Tag: 3*

Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A. T. Greenblatt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A. T. Greenblatt (Uncanny #34. May-June 2020) opens with the would be “Super” (superhero) of the story, an accountant called Sam Wells (who has some ability to produce fire, although not always in a controlled fashion), interviewing to join his local “Super Team”. Most of the assembled superheroes seems unimpressed or uninterested in him:

 “I would really be grateful if I could join you,” Sam says, clasping his hands behind his back to stop them from shaking.
Twenty-four pairs of eyes turn to look at him again. But this time they aren’t empty stares. This time, they are filled with heartache and grief and despair.
“Okay,” says the man in gray, “I’ll go get the papers you need to sign.” He drops his gaze and in an afterthought adds, “Congratulations.”
And just like that, Sam’s a member of the Super Team.
The hours of standing in front of the mirror, practicing control, paid off. Except there are no introductions or chocolate cake. No smiles or welcomes.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman in magenta tells him before heading to the exit.
Twenty-four pairs of eyes have found something else to look at. Twenty-four pairs of feet shuffle out. And soon all that’s left in the room are twenty-four empty chairs and Sam.
Watch Sam burn.

This uninspiring beginning to Sam’s superhero career takes another nose-dive when he finds out from Miranda, the Supers’ Office Manager, that they have hired him to be their accountant. However, over time, and with the help of Miranda, he learns to control his talent and slowly integrates into the team. After further complications (e.g., he is refused service in a shop because of what he is, then Lance, the team precognitive, warns him that he shouldn’t stay with the team), he becomes the hero of the piece (spoiler) when he rushes into their burning headquarters after it has been set alight by an arsonist. After this Sam learns to accept what he is and how his life has worked out.
I’m not really interested in superhero stories (especially movies, which are usually endless and violent power fantasies), but this is a reasonably well-done variation on the trope—and one which views super powers (especially only partially controllable ones) as a curse or disability more than a boon. And, of course, the story still manages to squeeze in a couple of scenes where the Team use their superpowers!
*** (Good). 10,200 words. Story link.

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison (FIYAH #16, Autumn 2020) opens with an unaccompanied young boy going into a diner. Tammy the waitress offers him some apple pie if she’ll tell him who he is and who looks after him. He replies that he is on his own, and then she gets ever more enigmatic answers to further questions, including the fact he is studying “how this world ended”. Then, when Tammy asks the boy what game he is playing, he tells her this:

“Susan Culpepper. Eighth grade. In the lunchroom. You made fun of her clothes in front of a group of girls. You said she looked poor and homeless. All of you laughed. At the end of lunch before class, you were in a restroom stall and saw her come in crying. She sobbed for a solid two minutes. Then she left. You wanted to apologize and didn’t. The next week she transferred schools. You never hung around that group of girls again, and to this day you regret never telling her you were sorry. You looked her up on social media more than a dozen times.”
Tammy’s eyes are the size of the saucers sitting behind her on the counter. “I—I never told anymore that story.”
“You told it to me. Susan is married now with two children in a lovely brownstone in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She’s a wealthy author married to an anesthesiologist. Funny how life works. Writing about the abject poverty she survived as a child made her a millionaire. This world loves its irony nearly as much as it does its war.”

The rest of the story details Tammy’s reaction to the above, further personal information about her (apparently the man who comes into the diner every day is secretly in love), and (spoiler) that the boy is an alien being from far, far away.
We finally learn that Earth will be destroyed the next day by two mad dictators, one of whom will fire a burrowing thermonuclear device which will fall into the ocean and tunnel into the Earth’s crust, destroying the planet. This will cause a rift in space-time that creates a thirty-six hour time loop, which the alien/boy will then repeatedly use to visit Earth before its destruction so that it can study humanity. The story closes with the alien saying that this will be its last trip, and Tammy responds (uniquely) by going to track down the man who is in love with her.
This has an intriguing first half, but the more that is revealed the less engaging it becomes. Not bad overall, though.
*** (Good). 4,700 words. Story link.

