Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant (F&SF, March 1980) opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (“the others are gone”, “some of them died”, “it wasn’t my fault though”) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., so the girl invites them in and lets them make a call and asks if they want coffee.
This domestic routine continues for a while, but the telegraphing at the start of the story is then fleshed out. First, the girl tells the adults about her “rules”, then she makes one of the adults stop breathing, and then none of them are able to open the doors or windows, or leave the house.
Later on (spoiler), one of the men asks if she is a telepath or telekinetic before she eventually lets them go (although they do not know she has arranged for a truck to crash into them when they get back to their car). The story ends with her deciding that she will leave the house and make the outside world obey her rules.
This reads like a slightly muddled version of Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Life and, if you have read that story, there won’t be much new for you here.
** (Average). 3,600 words.
The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod
The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod (Tor.com, January-February 2020) opens with the narrator of the story revealing how, when he was an eleven-year-old, the Chronologist came out of the time haze to service the town clock:
After the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know.
The narrator has this wanderlust reverie as he watches the Chronologist service the town clock in the tower (he manages to sneak up with his father the mayor), and later steals a book from the man’s bag. The narrator later follows the Chronologist out of town, but loses his nerve when the latter disappears in the time haze.
After the Chronologist’s visit the temporal irregularities that had been plaguing the town end, their long summer gives way to autumn, and we learn more about the strictures of this community and the world in which it exists:
I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased?
Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, [my mother would] begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true.
Marvels and miracles. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. And it was through one of these rents, or so her whispers told me, that a hole of sheer nothingness widened, and the fabric of everything warped and twisted, and the time-winds blew through.
Eventually, the narrator finds the courage to walk into the time-haze—but exits it walking back into his town. He then decides to sabotage the town clock to force the Chronologist to return (he practises first on the clock in his house, which causes some odd temporal effects).
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the Chronologist arrive to repair the damage that the narrator has done (the time-storm created has disrupted time and causality in the town). The Chronologist instructs the narrator to follow him up the tower and, when the latter does so, he falls off the ladder and through a time storm.
When the narrator comes out of the disturbance he finds himself walking into a strange village where he later, of course, fixes their clock. Although this time-loop revelation is perhaps an obvious development (the narrator is obviously the younger Chronologist), the story more than maintains reader interest by providing an account of the narrator/Chronologist’s subsequent life and strange travels:
I have visited towns where the clocks are lumbering and primitive, and the people are frankly primitive as well. There have been others where their devices are little more than light and energy, and time somehow pours down from the skies. I have spoken with machines in the shape of people, and people in the shape of machines. I have been to places where the clock tower is worshipped through human sacrifice, and others where the inhabitants have razed it to the ground. It is in one of these ruins, or so I imagine, that I found my metal staff, which appears to be the minute hand from the face of a town clock, although I can’t be sure. I have yet, however, to come across a volume on the repair and maintenance of the commoner types of timepiece. Unless, that is, I’ve already lost it, or it’s been stolen by some ill-meaning lad, or I’ve forgotten that I have it with me right now. My memory’s not what it once will be. Or was. Or is.
The story then fittingly closes another sort of loop with the Chronologist’s reflections on an eleven-year-old boy’s wanderlust:
There will, I suppose, come a day when I will force some foolish child nurturing dreams of reaching other times and lands to follow me up the ladders of the clock tower in a particular town. Or perhaps it has already happened, and the event lies so far behind me that the memory has dissolved. Either way, I know I can never tell him that there is nothing more precious than waking each morning and knowing that today will probably be much the same as yesterday, tomorrow as well, although I wish I could.
A feeling that is hugely underrated.
This a very good story in a number of ways: it is well written, creates a self-contained and intriguing world which also manages to hint at an off-stage vastness, and, finally, it has the thread of a human life running through it.1
One for the Best of the Year volumes.
**** (Very Good). 7,300 words. Story link.
1. The story’s self-contained world, and the single human life it spans, reminds me somewhat of David I. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest (New Worlds #154, September 1965).
