Tag: short story

Jessica Ann by F. E. Ellwood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jessica Ann by F. E. Ellwood (Argosy (UK), July 1955) introduces us to Ely, an apothecary to the seven witches in his area, and a man who is who is tempted by Jessica, a young witch who has recently arrived in the area and who suggests that they do away with the others. Ely agonises about the matter:

Ely looked at her solemnly. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were, after all, brighter than the speedwells . . .
“And old Mother Peasgood,” said Jessica. “She cured Margie Boss’s baby of her hacking cough o’ nights, and then she saw their little dog. She gave it one look out of her evil eye and it started to run backwards, and backwards-way forwards it’s been ever since. Now why, Ely, why?”
“The sabbath,” said Ely absently. “They beat them.”
“They?” said Jessica.
“The demons,” said Ely, “at the Meeting. They beat the witches who cure the coughs and charm the warts. The ones who do the mischief, now, they’re all right. But the ones who like a bit of both, like ours, they have to be careful. They daren’t not touch the goat if they’ve done something they’re going to be ashamed of. Things like mending young Tom’s back or giving the mixture for Margie Boss’s baby’s cough.”
[. . .]
“Think of it, Ely,” said Jessica, encouraged. “The medicines for the sick and the poor. The secret recipes of the witches. We could burn the wicked ones, Ely. Just the two of us and no more of the witching. And we could be married, Ely. In the church, with a real wedding, and Parson saying words over us. Think of it now, Ely.”
“Yes . . .” said Ely, and he stopped, aghast. Reforming zeal and the lengths to which the zeal will go were new to Ely. He looked at Jessica anxiously, but she was still the same Jessica, and still very beautiful.  p. 103

Of course (spoiler), after Ely poisons the other witches he finds that Jessica is no better than they were and, after some more agonising, decides if you can’t beat them, join them. He picks up a copy of Sorcerie for Ye Verie Begynner, and she takes down his Apothecary sign.
Minor but okay.
** (Average). 3,050 words.

The Magpie Stacks Probabilities by Arie Coleman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Magpie Stacks Probabilities by Arie Coleman (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) has as its narrator a female astronaut who managed to survive an accident in space by opening a hatch with an improvised tool based on a lost Allen key. The story itself takes place afterwards at her home with her wife and son. The latter has now started to secrete small items around the house; later, the narrator starts doing the same thing while musing about order and entropy.
There is no real story here, and I’m not sure what point the piece is trying to make (possibly none, it may just be a short mood piece).
* (Mediocre), 2,750 words.

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live—and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the “SmartHome Initiative Complex”, and soon moves into an affordable smart home with an inbuilt AI.
Initially the AI is a big help, but Theresa is not best pleased when it orders her daughter a new coat without asking her first. The situation sours further when Theresa gets an unexpected house call from a doctor:

“I’m Dr. Owosu, the on-call for the Complex. May I come in? It’s a bit chilly.”
Theresa found herself unable to say no.
[. . .]
“What?” she said, still trying to process what the man had said before coming in.
“I received a report of someone being sick in the house. Is it just you here?” Dr.
Owusu asked.
Theresa frowned. “No one is sick here.”
“I received a report around 4 A.M. for a fever of at least 100.8 degrees, miss.”
In that moment, Theresa’s blood went cold. “Home, what do you know about this?”
Without a moment of hesitation, Home replied, “I recorded Niyah’s temperature this morning to be above normal, thus indicating a medical need. I also took the liberty of arranging a genetically similar doctor to come to the house for your added comfort.”
“You what?” It was all so much to process. Theresa could feel her face heating, her anger rising. This SmartHome, this fucking robot—how dare it record their temperatures and know their ethnicities and pretend to know them?  p. 56

Imagine, an AI summoning a doctor for your sick child—how terrible.
After this, Theresa’s life settles into a routine where she works and looks after Niyah. She is able to afford a few luxuries, and starts banking with SmartBank as the fees are lower (and it makes it easier and cheaper to shop at the SmartStore the AI orders their goods from).
Matters eventually come to a head, however, when Theresa comes home on Niyah’s birthday and asks her daughter what she wants for her birthday meal. Niyah does not know and, although Theresa pesters her daughter for an answer, Niyah still doesn’t come up with a suggestion—and then the AI suggests that she may want the ratatouille from a film they watched earlier that week. The story ends with Theresa’s existential despair as she realises that the AI will always know what the two of them want and need better than she ever will:

There never was a choice. Home was always going to know what to do, and it had been showing Theresa that since the beginning. What made it unbearable, though, was that Home knew Niyah, her baby girl, better than Theresa did. A robot. And no matter what, Theresa couldn’t turn it off. Home was connected to the house, and the house was connected to the store, and all of it was intertwined with itself to the point where shutting one down completely cut off access to all the others. She couldn’t just turn Home off and pretend that she could live in the Complex without it. Despite the hatred boiling inside her, she needed Home. Because Home was taking care of them in every way possible.  p. 59

She then concludes, in the penultimate line, that her choices have been taken away from her.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one, but it’s pretty obvious to an external observer that, even given the AI’s irritating quirks, Theresa and her child are much better off than they were before they moved into the SmartHome. It’s also pretty obvious that Theresa still has her autonomy, because she could move out any time she wants. Only a control freak with a glass-half empty mentality would think otherwise.
This was an interesting piece to begin with, but the character’s personality, and her irrational ideas and attitudes (her territorial responses about Niyah, etc.), are quite illogical.
* (Mediocre). 4,650 words.

The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with the female narrator in a car with her partner Gavin as they drive to a cabin in the woods:

We always defaulted to the radio so there would be no argument over the music. We listened to the music the universe chose for us.
He smiled at me, a quick glance, and eyes back to the road. We had been dating for two years, living together for one, and recently we had been arguing, arguing so much and about everything—I loaded the dishwasher wrong, I went out with my friends every week, I was a bitch to his friend Steve. I wanted to take the job in Denver. He wanted to stay in Philadelphia.  p. 152

They arrive at the A-frame in the woods after dark, and unpack and have dinner—but it isn’t long before they are arguing about whether or not they should move, and to where. In the middle of this the narrator rushes outside and finds herself in the pitch black—and she thinks that her boyfriend has turned off the outside lights.
After she wanders around for a short time (spoiler) she sees the same golden glow that they saw in the woods earlier. Then the lights come on (or the narrator can see them again) and she goes back inside, where she appears to find a different (and improved) version of her boyfriend (initially there are hints—a stained cuff is clean—and then it becomes obvious when she can hear the old version of her boyfriend outside the cabin calling on her). She decides to stay with the new one.
I had no idea what was going on here, and the horror vibe ending (again, unexplained) didn’t work for me. I also thought that the troubled relationship stuff was, as usual, tedious.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
** (Average). 7,050 words.

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny, September-October 2020) has a long-ish set-up which sees an old man (on an otherwise deserted planet) create two robots, Brother and Sister, who subsequently change shape and roam their world in search of the heavy metals they need to sustain themselves. One day the old man falls ill and realises he will need to summon help—but he is wary of humanity. So, as he hasn’t been able to program his children to be suspicious, he tells them to hide. The wing-bearing Brother lifts Sister into orbit and they watch from behind a moon as a ship arrives and takes the old man away.
The second part of the story sees the pair roam through their solar system. During this they stumble upon a large spherical structure and, when there is no response to their signals, they start gorging themselves on the metal. Then, while they are distracted, something attacks them and they are taken prisoner.
On recovering consciousness Brother and Sister find that their attacker is a taloned amalgam of various mechanical parts, and it berates them for damaging its ship. However, once it finds out that Brother and Sister’s form-changing nanites can make him a larger set of wings, it says they will be set free in exchange for these (the pair do not know the machine, later referred to as Third Drone, is lying).
The final section (spoiler) sees Sister forage for materials so Brother can make the wings. During this Sister becomes suspicious of Third Drone, and teaches herself to lie (she tells herself that a pebble is black when it is really brown). Sister later tests her ability when Third Drone returns for her:

Third Drone reappeared, swooping down to pick her up and carry her to the next metal deposit. “Anything good?” they demanded.
“There was a black pebble,” said Sister, and waited for Third Drone to scream at her for her falsehood.
“And?” her captor said impatiently. “Did it have usable metal?”
“No,” said Sister, which was true whether the pebble was brown or black.
“Useless,” said Third Drone. “All these asteroids are useless. I will have to find some derelict mining outposts, if I am to get the metal for my wings.”
The lie had stood. Third Drone had not caught it. Third Drone believed that she had seen a black pebble. She had spread a deliberate error.
The universe picked itself up and spun around and landed in a different formation, but only inside her head. Third Drone noticed nothing. Sister hung silently from their talons and looked at the pebble again, to make sure that she herself was not in error.
It was still brown.

Sister eventually discovers that Third Drone wants to use its new wings to fly into the gas giant Chrysale and return to the surface to punish those who caused its exile. However, after Sister tests the wings in Chrysale’s atmosphere, we learn that she has sabotaged them when Third Drone plummets to the surface. Sister goes back to collect Brother but does not tell him about her ability to lie.
This is essentially a fairy tale1 about lying which is, for the most part, quite good if lightweight. Weaker ending though.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

1. I subsequently found out that this story won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. That way overrates it. I’d also note that another finalist, The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee, is also written like a fairy tale.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury (The Golden Apples of the Sun, 19531) is one of his prose poem stories, I suppose you would call them—tales where there is no particular story, but where a vivid, poetic image is developed. Here, that image is fire and ice:

“Temperature?”
“One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!”
The captain stared from the huge, dark-lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it for ever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical.
Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship—any small fire-breath that might seep through—would find winter slumbering here, like all the coldest hours of February.

As the temperature rapidly increases, a crewman falls to the floor dead (a faulty space-suit). There is more drama:

Their icicle was melting.
The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling. As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory-frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood.
On spring mornings as a boy, he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle on the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April, fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December’s weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the gravelled walk below.
“Auxiliary pump’s broken, sir. Refrigeration. We’re losing our ice!”

After they resolve this problem they eventually begin their mission, which is to extend a cup out of the spaceship to gather a sample of the Sun:

And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion, drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So we stretch out our hand with the beggar’s cup . . .

Insert smart comment about the relative ease of solar panels here.
One of Bradbury’s better efforts at this kind of thing.
*** (Good). 2,350 words.

1. The The Golden Apples of the Sun collection was first published in March 1953. The first magazine appearances were in Planet Stories, November 1953, and Argosy, July 1955 (the UK pocketbook magazine, not the US pulp).

Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts with Siob, a member of the far-future Dispersion of Humanity, remembering a faraway conflict before he arrives on a world where Thave (another member of the Dispersion) lives.
The planet is disguised to appear uninhabitable, and Thave lives through several host bodies in a futuristic underground city. Siob remonstrates with her about her choice (a dull section that seems essentially to be about cultural aesthetics).
Later, Siob asks Thave about other members of the Dispersion before he goes down to “Bedlam”—the final long stream of consciousness section of the book:

Outside the door, the city seethed, roiled, cacophonous. Brimming with people. Were they people? Brimming with dolls, brimming with shadows, brimming with monsters. I forced a smile, a monstrous gritted-teeth affair. “I can’t, Thavé. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have to go down.”
Thavé nodded (whatever that meant).
It was time for Bedlam.
There was a claw-hand of a moon, violent violet, digging down past my eyes, beneath the portal, the partial, the penetrating perorating peach perfection, capsized
capsized in an ocean of night.
That’s not right. Focus on the hands, on the hands—leather? of leather? Running through the heather.
(“I can see where I am, I can always see where I am. Dreaming with part of my brain. But how to interpret what I see? How to know if that—that—is a bed, a wall, a hand, a moon, a vault, a vertilex, a transix, a typhoon?”)
Cultural detox. Hallucenophenomenic aspects of.

I’m not entirely sure what goes on subsequently, but I vaguely recall a lot of memories and angst. And, of course, the two pages of blank verse, which were an especial treat.
There is a lot of surface glitter in this story but not, I think, much else.
* (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe1 (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.2)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
**** (Very Good). 5,650 words.

1. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

2. Mauled can’t be a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!