Egoli by T. L. Huchu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Egoli by T. L. Huchu (African-futurism, 2020) is an autobiographical piece about an old Shona1 woman which is told in an almost stream-of-consciousness second person:

You remember [Grandfather Panganayi] was proud of that house, the only one in the compound with a real bed and fancy furniture, whose red floor smelled of Cobra and whose whitewashed walls looked stunning in the sunlight compared to the muddy colours of the surrounding huts, just as he was proud of the wireless he’d purchased in Fort Victoria when he was sent there for his training. Through his wireless radio with shiny knobs that no one but he was allowed to touch, the marvels of the world beyond your village reached you via shortwave from the BBC World Service, and because you didn’t speak English, few of you did, the boys that went to school, not you girls, Grandfather Panganayi had to translate the words into Shona for you to hear. In one of those news reports, it was only one of many but this one you still remember because it struck you, they said an American—you do not remember his name—had been fired into the sky in his chitundumuseremusere and landed on the moon.

This is the first of many cultural and technological changes that we see her live through, and in the rest of the piece we see her get married, have children (who later go to work in the egoli, gold mines, of South Africa), and eventually get a mobile phone—something that opens up the world to her (she learns English through online comics, and receives weather reports and farming advice that help her make the most out of her crops).
The story (spoiler) finally morphs from a contemporary piece to an SFnal one when she looks up at the southern night sky and sees a steadily moving dot of light—a spaceship taking her grandson to mine the asteroid belt.
An absorbing story of generational social and technological change, told from an African viewpoint.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.

1. According to Wikipedia most Shona people live in Zimbabwe.

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the death (“the inexorable termination of his earthly existence”) of the necromancer Avalzaunt, and his subsequent entombment:

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again into the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection.
On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorem that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life.
After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.  p. 83

I guess you’ll either like this mannered, discursive, and droll stuff (as I did) or you won’t. If you are in the former group then the rest of the story will treat you of an account of how Avalzaunt waits for a ghoul pack to break into his tomb to release him, swears them into thraldom, and then seeks out the sustenance his post-life body now requires—human blood and gore. During these depredations Avalzaunt becomes more and more swollen as the undead can neither digest nor excrete “the foul and loathly sustenance whereon they feed”.
Eventually, after working his way through several of his former apprentices, and preying on the fat monks of Cambora, he is (spoiler) finally stopped by the silver knife-wielding abbot in an Grand Guignol ending that sees everything Avalzaunt has consumed spew out of his body (think of a bloodier and messier version of Monty Python’s Mr Cresote sketch).
I suspect many will find this an overwritten and ridiculous story, but I thought it was an entertaining pastiche of Smith’s work.1
*** Good. 3,600 words. Story link.

1. Ted White’s introduction states:

Lin Carter, working from Clark Ashton Smith’s extensive legacy of notes, outlines, lists of titles and story-fragments, has collaborated posthumously with Smith (who died in 1961), creating new stories—two of which appeared in the briefly-revived Weird Tales, and the third, “The Scroll of Morloc”, here (October, 1975). Here is the fourth.

I suspect the whole (or most of the) story is probably Carter’s apart from the plot idea.

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21st September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow in the bathtub of biomass that Jow has prepared:

There’s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. A wet pink fleck strikes Jow’s boot. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores.
Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. It swells and thrashes. Limbs elongate. A cartilage skeleton stretches, twists. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer; rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow can’t take his eyes off it.
When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. It’s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes.
“Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.

The woman compares it to a tupilak, something made out of animal carcass that you send after a person who has wronged you but, before she can expand on her comment, Jow gets a text saying, “For diagnostic purposes, run or hide.” The butterfly man then leaps out of the bathtub and stabs the woman to death with a plastic probe before pursuing Jow, who flees.
The next section switches to a bar where Timo finds a woman called Quandry and tells her that a gangster called Jokić is unhappy about “the harbour job going belly up,” and that he has sent a butterfly man after her. The story subsequently turns into a Terminator-style narrative (the butterfly man has extraordinary powers of regrowth) where Quandry is relentlessly pursued and has several close shaves. During this she learns about butterfly men from her father (Quandry keeps his oxygenated head in a case while she is acquiring funds to buy him a new body), and he tells her that they only survive for 24 hours, but no-one who is pursued lasts that long.
The pivotal part of the story comes when Quandry goes to a drug dealer’s house and discovers (spoiler), when the butterfly man arrives, that she is in its temporary lair. Quandry then fights with the butterfly man, manages to inject a cocktail of drugs into its jugular, and restrains it. She subsequently manages to convince the creature that, if it kills Jokić before her, it can get control of the rest of the shipment of butterfly men that is due to arrive and, because they have linked memories, gain control of its own destiny and do what it wants rather than being endlessly compelled to be a bioware assassin (we have learned along the way that it likes noodles and painting). The butterfly man agrees to kill Jokić first, then her.
The climax of the piece comes when Quandry and the butterfly man go to the top floor of Jokic’s building, where they kill his guards and then fight with him and his barber robot. During this Quandry watches a second butterfly man push the original off the roof (this second butterfly man has the same memories and essentially the same consciousness as the first but likes pushing things off of buildings). This latter act is fortuitous because the second butterfly man, unlike the first, has not been programmed to assassinate Quandry.
If you don’t think too much about what is going on here (the part where Quandry ends up in the butterfly man’s lair and manages to convince it to go along with her plan hugely stretches credulity) then this is an entertaining enough gangland assassination story with lots of grisly wetware action and a twisty plot. If you enjoyed Larson’s recent How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar (also on Tor.com) you will probably like this.1
*** (Good). 14,750 words. Story link.