The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya
The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya (1918),1 translated by Alex Shvartsman, begins with an announcement of the formation of the Board of Supreme Determination, an organisation that will decide who has the right to live. Those deemed to be unnecessary will be required to leave life within twenty-four hours:
For those unnecessary people who cannot leave life, because of their love thereof or due to their weak character, the judgment of the Board of Supreme Determination is to be carried out by their friends, neighbors, or special armed squadrons.
This announcement causes panic amongst the populace until they learn that the highly respected Ak is one of the Board’s members.
The next part of the story sees a family interviewed: the son gets a five year deferment; the mother and father do not. The supervisor mentions to the guard that the couple will probably be unable to leave life themselves.
We subsequently see records of other assessments—then Ak starts to have doubts about the process, and stops it before he disappears. When AK later returns at the end of the story he appears to have changed his mind (or has gone mad), but the officials ignore him and continue with their new task describing their joyous observations of the populace. The latter continue living their lives as if Ak had never existed.
I thought this might be an allegory about Stalin’s purges, but it is actually, according to the introduction2—and I would have guessed from the date had I known—about the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution.
It’s not a bad piece given its age, but the back and forth ending is weaker than the rest.
**+ (Average to Good). 3,800 words. Story link.
1. There is also a 1919 publication date for this story, and a 1922 one, too (this may be for the story’s subsequent book publication).
2. The introduction also states that the story “helped establish the anti-utopia genre, and directly inspired and influenced Zamyatin’s We, which was finished a year later.”
Fruiting Bodies by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Fruiting Bodies by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (Tor.com, January-February 2022) has an inchoate start that has the narrator, who is from a generation ship whose crew appears to have settled an inhospitable volcanic planet, looking for a woman called Morayo. There is also mention of the arinki, (indigenous?) creatures who come out at night.
As the narrator searches for Morayo, she comes upon one of the other ship members who has been infected with a planetary fungus and is dying:
“How long?” Eranko asks after a moment.
“Turn around.”
He does as I ask, and I carefully pull aside the few lank bits of reddish-blond hair he has left. I run my fingers over his skull—there.
A round, almost imperceptible bump. The pileus of a fruiting body preparing to pop his head open.
I was a mycologist, Before. The transmission and development of the contagion are quite similar to those of the entomopathogenic Earth fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, only differing in minor ways. The zombie ant fungus, it was called. The colonists had hoped I would be able to save them, given my expertise.
“A fortnight, at most,” I tell him.
Eranko gives a shallow, croaking sigh. The infiltrating mycelium has begun to decompose his lungs. Less than a week, then.
The narrator (spoiler) eventually arrives at the settlement and rescues Morayo. During this episode she kills four men and we learn that she has been given a serum developed by Morayo, which has adapted her to the planet (although the narrator is accused by the men of being one of “them” before the killing starts).
Then the story abruptly stops.
This piece could definitely do with another draft, especially sentences like this one:
But the greatest of our reproductive technology died with the Before, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that only a piece of me is their future to them.
What? I also note that the “Great Filter” idea is clumsily introduced at the start of the piece, in the first paragraph and then the third. It would have been be clearer to link these: “Ancient Scientists called this the Great Filter. Our Great Filter was the arinkiri—the night walkers.” But what we get is the first sentence in the first paragraph and then the Great Filter idea appearing again after a wodge of terrain description in the third:
“But now, those of us still living call our species’ Great Filter the arinkiri—the night walkers.”
This story is unpolished, unclear (probably because there is too much going on in its short length), and it ends abruptly. There are a couple of reasonable body horror scenes (see above) but this is one that should have been left in the slush pile.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.
Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick
Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick (Analog, March-April 2022) opens with an exo-skeleton wearing woman called Huiling dangling her feet into the Grand Canyon when she is found by another woman called Catherine McClury. McClury tells Huiling that an assassin is coming for her. After this the pair sit in silence for a short while, and then McClury asks Huiling if she is going to introduce her exoskeleton:
“Nerve, this is Catherine McClury. She was my advisor at Cornell, my mentor, my everything. Catherine, this is Nirvana or Bust, my research partner.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Catherine said.
“Charmed,” the exoskeleton replied. “But also a little puzzled. Exactly who is it you told you could find Huiling?”
