Tag: short story

Ransom by Edward Wellen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ransom by Edward Wellen (F&SF, July 1977) has a good hook:

First the finger, then the ear, then the nose.
But before them, the tape. The tape came in the mail that caught up with the traveling mansion of Peter Kifeson. The tape showed a trembling Junior Kifeson in a limbo shot—no background visible, no furnishings. A two-shot, with the light on Junior and the masked man holding him at blaserpoint, and darkness all around them. You had the sense, however, that this scene took place in a small room.
Old Peter Kifeson watched, listened, and chuckled. Twenty-five million credits, indeed. But at least and at last Junior was thinking big, showing drive. About time. After all, Junior must be all of sixty.  p. 92

When Kifeson later receives a finger in the post he publicises the fact but refuses to pay the ransom (he still thinks his son is behind the extortion attempt). When an ear and then a nose arrive, Kifeson changes his mind about his son’s involvement but continues to hold out.
The police (spoiler) eventually find the blackmailer and a dead Junior. Kifeson decides to clone his son, and the last couple of paragraphs make an unclear point about parenthood and filial love.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words.

Quake by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quake by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Mountain (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
** (Average). 5,950 words.

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen (F&SF, July 1977) is a short squib (it’s less than three pages long) that tells of a coal burner called Ash who spends a lot of time staring into the flames of his fires. One evening he sees a maiden (glowing “red and gold”) in a fire and pulls her out, burning his hands in the process.
Ash learns she is a fire maiden, calls her Brenna, and builds more fires so she can move around more freely (she can only move over fire and embers).
The story resolves (spoiler) when the village elders turn up and complain that their supply of charcoal has ceased. When Ash points to Brenna the elders cannot see her, and Ash’s sudden doubts about her reality causes her to fade. Ash looks at the villagers and then at Brenna, puts the doubt from his mind, and jumps into the fire to join her.
A pleasant but slight tale, even if there is some personal belief metaphor buried here.
** (Average). 1,200 words.

Flowers Like Needles by Derek Künsken

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Flowers Like Needles by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) introduces us to Bek, a needle-like alien that lives in a strange and exotic environment:

Bek scuttled over the needle field on the Waste of Mosses, far from Roktown and the monastery in Horn Valley. Turbulent winds scattered the neat rows of falling iron carbonyl snows. The steely needles here grew jagged, making the magnetic fields on the waste feel unsettled, haunted. Deep beneath the waste, the iron carbonyl ocean surged, pushing erratic breezes between the spines, whistling ghostly, wordless songs. Only two swarmers, Dux and Jed, accompanied him, humming a tune about Bek’s brave travels. In some ways, they looked like him. Fine iron and nickel needles burst radially from the centers of their bodies to absorb microwaves from the pulsar and catch falling gray snowflakes. Strong magnetic fields moved eight legs of sliding metal rods. Small pincers capped each of their limbs, tough enough to hold tight to the upthrusting fields of spines, delicate enough to read histories recorded in the crimpings in archival needles or to preen Bek’s needles.  p. 138

Bek is on a quest to find Master Mok, the former head of his order, and he eventually arrives at Mount Ceg. There he finds another of his kind, Lod, guarding a mountain tunnel which leads to Master Mok. Lod tells Bek he will have to get past him to see Master Mok, and indicates the bodies of other fallen warriors around him.
The pair fight, and Bek wins but yields to Lod (which then releases Lod from an oath put on him by a monster which lives under the mountain and which also guards Mok). After some back and forth (mostly Bek’s zen-like teachings about accepting help) they both go to seek Master Mok.
The two then meet the monster TokTok in a mountain tunnel that leads to Master Mok, and learn that he is actually a huge warrior who crossed the ocean to avenge Cis the Master of Tides. After some backstory about how TokTok came instead to become Master Mok’s guard, he agrees to accompany them to find Master Mok.
The threesome (spoiler) eventually find Master Mok, who tells them he will not teach them anything unless they defeat him in battle. The three reflect on what they have learned on their journey and (I think) conclude that they need to find their own path and not follow someone else’s.
The alien description is well done, as is the Eastern spiritual journey-like material,1 but the story’s payoff isn’t as obvious or profound as it should be. Still, apart from a weak, somewhat anti-climactic ending, this is quite good.
*** (Good). 6,100 words. Story link.