1. Both of these stories show Larson in Hollywood movie mode (albeit a movie with more SFnal invention than most).

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956)1 is a one of his “Multivac” stories about a giant computer. In this tale, after the computer has been running for several decades, it finally develops a system that provides unlimited solar power for humanity. After this achievement, we then see the Multivac’s two attendants, who are hiding from the publicity in an underground chamber, having a drink and relaxing. Later, an argument develops when one of the two, Adel, contends that that the solar power supply will last forever:

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.
“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”
“That’s not forever.”
“All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?”
Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. “Twenty billion years isn’t forever.”  p. 8

This back and forth continues until Lupov points out that when entropy eventually reaches a maximum (i.e The Heat Death of the Universe, when the temperature everywhere in the Universe is the same), no more free energy will be available. Adell suggests that it may be possible to “build things up again someday”. Lupov disagrees, and so they ask Multivac if it will ever be possible to decrease the amount of entropy in the universe: the computer replies “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”.
The rest of the story telescopes through time until the end of the Universe, with many changes taking place during the various sections: Multivac becomes a much smaller machine, and eventually exists in hyperspace (by this point it is called the “Cosmic AC”); meanwhile, humans become immortal, spread throughout the Galaxy and the Universe, turn into disembodied beings, and later merge into one consciousness. At the end of every section someone asks the same question that Adell and Lupov asked and get the same answer.
Finally, ten trillions years later, just before the last man fuses with AC, the question is asked one last time with the same result. Then, in the timeless interval afterwards (spoiler), AC learns how to reverse the direction of entropy:

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light—  p. 15

The cosmic and temporal sweep of the story is quite well done but the ending is a gimmick better appreciated at age 12. I’d also suggest the story has a religious or mythological ending rather than a proper sense of wonder one.2 Still, not bad I guess.
*** (Good). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I assumed that this story had bounced from Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF to Science Fiction Quarterly (a much lower-budget publication) but then I found this in Asimov’s autobiography, In Joy Still Felt:

On June 1, 1956, I received a request from Bob Lowndes for another story. I was already thinking about writing another story about Multivac (“Franchise,” which had been the first, had been written as a direct consequence of my introduction to Univac in the 1952 election).
I had worked out ever greater developments of Multivac, and eventually was bound to consider how far I could go; how far the human mind (or, anyway, my human mind) could reach,
So as soon as I got Bob’s letter I sat down to write “The Last Question,” which was only forty-seven hundred words long, but in which I detailed the history of ten trillion years with respect to human beings, computers, and the universe. And, in the end—but no, you’ll have to read the story, if you haven’t already.
I wrote the whole thing in two sittings, without a sentences hesitation. On June 4 I sent it off, and on June 11 I got the check from Lowndes at four cents a word.
I knew at the instant of writing it that I had become involved in something special. When I finished it, I said, in my diary, that it was “the computer story to end all computer stories, of, who knows, the science-fiction story to end all science-fiction stores.” OF course, it may well be that no one else agrees with me, but it was my opinion at the time, and it still is today.  p. 59

2. Tacking on a religious or mythological ending to provide a sense of wonder is not uncommon, e.g. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.

