and illustrates an anti-climactic domestic aftermath. First, the media attention on the couple fades; then the Professor gets old and dies; later, the narrator and his girlfriend have problems with their teenage kids and eventually separate, etc.
This is an interesting idea but it isn’t a particularly engrossing one.
** (Average). 2,800 words.

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

** (Average). 4,250 words

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is the second story in a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
** (Average). 4,100 words.