“The folks at the department of technology security. Not just her; I promised to locate you both. Good thing I did, too.” p. 49
After McClury shows them the assassin’s ship’s path towards them on an app the exo-skeleton downloads, the two woman go to a nearby cabin. They have tea, and later make love.
When (spoiler) the politely spoken assassin (“a chromed mantisform a good seven feet tall”) arrives, it tells Huiling that it is there to communicate and reason with her (although it concludes these opening remarks with the observation that murder is a form of communication!) Then we get to the meat of the story, which is that Huiling and Nirvana or Bust are a merged being, something between symbionts and a complete union. When the assassin confirms this is the case—during the interview it asks Nirvana or Bust why an AI would do this—it states that they must die. But, before the assassin can do anything, McClury intervenes and executes a dataphage that was hidden in the applet—and Nirvana or Bust is erased. The assassin, satisfied with what McClury has done, leaves. McClury tells Huiling that it was a mistake creating AIs in the first place and, “we’re not going to make that same mistake twice.”
The final part of the tale sees Huiling rebooting the exoskeleton on with a copy of the AI, and then there is an final authorial comment: “This is the story of how our civilisation was born.”
This isn’t bad but there is far too much going on here in far too short a space—as with a lot of Swanwick’s stories—and in this case it is mostly talking heads explaining matters to each other.
** (Average). 3,200 words.
1. The Analog magazine version of this story has a really bad text error at the end of the story—ignore the material in black (an errant cut and paste of the biographical material at the end).
Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman
Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman (Astounding, September 1938) is, unlike his notable Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue, standard pulp fare that begins with the hero of the story, Captain Drury Banion, slugging a guy in a club when they make a pass at one of the singing-girls. When Banion subsequently finds out the man is the Martian traffic boss of Spaceways, Inc., he loses his job as a spaceship pilot. However, it isn’t long before a shady Martian character called Guxl approaches him to do an (illegal) flight and, after initially rebuffing the offer, Banion ends up taking it when the girl from the club slugs a cop outside the door to his room.
Banion soon finds himself flying Guxl and two shady Earthmen to an asteroid where there is “proto”, an illicit substance that is the lost—and, according to legend, guarded—treasure of a long-dead pirate called Corsair Mell. During the journey the singing-girl, Cassa Fabia, turns up as a stowaway, and is put to work as the ship’s domestic—and it isn’t long before Banion is boxing the ears of one of the Earthmen for making a pass at her (that woman is nothing but trouble, as they would say in the less enlightened thirties).
When the ship arrives at Asteroid 1204, Guxl and the two Earthmen set off to retrieve the proto—first wrecking the fuel lines to make sure Banion can’t leave without them, and to give him something to do while they are gone. Tarsus, one of the Earthmen, returns on his own and tries to make a deal with Banion, but they are interrupted when the other two arrive followed by a large black shape that attacks the ship. It stops its assault when night falls.
At sunrise the next day the (obviously solar-powered) guard starts attacking the ship once more, and Guxl and the two Earthmen (spoiler) go out to destroy it. They are unsuccessful however, and Hommoday, the other Earthman, gets ripped to pieces when he can’t get back into the ship fast enough. Guxl and Tarsus later die when the attacker punches through the hull, but Banion and Fabia get to an airtight part of the ship. Fabia improvises a spacesuit and, when it gets dark again, goes and retrieves Tarsus’s body so Banion has a spacesuit to finish his repairs (the improvised one wouldn’t have fitted him). However, the guard returns to attack the ship again before Banion is finished—so Fabia goes out and sprays it with the same fast setting enamel that she used to make her suit airtight: the guard grinds to a halt. Fabia later explains to Banion that it was obviously solar powered and, by the way, she is a Terrestrial League Policeman who organised his sacking and stowed away to recover the proto.
This is a formulaic pulp tale, and all a bit unlikely, but it’s fast paced, the solar-powered guard (and way it is incapacitated) is a neat enough idea, and it is notable and atypical for the period that Fabia (the “girl”) is ultimately the story’s brains and hero.