(Emet) by Lauren Ring

Posted on by Paul Fraser

(Emet) by Lauren Ring (F&SF, July-August 2022)1 opens with Chaya in her countryside home watching a golem dig up dandelions in her garden—these creatures of Jewish folklore are created daily by Chaya and linked to her home network:

After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.  p. 67

We learn that Chaya is a teleworker for Millbank Biometrics, a company that is developing facial recognition software. Then, after some backstory about how Chaya’s mother taught her how to make golems and the generalities of Chaya’s job, Chaya virtually attends a company meeting where she and the other employees are given a list of thirty-six protestors that law enforcement want to track:

Confusion spreads across the faces on Chaya’s monitor. If her camera was on, she is sure that she would see the same expression reflected in her own frown. Tracking protesters isn’t exactly what she signed up for when she applied to Millbank. Sure, it’s what their software was ultimately going to be used for, but she wasn’t supposed to have to do it.
“Are there any questions?”
Chaya expects someone to ask what crimes these people committed, or what is going to happen to them when the information is turned over to the police, even though she already knows the dark answer to that. She expects questions about ethics and precedent and nondisclosure. At the very least, she expects someone to ask how they are supposed to check every partial match from every instance of every client’s software without neglecting all their other work.
No one asks any questions, though, not even her manager, so Chaya stays in line and keeps quiet. She sets the thirty-six faces to display on one of her monitors and returns to her code. What else can she do? She’s only one person, after all.  pp. 72-72

The next section of the story sees, among other things: (a) Chaya remember a childhood incident when a black friend was arrested on a false positive match (Chaya’s family didn’t do anything before the child was eventually released); (b) Chaya spot one of the thirty-six protestors in a local shop (when they talk to each other, Chaya is told about a surveillance protest in a couple of weeks); (c) Chaya garble the code for one of her golems—this makes it create another one, which in turn creates one more (“like a line of self replicating code”); (d) Chaya’s mother’s death due to cancer and health algorithms; and (e) Chaya realise, when she receives another dubious request from her company, that she is little better than a golem herself.
The story ends (spoiler) with Chaya’s long simmering rebellion, which sees her create self-replicating golems with the same faces as the target individuals, something designed to overload Millbank’s servers (she is helped with this by the man from the shop, who she meets again at the protest, and who gets the dispersing protesters to take a self-replicating golem with them to increase the area where Millbank will record sightings).
I found this story interesting but something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the gimmick (golems controlled by computer code) is original, and the story is more multi-layered and complex than most but, on the minus side, the golem/computer mix feels a bit odd (a fantasy idea mixed with science fiction), and the politics of the story (surveillance + algorithms = bad) feels a bit simplistic (look at how much surveillance data we give away willingly).
I’d also add that the very last part, where Chaya conflates her actions with the idea of “truth” (“Emet” in Hebrew) doesn’t make much sense as they seem to be more about political values or freedom. Finally, I didn’t understand why “Emet” is the word that brings the golems to life.
*** (Good). 7,800 words. Story link.

1. This won the 2022 World Fantasy Award for best short story. It was also a Nebula finalist.

The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory (Tor Novellas, 2021)1 opens with Bobby, a human-ocelot hybrid and one of the members of the boy band WyldBoyz, waking up after a huge after-tour drink and drug taking binge to find his manager, Dr M., lying beside him in bed. He has been brutally murdered and Bobby is covered in blood.
Bobby goes to get hold of the rest of the band members, who are also human-animal hybrids, and they assemble in Bobby’s room to examine the body and discuss what they are going to do. During this they talk about what happened the previous night and also allude to matters that they must not mention to the police.
At the end of this section Bobby says, “I’m going to need a really good publicist”. This, and an earlier hopeful comment, “Please don’t be a dead hooker”, are the first glimmerings that this is going to be an overtly humorous piece (I didn’t realise for sure until further on in the story).
After this set-up the point of view switches to Detective Lucia Delgado, who is assigned to the case with her partner detective Banks. Co-incidentally, Delgado has a daughter interested in the band:

[Melanie] was nine years old—dead center in the band’s demographic sweet spot of preteen females—and a huge fan. A poster of the band—the one where they’re wearing space suits from the Unleashed album—hung over her bed. Luce knew the names of every member of the band, because Melanie talked about them as if they were her personal friends. Devin, “the romantic one,” was three-quarters bonobo; Tim, “the shy one,” was a large percentage of pangolin; Matt, “the funny one,” was a giant bat; and Tusk, “the smart one,” was a hybrid elephant. Last but by no means least in the heart of Luce’s daughter (and on the LVMPD person-of-interest list) was “the cute one,” Bobby O.
Next to her mirror Melanie had pinned up a Tiger Beat cover filled with Bobby O’s face. The headline read: “O Is for Ocelot! We Luv a Lot!” And indeed, Melanie adored him. Last week Luce was feeling bad she hadn’t ponied up the $38.50 a ticket for the WyldBoyZ show at the Matador. She had zero interest in watching a bunch of genetically engineered manimals sing and dance like some Chuck E. Cheese nightmare, but Melanie would have lost her mind with joy. Now Luce was grateful she’d skipped.

