Tag: short story

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl (Asimov’s SF, January 1985)1 opens in the TWA terminal at JFK airport after a maritime military exchange leads to an imminent nuclear war. Initially the story focuses on a young boy called Timothy, who has lost his parents in the crowds trying to flee New York, but we are soon introduced to another character, Harry Malibert, a SETI astronomer sitting in the temporary island of calm that is the Ambassador Club. The two are flung together in the increasing chaos at the airport and, when Malibert gets the offer of a flight to Iceland just as the nuclear attack warning sounds, he takes Timothy with him.
The central part of the story sees the two arrive and settle in Iceland (just as Reykjavik is accidentally nuked by a bomb meant for the US airbase at Keflavik), and details, in graphic and precise detail, the nuclear winter that encompasses the globe—killing off nearly all of the remaining survivors:

The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled.
The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.
And the darkness stayed.
The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.
The missiles went off on the 11th of June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.  p. 87

During this period Malibert parents Timothy and works as a geothermal engineer (Iceland’s constant supply of hot water provides its survivors with heat and electricity, which means artificial light for crops), and Malibert later has time to run an informal SETI club—this is where the “Fermi” of the title enters the story, from Fermi’s Paradox: if there are aliens out there, why haven’t we met them?

“One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.  p. 92

Shortly after this the story—which had been interesting, detailed, and well developed—comes to an odd ending where Pohl goes all meta, stating in an authorial voice that in one ending sunlight returns too late to save the Icelandic survivors, but that in another ending they survive and, generations later, aliens finally arrive. (“But that is in fact what did happen! At least, one would like to think so.”)
An irritating finish to an otherwise good story.
*** (Good). 6,200 words.

1. Pohl won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Story for this, an achievement which hugely overrates the piece. Perhaps 1985 wasn’t a particularly strong year in this category—the other Hugo finalists, which I haven’t read but haven’t heard of either, were: Flying Saucer Rock & Roll by Howard Waldrop; Snow by John Crowley; Dinner in Audoghast by Bruce Sterling; Hong’s Bluff by William F. Wu.)

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg (The Arcanist, June 2021) opens with this:

The ticks dropped down from the trees thick as sleet. I’d been out hunting with my brother, Paul, when it happened. They fell in great heaps, burrowing into us, tangling themselves up in our hair, our clothes. We had to shake them from our boots. Out they spilled, endless grains of living sand scouring our toes for blood. We found them days later under our armpits, the backs of our knees, the crannies of our earlobes. And then the telltale bullseye would emerge, hot and red. I’d gotten tick bites before, but never like this. I was a feast for an entire generation.

Subsequently the brothers are repelled at the thought of eating meat (or diary), and their similarly affected father—who persists—ends up in hospital due to a physical reaction.
We then see that ticks have spread all over the world, as has the condition that has affected the narrator’s family. The resultant rejection of animal products causes the collapse of those industries and a forced shift to a vegan diet.
The story finishes with the two brothers at the local creek. When they hear a rustling noise they don their ponchos as they think it is an approaching swarm of ticks, but (spoiler) it turns out to be a female moose and her calf coming down to drink—the first time that animal has been seen in the area for decades.
This is quite good as far as it goes, but it’s a very slight piece—an if-this-goes-on SF story compressed into a literary vignette. If this idea had been used in an genre SF story it would probably have been much longer, had multiple point of views,1 and would telescope through time from the beginning of the change to the end.
**+ (Average to Good)

1. The Grand Guignol version would have a thread which has an abattoir worker killing animals, being laid off, hitting rock bottom, and then returning to the factory to shoot himself in the head with a bolt gun.

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler (F&SF, January-February 2021) opens with the narrator recounting a childhood memory of the day that the king and queen came through his village; the narrator’s sister was given a disk with the king’s symbol, a red dragon, on one side.
The story then moves to the current day, where we get some brief information about the village and the narrator’s marriage plans before learning that the king has gone to war. The army subsequently passes through town, and the narrator and his friend Henry are recruited.
The pair endure a long, hard march to the sea and at one point the company shelter in a cave. When the narrator goes to relieve himself he finds a passage that takes him back to the surface. He sleeps there and, when he wakes the next day, he sees the skeleton of a dragon (“the king’s dragon”) embedded in a nearby rock face. The commander sees it as a sign.
When they finally arrive at the coast (spoiler) the narrator decides to desert and go back to his village. En route, he wonders what he’ll tell his family and neighbours on his return:

I would have to explain to the village why I was back and everyone else gone, and it couldn’t be a story that made me a coward, a deserter, and a man who didn’t love his king. I wasn’t yet sure how this story would go, but I wasn’t really worried about that. I had twelve whole days to work it out and I could already see its bones.  p. 256

I can understand why a departing editor (who is off to write his own tales) might use this as the final piece in their last ever issue, but the arc of this story seems pointless: young man goes to war, changes mind, goes home. Littering it with dragon images doesn’t much improve that.
* (Mediocre). 3,000 words.

Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020) is set on Earth two hundred years from now. It is a better place than now, but one that has abandoned its Mars colony and dreams of space exploration.
The story opens with the narrator getting a call from a call from a school friend to say he’s found a copy of a long lost show called Star Trek at a site he’s developing, and the narrator’s wife agrees to screen the show (the library she works at has the tech to read the recording’s ancient format). The three of them then meet the next morning to watch it—only to find the disc contains a fan production. The friend shrugs off his disappointment, and agrees to let the wife copy the disc for the museum.
That night the narrator and his wife watch the show at home:

The storyline wasn’t great, but it was okay. It wasn’t the narrative that caught our attention. It was entering the ring system at the gas giant. And watching stars pass steadily through the windows of the Republic. And looking down on other planets. The special effects took us for a serious ride.
“I think the magic,” said Sara, “is knowing it was put together by people who believed it was coming.”   p. 164

The show becomes a hit at the museum, and then the series is remade, which in turn provides stimulus for new research in space/warp flight.
If you are in the mood for a mawkish, boosterish tale about how Star Trek will inspire future generations to travel into space, and one that includes a three page synopsis of a fan show, then this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine, and reads like something that was pulled out of Analog’s slush pile.
– (Poor). 4,000 words.

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas; there is just too much going on in this short piece.
** (Average). 7,250 words.

Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell

Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) opens with Rena driving across the Nevada desert in a barely functioning electric car when she comes upon a deserted automotel:

[Here] sat the Rock Springs AutoMotel like a postcard from the past, its electric sign flashing SWIM and AC and VACANCY: a single-story, L-shaped building, spread low beside a parking lot with one lonesome, dust-coated truck. Behind a chain-link fence the pool sparkled in the sunlight, a cleaning skimmer dancing across its surface. It had to be real, that water—maybe those Rock Springs still existed, underground somewhere now. Next to the pool, dangling small plump feet, sat a little girl, staring back.
How was that even possible? Settlement was illegal from the Rockies to the Sierras. Back in Chicago the tabloids babbled about outlaw gangs preying through the mountains, doomsday cults, radioactive corpses piled by the roadside. Military escorts guarded cargo trucks driving between Vegas and LA. But on 50 Rena had seen nothing and nobody—only the remnants of gas stations, dried-out husks of ruined towns, and dispirited clumps of dead brush. From horizon to horizon, nothing was moving but her and a few wary birds.
On the Coast, with its forests and desalinization plants and fish-filled oceans, tourists still drove up and down, burning money on hotels and restaurants. Or so people said back home, wondering in hushed tones, dreaming in the winter cold. So Rena wanted to believe.  p. 58

Rena tries to communicate with the eight-year-old girl but her Spanish lets her down, so she goes into the reception and gets a room from the automated system. Then she has a shower, and is delighted that the motel seems to have plentiful water. But, when she tries to order food, she finds that there isn’t anything available.
The rest of this post-apocalypse story includes some backstory about Rena’s trans lover Mike (who has ended up somewhere else for a reason I can’t remember), and her discovery of a smuggler who has been locked in a room by the motel’s security software. Rena also eventually realises that the automotel AI has been looking after the young girl.
The story ends (spoiler) with Rena freeing the man, who has promised to drive her to Tahoe. After some discussion, including about how much food the motel has left, Rena manages to convince the AI to let the girl go with them to the coast.
This is an engaging and well told story but matters rather work out of their own accord—which makes for a rather pedestrian ending.
*** (Good.) 6,000 words.

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias

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GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2020) sees a PandaPillow (an AI comfort accessory) in the overhead locker of an aeroplane sense an explosive decompression in the cabin:

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.
With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two closeups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.
PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?
COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programing. Powering down wouldn’t do that.
PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.  p. 89

This call to a (perplexed) customer support team is the only distress message sent from the aircraft and, while they raise the alarm, the PandaPillow starts doing what it can to help the other bots in the cabin deal with the unconscious human passengers and seal the hull. It performs a number of key actions during the emergency and, ultimately, glues itself over a failing window. Eventually (spoiler), a limpet repair missile docks with the plane’s hull, takes control, and lands the aircraft safely.
Despite its heroic actions the PandaPillow is initially overlooked after they land, but is later fêted as a hero.
Some of the early action is hard to visualise but this is an entertaining piece, and the touching last section drags it up another notch.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words.