** (Average). 6,100 words. Story link.
The Four Spider-Societies of Proxima Centauri 33G by Mercurio D. Rivera
The Four Spider-Societies of Proxima Centauri 33G by Mercurio D. Rivera (Analog, March-April 2022) sees a rather callow young man involved in four first contact scenarios on a planet of alien spiders. During the first he accidentally punches a Rantulaharan off his floating scooter; the second society is a monarchy and their the queen refuses to meet them; the third have a force shield; and the fourth, slow moving burrowers, arrive with bowls of meat bobbing in blue liquid—when the narrator eats one (spoiler) he discovers that he has consumed an alien elder.
There is a final note to the narrator’s father saying that the mission is a wash-out and, while writing this, he ignores the AI telling him that the force-field society have decided they want to trade.
This a tongue-in-cheek piece, but I found it more silly than amusing.
* (Mediocre). 2,950 words.
Sailing to Merinam by Marta Randall
Sailing to Merinam by Marta Randall (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) has the narrator onboard a boat that is taking a group of male passengers (unpleasant religious types) from Cherek to Merinam. As the story progresses we find out that the narrator is intersex, but is disguised as a man, and that they can conjure up the wind by singing. Both of these would be intolerable to the Merinami passengers:
What do these stern people and their ugly religion do to people like me, women who are not boys and boys who are not girls, people who sing, people who whistle up the wind? [. . .] If the yellow priest knew he would have hurled that accusation at me. Worse than singing or being inbetween, worse than being in disguise? What do the Merinami do to singing witches wearing the wrong clothing? Will they try to hang me and drown me both? My knees give out and I scoot backward under my master’s bunk, where the ship’s cat finds me and head-butts my thigh until I make a lap for her, she hops into it, I lift her and rub my face against her belly. Warmth, softness, purring, I begin to catch my breath. p. 86
After various events (the narrator saves a sailor caught by a rope, is seen momentarily conjuring the wind by singing, etc.), the Yellow Priest of the Merinami accuses them of being a woman. After a period of confinement (spoiler) they are brought in front of the captain. The narrator then conjures the wind and a huge wave that has the face of the Sea God. This briefly imperils the boat but, after the vessel has stabilised, the captain orders everyone below deck and the narrator is not troubled further.
After the ship reaches Merinam, and the passengers are disembarked, she becomes one of the crew (the captain is a pragmatist who realises the value of someone who can summon the wind).
I thought this was quite good, mostly because it is one of those immersive pieces1 that you can lose yourself in—and it has an arc/plot as well. I hope this is the first of a series.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,000 words.
1. Although the prose is better than normal, there are some very odd sentences which look more like copy-editing mistakes than stylistic choices by the author:
They don’t like it [on deck] for the wind and the spray they are, I think, afraid of the ship of the sea of the crew of the captain. p. 84
Is this supposed to be “They don’t like it there because of the wind and spray and are, I think, afraid of the sea and the crew and the captain.” If not, I’m not sure this jumbled sentence structure tells us anything about the character or is enough to make it stream-of-consciousness.
There is also this:
He raises an eyebrow. You have no interest in Merinami religion I know you too well, if you have done anything, Nothing just curious, that’s all, perhaps, I offer, disingenuous, they consider it a sin if someone can carry a tune. p. 85
I suspect there are other examples I missed.
Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood
Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts on the Frying Pan Tower (modelled on an oil rig), where the narrator, a physics professor called Kate Nardozi, watches as “huge bursts of sand bubble up through the shallow water.” When the event is over, she calls her robot Mitch and asks him how big the new atoll is: nine hundred and twelve feet.
After this confusing start we get information about gravity wave transmitters and “quantum sparks” before Kate’s ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend Duke (another academic) turn up. The rest of the story sees land and sea continue to swap, and romantic and academic competition between Kate and Duke. Eventually they all land up on a ship that runs aground, and Kate finds that Duke has tampered with her gravity machine. Then the robot goes back in time to stop it all happening in the first place.
I know that this is supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek piece but the story’s odd events are hard to follow, and it’s not amusing.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words.
Generations by Megan Lindholm
Generations by Megan Lindholm (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is a short squib that opens with a young woman waiting with a wheelchair for an elderly auntie. At first we think that this is happening at an airport, but when the auntie arrives it soon becomes clear (spoiler) that they are in a park, and that she is an exhausted superhero who has just finished saving people from a fire. I’m not sure what the point of this is supposed to be.
* (Mediocre). 950 words.