The rest of the story sees Delgado and Banks investigate the murder and interview the members one at time (we get these interviews from Delgado’s point of view, and then a chapter from the band member’s point of view—which sometimes varies significantly from what they have told Delgado).
Sequentially, we see: (a) Bobby remembering a huge argument between the band and Dr M. about the imminent break-up of the group; (b) Devin revealing that he and Tusk created the songs (lyrics and music respectively) but that Dr M. owned the rights; (c) Tusk telling the detectives about the band’s escape from a barge that went on fire; (d) Luce and Banks finding a costume and the murder weapon in the toilets after watching a security video; and (e) Tim (the pangolin-hybrid) worrying about shell cancer and giving the detectives a one-page lecture on pop-song construction (an atypically dull section in the story2).
During this latter interview we also get the band’s origin story when Tim reveals that, after a fire on an illegal floating laboratory where they were experimental subjects, they drifted on a life-raft in the Pacific for two weeks before being rescued:

The fishermen towed them east for two days and cut them loose at Isla Isabella. “Oh my God,” Matt had said. “We’re in the Galápagos Islands. This is where Darwin figured out evolution.”
“Why are you laughing?” Tim asked.
“Because a hundred years ago, we could have fucked his shit up.”

We also learn that when the group finally got to mainland Peru they met Dr M. and Kat, their roadie (who Luce later discovers is pregnant).
Although this has the structure of a mystery story, a lot of it is played for laughs (Luce’s partner Banks has a stream of puns and one liners, e.g., “I’m sure we can get the pangolin to come out of his shell”), and hits peak humour when Luce interviews two members of the fan-club, who are as deranged and pedantic as you would expect—they explain in depth the differences between the two fan types that are “zoomies” and “zoomandos”. We also go beyond puns, one-liners and amusing scenes to metafictional humour in Matt’s interview, when he reels off a list of murder mystery writers and their asides to readers about the stories:

“I hate metafiction,” Delgado said.
Banks said, “A couple hours ago she was telling me we’re either in a locked-room mystery or a science fiction story. She said she really doesn’t want to be in sci-fi.”

A little while after this interview, Luce announces to Banks that she knows who committed the murder. Then, after a few more puzzle pieces are presented—there is a interview with Dr M.’s wife, the recovery of a missing laptop, and a short conversation with her Captain and two men who are supposedly “Fish and Wildlife” agents (and who who have a photograph of someone who looks like Kat’s twin brother)—Delgado discovers the laptop files include a capella versions of the band’s songs and a list of the subjects at the floating lab. She notes that all of them were terminated apart from the band members and the original experimental subject.
The climactic scene of the story (spoiler) sees the band flee the hotel (much to the chagrin of the two agents) but they later turn up at Delgado’s house. She tells them how she thinks the murder was committed (she thinks Matt is the murderer, if I recall correctly), and then the band tell her what actually occurred: Matt glided/bungee-jumped onto Dr M.’s balcony and opened the door so the rest of the band members and Kat could enter. They searched the room for the laptop and its incriminating information, and then Kat killed Dr M. to prevent him revealing the band’s secrets, mutilating his body to make it look like a deranged fan did it. Finally, we learn (a) Kat is the mother of all the WyldBoyz—she is the original protean subject on the list (I presume “protean” in this case means that she is able to give birth to various types of life), and (b) the Feds are closing in (the Fish and Wildlife guys actually work for a much more sinister department, the one that detained Kat during WWII and repeatedly made her give birth3). Also, during all this back and forth, Delgado’s daughter Melanie comes through briefly and ends up singing with her favourite band (this will no doubt be the finale in the musical of the story).
Overall this is an enjoyable read and one that is quite funny in places—as well as Banks’s puns, there are numerous amusing exchanges and scenes, mostly about boy bands, animals and their habits, and, as already mentioned, fans. There are also a lot of throwaway references to pre-2000 music, e.g. when the lack of a female band member comes up, one of them says “We’re not The Cure”—presumably a joke at the expense of the singer Robert Smith; also, when Dr M. forms the band in Peru, The Animals is discounted as a name.
I note that most of the humour is in the middle part of the story as, at the beginning and end, the mystery requirements are prioritised. And, while we are talking about the murder mystery aspects, I doubt that anyone could figure out the circumstances of the murder from the clues that are presented. The story is also a bit longer than it needs to be (it’s a very long novella), and there is no convincing explanation as to why the Feds, having let them remain free for so long, suddenly become interested in them at the end of the story.
*** (Good). 37,750 words. Purchase link.