1. I was reminded of the old TV show Kung Fu to the point that I went and ordered the DVD boxset.

Mrs Piper Between the Sea and Sky by Kali Wallace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mrs Piper Between the Sea and Sky by Kali Wallace (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with a British agent on her way to abduct a man called Piper from a house near Plymouth:

It was Hazel’s turn at the checkpoint.
[. . .]
“Papers,” said the guard.
A powerful stench rolled outward from the booth: the acrid scent of burnt sugar with a metallic undertone, like a dusting of rust on the tongue. For a second Hazel could not speak. Her words, her excuses, they stuck in her throat like iron needles, and a feverish fresh fear swept over her entire body.
The young man was not alone in the booth.
[. . .]
His gaze flicked to the left. The Guest was right behind him.
Hazel looked away so quickly the road blurred before her. A glance was enough.
The Guest filled the tiny booth, filled it and surpassed it and engulfed it from within, a gleaming, cold darkness without boundary or form. It stretched and seeped at the edge of her vision, a nauseating lack of stillness that was, even so, impossible to track as motion.
People compared the Guests to black fire and living oil, roiling shadows and storm-cast skies. Some spoke of the unknown depths of the sea. Hazel was not given to poetry in the face of such ugliness. To her they were only darkness and corruption.
“This is acceptable,” the man said. His voice cracked. He was so terribly young. “Go on. Move along.”  p. 79

We later learn that the aliens have interrupted WWII and have annihilated both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Piper, the man who Hazel is travelling to see, voluntarily served with the Guests, and she hopes to abduct him so her organisation can retrieve an alien control device that was inserted into him. The resistance hope this will provide information that will help them in their fight against the aliens.
When Hazel arrives (spoiler), she has tea with his wife, who cooperates, before drugging Piper and taking him away.
This is moderately intriguing, but there is a too much going on and not enough of that is explained. The ending also leaves the story hanging in the air, which makes it feels like an extract from a longer work. A pity—it is not a bad read otherwise.
** (Average). 6,500 words.

Re: Bubble 476 by A. T. Greenblatt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Re: Bubble 476 by A. T. Greenblatt (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) sees two characters (who are working in two different “bubble universes”) exchange emails. Geo works as an astronomer on an abandoned space station looking for habitable planets for humanity, and Deni as an admin assistant/writer/video monitor on, presumably, one of the planets that NextEarth has discovered.
After some back and forth between the two characters that gives background and character information as well, as describing their current locales, temporal anomalies start to occur: this becomes apparent when some of the emails they receive are from the future.
While this latter event is unfolding, Geo also notes his station is detecting an increasing number of supernovas and (spoiler) eventually it becomes obvious that all bubble universes are breaking down (violent sandstorms become a feature of Deni’s emails). Both characters experience catastrophic events (although it seems like Geo survives but Deni doesn’t).
This story didn’t really work for me as (a) the bubble universe/temporal problem seems a bit contrived and (b) the story peters out at the end.
* (Mediocre). 5,100 words.

The Same Old Story by Anya Ow

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Same Old Story by Anya Ow (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with the narrator programing her food machine as she remembers her grandmother making onde-onde:

Grandmother combined the flour with pandan juice from the blended waxy leaves we grew from her planter box, kneading it gently. Her gnarled hands twitched hungrily over the pots, steaming coconut, pinching out pieces of rested dough, and filling the center of each flattened disc with a thumb of gula melaka. The water she used to boil the rested dough had been distilled and recycled from household wastewater the day before. The smooth rice balls floated to the thrumming surface in restless jerks. They looked like balls of phlegm spat into the pot by the dying, restlessly jockeying for attention. Not appetizing in the least. I stared at my feet and wished I was elsewhere as Grandmother removed the rice balls with a slotted spoon and coated them in a bone-white dusting of grated coconut.
The kuih was hot to the touch, the palm sugar bursting on my tongue. My four-year-old self had been gearing up to throw an ice-cream tantrum, but I now sat stunned on my stool, chewing slowly. I decided that I did not like it. When I looked over to my grandmother to complain, I was startled to see that she had closed her eyes. Tears pursued themselves down the timeworn grooves of her face. My resentment fled. We sat and ate in silence, mourning her memory of old Singapore. I wrote the mourning into my gula melaka, twisted my grandmother’s unresisting grief into its moreish sweetness.  pp. 72-73

The rest of the story sees the narrator enter a cooking competition judged by world leaders in a Post Collapse world. She (spoiler) loses to a French chef’s imitation of a dish that she intended to present (there is probably some authentic vs. adapted or cultural appropriation point being made here).
If you like the passage above, there is more over-described food and angst here for you. I found it made for dull reading.
* (Mediocre). 3,450 words.

Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is (we eventually discover) a campfire story told by an alien !Cha, and initially tells of an explorer called Iryna who discovers a virgin planet but chooses not to land there. Instead, she gifts the exploration rights to her niece (the Maryon of Maryon’s Gift), who then transfers them to a Gaian sect who set up defence drones around the planet to keep it in a virgin state.
Later, various intruders try to come through the nearby wormhole and land on the planet—but only two get close: one is a young fellow who hides in one of the supply ships and plans to surf through the atmosphere; the other is the Admiral, Iryna’s world-hunting rival:

He called himself the Admiral, although he had never held that rank, having only briefly served as a rating in the Commons police. He was around a hundred and fifty years old and claimed to be much older, and had spun a cocoon of vivid stories about himself, for he was not only a skilled and fearless explorer, but also a tireless self-mythologizer. We knew each other quite well—I had once traveled with him and the circus of his entourage for a couple of years—but even I do not know his true name or origin. Fame had displaced everything he had once been. No one believed the stories he had spun about himself more than he did, and as Iryna predicted, he was supremely irritated when he heard that she had discovered a habitable but untouched world and had taken steps to ensure that it would remain pristine. It was forbidden fruit, as in one of your myths, and there was nothing more that he craved, for he was a full-blown believer in the fitness of humanity to claim all the worlds in the galactic network, and the worlds beyond it, too. To step from star to star, galaxy to galaxy. To prove that humans were greater than any other client species and might even be their secret masters—he liked to promote the story that the Jackaroo were the distant descendants of the human species and had used tweaked wormholes to travel back in time to ensure their eventual triumph on the galactic stage.  p. 130

The Admiral (spoiler) starts a huge diversionary battle near the wormhole and sneaks through the main defences in a multi-shelled stealth ship. However, he is caught in a net near the planet and burns up in the atmosphere.
The !Cha narrator finishes his tale with some philosophical observations, one of which concerns whether or not its story is really finished.
This is more an account than a story, but I found it an interestingly detailed and imaginative one. Reader reaction to the passage above will likely predict their enjoyment of the piece.
*** (Good). 4,150 words.

The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the English teacher narrator and her scientist friend (they were in the Girl Scouts together) listening to an incoming message from a probe that has arrived at Proxima Centauri, four light-years away, after a twenty-three year journey. At the end of this section there is a moan about the amount of space junk in Earth orbit, and how it is hampering—and possibly preventing—any further missions (there have already been catastrophic accidents).
The next part of the story sees the scientist friend develop an FTL drive that is eventually tested on a flight to Jupiter (they use a previously abandoned probe in Earth orbit rather than ship all the parts up there). More complaints about space junk. The FTL ship, after a successful test flight, later sets off towards a plant called Wolf.
When the ship arrives there (spoiler), Earth (eventually) receives messages saying that they have discovered an abandoned alien ship, and then abandoned alien cities and planets. There is one final moan about space junk before the scientist observes, “It’s kind of like having invented the radio in a place that has no electricity”.
What is the point of this?
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words.

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with an elderly man called Roy going to the topmost room in his house to speak to a screen simulation of his dead wife Susan. After we witness a few of the, sometimes imperfect, conversations between the two, Roy’s daughter Elaine (who is cool on the simulation idea) visits along with granddaughter Jane and a baby grandson.
When Jane asks to go up and see her grandmother, Elaine isn’t keen, but she allows her to go. While Jane is upstairs, Elaine asks her father some difficult questions:

Elaine gazed at the infant, stroking his hair. “Does it cost a lot, the maintenance, the remote storage, whatever’s involved?”
“I can afford the fee. You remember, I was good with a budget.”
“Did she even want this?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “You knew your mother. She wanted me to have anything that might help me, or any of us. Otherwise, all I can say is the idea didn’t seem to bother her much.”
“Because she wouldn’t be aware of it. She’d be gone.” She leaned over and smelled the baby’s head.
He watched the child stir, fuss, then go back to sleep. “I think—” He stopped. “That’s right. She’d be gone.”
Elaine turned her head away from her son to look at him. “Dad, after you die, am I supposed to keep her, put her someplace in my house and visit her like you do, pay for all that? Is that what I’m supposed to do? And then am I supposed to keep both of you around after you die? Am I supposed to like having ghosts in my house?”
Roy hadn’t considered any of this. He should have. “It’s okay, honey. You’re free to do whatever you need to do for you and your family.”
“You make it sound like it’s not going to be hard.”  p. 155

When Jane comes downstairs she tells her mother that simulation-Susan would like to see her and the baby. Elaine and the grandson go upstairs.
The story then skips forward a generation to a time when the granddaughter Jane has her own children, and is taking them to Memorial Plaza. We learn that this is a place where people can talk to various historical figures, and where her children will be able to talk to their great-grandparents Susan and Roy. At the end of the story Jane’s children ask if they can also talk to their grandmother Elaine (Roy’s reluctant daughter): Jane tells them that their grandmother didn’t want to leave a simulation behind after she died.
This has an impressively contemplative first half, but the second part doesn’t really go anywhere—the reveal of Elaine’s refusal to do the same as her parents isn’t really enough to complete the story other than in a cursory fashion. I couldn’t help but think that this is the seed of a longer, and more profound and satisfying, story.
** (Average). 4,200 words.