It’s Smart to Have an English Address by D. G. Compton

Posted on by Paul Fraser

It’s Smart to Have an English Address by D. G. Compton (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) sees Paul Cassavetes, a celebrated 84 year old pianist on his way to visit Joseph Brown, a composer he knows. As Cassavetes is driven there we see (his driver is doing 130mph in the slow lane, among other things) that we are in a near-future world.
When Cassavetes arrives at Brown’s house he is taken into a soundproof room (the need for such security seems odd to Cassavetes), and Brown plays his new sonata. Afterwards, as two men discuss the work, it becomes apparent that the piece is only an excuse for Brown to see Cassavetes about another matter, and another visitor joins them. Dr McKay, who works with XPT (experiential recordings of brain waves which are then superimposed onto another person to let them relive the experience of the person providing the recording), tells Cassavetes that they want to “record” him playing Beethoven. Cassavetes isn’t keen but before he can explain this to them (spoiler) he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage.
This is a very descriptive story (it takes three pages for Cassavetes to drive to the house), and better characterised than other SF of the time, but I just don’t see the point of it all.
* (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss (Orbit #2, 1967) opens with Balank climbing up a hill alongside his trundle (a robotic vehicle) as he hunts for a werewolf. At the top of the hill there is a clearing, and there he meets a forester called Cyfal. Balank tells Cyfal he is hunting a werewolf, and asks if he has seen one. Cyfal says that there have been several passing through the area. Then, as it is a full moon that evening, Cyfal manages to convince Balank to stay the night.
As the pair have supper that evening we learn a lot about this world, including the fact that their cities are run by machines—machines that have linked up through time, and send video back to the past. Balank and Cyfal view this on their wristphones, and generally catch up on the news after they have eaten. We also learn from their conversation that Cyfal isn’t particularly enamoured of their machine cities and, at one point, states that “humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.”
Cyfal then sleeps while Balank uses his “fresher” for an hour (a mechanism that negates the need for sleep, and which trades an hour of consciousness for 72 hours awake). When Balank rouses himself afterwards he realises that he has never seen any people in the videos that the machines have sent back in time. Then he notices that Cyfal is dead, his throat ripped out. When he examines the body he sees a piece of fur and notices a letter on it, which may mean it is synthetic and left to confuse him. When Balank goes outside he sees the trundle coming back from patrol, and interrogates it before showing the machine what has happened to Cyfal. Then they leave.
While they are walking (spoiler), the trundle asks Balank why he hid the fur he found beside Cyfal’s body—at which point Balank flees, as he realises that the machine couldn’t have known about the fur unless it left it there. Balank escapes across a crevasse and takes cover as the trundle shoots at him.
The rest of the story is then told from the viewpoint of Gondalung, a werewolf watching from higher ground. The creature observes the machine attempt to cross—and Balank waiting to ambush it when it is at its most vulnerable, straddling both sides of the crevasse. Gondalung doesn’t care who survives the encounter, and realises that, in the future, the werewolves’ struggle will be against the machines.
There are lots of intriguing ideas and super-science passages peppering this story, but I’m not sure that the disparate elements come together at the end (even if there is some point about savagery winning over civilization). A pity, as this is an interestingly dense piece for the most part.
** (Average). 4,650 words.

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty

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Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty (Galaxy, September-October 1967) is one of his ‘Institute for Impure Science’ series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred years of darkness that occurred after a brief period of enlightenment. To achieve this they send an avatar (“partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction”) to intercept a man called Gano, whose ambush of Charlemagne’s rear-guard led him to close the borders to the East and initiate a period of cultural isolation.
After their intervention the timeline changes, but the group don’t realise it (and there are also three computers now, and ten people). So they have another go, this time by preventing John Lutterell’s denunciation of Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences.
The next iteration leaves them once more oblivious to the changes they have wrought, and their world is now much more backward (they are down to three people and a computer made out of sticks and weed). When they make another change, things go back to the way they are (I think—the last short section isn’t that clear).
This is all told in Lafferty’s quirky and digressive style, and with the odd touch of humour, such as when they initially discuss the use of the avatar:

“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”
“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”
“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”
“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.
“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”
“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.
“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”  p. 259

This is an entertaining read for the most part, but the ending is weak.
** (Average). 4,200 words.