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award.

2. The Apologies section at the end of the book reveals the song construction lecture comes from Gregory’s son, “I asked my second born, Ian Gregory, to write the first draft of Tim’s impassioned defense of pop music, and they gave me the perfect rant.”

3. It becomes obvious at this point in the story that Kat is a survivor from The Island of Dr Moreau.

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin (Fantastic, May 1976) opens with Sharra passing through a world gate. She has injuries from her fight with the gate’s guardian, and washes her wounds before falling asleep in a sheltered spot in the wood. Then Sharra regains consciousness to find that she is being lifted into the arms of a man. She is too weak to struggle, and he takes her to a nearby castle that was not there before.
When Sharra next wakes up she finds out that her saviour is called Laren Dorr, and the rest of the story sees them spend a month together at the castle (she agrees to stay and rest if he will show her where the next gate is). During this time, they talk and travel, and eventually become lovers.
From their conversations we learn the backstories of both characters: Sharra is making her way through various world gates as she searches for her lover, Kaydar, but the Seven don’t want her to succeed and have instructed the guardians of the gates to prevent her from passing; Dorr lost a battle with the Seven an age ago, was banished here, and has spent many years alone. Some of the information about Dorr is revealed through the songs that he sings for Sharra while playing an exotic sixteen-string instrument:

He touched it again, and the music rose and died, lost notes without a tune. And he brushed the light-bars and the very air shimmered and changed color.
He began to sing.
I am the lord of loneliness,
Empty my domain . . .
. . . the first words ran, sung low and sweet in Laren’s mellow far-off fog voice. The rest of the song—Sharra clutched at it, heard each word and tried to remember, but lost them all. They brushed her, touched her, then melted away, back into the fog, here and gone again so swift that she could not remember quite what they had been. With the words, the music; wistful and melancholy and full of secrets, pulling at her, crying, whispering promises of a thousand tales untold. All around the room the candles flamed up brighter, and globes of light grew and danced and flowed together until the air was full of color.
Words, music, light; Laren Dorr put them all together, and wove for her a vision.
She saw him then as he saw himself in his dreams; a king, strong and tall and still proud, with hair as black as hers and eyes that snapped. He was dressed all in shimmering white, pants that clung tight and a shirt that ballooned at the sleeves, and a great cloak that moved and curled in the wind like a sheet of solid snow.
Around his brow he wore a crown of flashing silver, and a slim, straight sword flashed just as bright at his side. This Laren, this younger Laren, this dream vision, moved without melancholy, moved in a world of sweet ivory minarets and languid blue canals. And the world moved around him, friends and lovers and one special woman whom Laren drew with words and lights of fire, and there was an infinity of easy days and laughter. Then, sudden, abrupt; darkness, he was here.  pp. 50-51

At the end of the month Shaara tells Dorr it is time for her to leave, and he takes her to the gate which, to Shaara’s surprise, is in third tower of the castle. On their arrival (spoiler), she is surprised to discover that there is no guardian present—at which point Dorr reveals himself and pushes her through the gate.
I thought this was a very good piece the first time I read it, but this time around I thought it was somewhat overwritten and a little slow-moving (see the passage above). That said, the part where Dorr pushes her through the gate rather than detain her is a neat twist (I think my subconscious was expecting him to be the guardian but I did not anticipate his actions) and, overall, it is a decent mood piece.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson (Analog, November 1976)1 is a post-collapse story—this time humanity’s fall is caused by the intentional release of a virus that hugely enhances human sense of smell and causes what is known as the Hypersomic Plague:

Within forty-eight hours [of the release of the virus] every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.  pp. 29-30

This change to the human sensorium also enables the afflicted survivors to detect an invisible, gaseous race of beings called “Muskies” who, once they discover that humans can sense them, go on the attack:

It is difficult for us to imagine today how it was possible for the human race to know of the Muskies for so long without ever believing in them. Countless humans reported contact with Muskies—who at various times were called “ghosts,” “poltergeists,” “leprechauns,” “fairies,” “gremlins,” and a host of other misleading labels—and not one of these thousands of witnesses was believed by humanity at large. Some of us saw our cats stare, transfixed, at nothing at all, and wondered—but did not believe—what they saw. In its arrogance the race assumed that the peculiar perversion of entropy called “life” was the exclusive property of solids and liquids.
Even today we know very little about the Muskies, save that they are gaseous in nature and perceptible only by smell. The interested reader may wish to examine Dr. Michael Gowan’s groundbreaking attempt at a psychological analysis of these entirely alien creatures. Riders of the Wind (Fresh Start Press, 1986).  pp. 31-32

If these two gimmicks sound like they stretch credulity to breaking point, they come close, and it is a testament to Robinson’s storytelling skills that he manages to hold the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself, however.
The tale opens with (unusually for the time) a black narrator called Isham Stone accidentally shooting a cat as he enters a post-apocalyptic New York (he is on edge, has an infected arm, and acts before thinking). Stone has travelled to the city to kill a man called Wendell Carlson, who Stone’s father has identified as the man responsible for the virus (Stone’s father worked with Carlson before the Plague).
When Stone reaches Central Park he stops for a rest, and is disturbed by an old leopard. He presumes the animal is a zoo escapee so he gives it something to eat, and then collapses with exhaustion. He smokes a joint, and thinks about his self-defence training and the mission that lies ahead of him.
After a little more post-collapse travelogue Stone eventually arrives at Columbia University, Carlson’s reported abode. He waits outside for Carlson to appear and, when he does, takes a shot—he misses, and is then attacked by six Muskies. Stone manages to kill five of them with his “hot-shot” shells and grenades before he loses consciousness.
The story then cuts, after another of the data-dump chapters (these post-plague accounts of the collapse of civilization and the advent of the Muskies alternate with Stone’s account of his journey), to Stone arriving back at Fresh Start to tell his father that he has killed Carlson.
The final section of the story then flashbacks to what actually happened after Stone woke up. This begins (spoiler) with Stone seeing that his arm has been partially amputated before Carlson arrives with food and drink and the news that he has been unconscious for a week. Then, as Stone begins his long recovery, he is informed of two significant pieces of information: (a) Carlson has learned to communicate with the Muskies; and (b) Stone’s father (Carlson’s laboratory assistant before the plague) was the one who was responsible for releasing the virus.
The final scene sees Stone back in Fresh Start, booby-trapping his father’s toilet with bleach (which produces chlorine gas when mixed with an appropriate substance). Stone knows his father has had his adenoids removed and that he will not, unlike the rest of the residents of Fresh Start, be able to smell the gas.
As I said above, these plot elements (and the data-dump chapters) do not suggest a promising piece but, while the story isn’t worthy of a Hugo Award,2 it is an engaging read because of Robinson’s informal narrative style—the narrator effectively chats to the reader—and its passages of effective description:

This old cat seemed friendly enough, though, now that I noticed. He looked patriarchal and wise, and he looked awful hungry if it came to that. I made a gambler’s decision for no reason that I can name. Slipping off my rucksack slowly and deliberately. I got out a few foodtabs, took four steps toward the leopard and sat on my heels, holding out the tablets.
Instinct, memory or intuition, the big cat recognized my intent and loped my way without haste. Somehow the closer he got the less scared I got, until he was nuzzling my hand with a maw that could have amputated it. I know the foodtabs didn’t smell like anything, let alone food, but he understood in some empathic way what I was offering—or perhaps he felt the symbolic irony of two ancient antagonists, black man and leopard, meeting in New York City to share food. He ate them all, without nipping my fingers. His tongue was startlingly rough and rasping, but I didn’t flinch, or need to. When he was done he made a noise that was a cross between a cough and a snore and butted my leg with his head.  p. 35

*** (Good). 23,850 words. Story link.

1. This story forms the first six chapters (about a quarter of the length) of the novel Telempath (1976).

2. I suspect that Robinson’s Hugo was more a popularity award given variously for his convention presence, opinionated book review columns in Galaxy (I think the first one was subtitled Spider Versus the Hax of Sol III), and possibly his “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” story series. Robinson’s ISFDB page.