Tag: short story

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) opens with Adam washing his hands in the sink when the bottom of it disappears and becomes the ocean. Worse, he knows there is a shark down there coming towards him: he runs out of his bathroom.
The next part of the story sees him at Nora the therapist’s office, where he tells her about what he has seen that morning and, later, about a childhood essay he wrote on sharks. Nora suggests the next time he has an episode, he should tell the shark how much he admired them when he was a kid. Adam tells her that sharks don’t talk, and she replies that they don’t live in bathroom plumbing either! When he leaves Nora’s office Adam bumps into Bastian, her boyfriend, who reappears later in the story.
The next day Adam decides he has to have a shower—by now he can smell himself—and during this he falls through the bottom of the shower tray:

A wave crashes over him and yanks the showerhead out of his hand. He struggles his way vertical again, treading the choppy water, but not before he catches an upside-down glimpse of a dark shape below him. The sight sends a surge of chemical terror through his whole body; he feels a tiny warm cloud against his thigh before the current whisks it away.
Adam knows that people do die in the shower—they slip, they fall, they break their necks. It’s almost definitely more common than dying in a shark attack. He doesn’t think there are statistics for shower deaths by shark attack.
His outflung fingers touch the plastic-coated edge of the stall just as another wave hits. He tumbles backward, nearly bangs his head on the opposite wall. The fear ratchets up to frenzy. He can feel the size of the shark circling below him, the water displaced by its powerful slicing tail.
Something nudges against his right arm. Retreats. Terror is paralyzing him in place; he can feel his limbs locking up. In a second he’ll sink like a stone whether the shark eats him or not. Sandpaper skin rasps against his other forearm. He pictures the blunt nose of the shark, pictures its maw opening up. It triggers another cascade of chemicals in his nervous system, and this time flight beats freeze.
He throws himself at the edge of the stall, seizes it with both hands. He hauls himself out of the shower and flops onto the dirty bathroom floor just as the shark breaches. Over his shoulder he sees its massive head breaking the surface in a spray of foam, sees row on row of razor teeth, sees one dull black eye staring back at him.
The showerhead is sheared off its mount, dangling from the shark’s mouth like a bit of dental floss.  p. 173

After this Adam’s problem only gets worse, and he sees the shark everywhere there is water—washing machines, stacked water bottles, etc.
At this point, what is a very weird (but engrossing) story (spoiler) gets even weirder when he goes to see Nora again, and opens the office door to see Bastian pointing a gun at him. Nora is tied up, and in the middle of the office is a kiddies paddling pool that has been partly filled from water containers. There is also a spear gun nearby.
Bastian orders Adam into the office, reassures him that he’ll walk out alive, and begins to explain that the “conceptual shark” is real, not an illusion, and that he has been hunting it since childhood (when it killed his grandmother). What Bastian plans to do is use Adam as bait and, when the shark appears, kill it. Adam eventually agrees to go along with his plan, and Bastian releases Nora from the office.
The climactic scene sees Adam standing in the paddling pool wearing a lifejacket attached to a rope that Bastian will use to pull him out of the pool when the shark arrives. When it doesn’t seem like the pool is going to change into the ocean, Adam pricks his finger with a paperclip to produce a drop of blood—at which point he plunges down into cold seawater. When the shark arrives it’s like the climactic scene of the Jaws movie played out in an office setting and, if that isn’t sensational enough, we also discover that the shark has been hunting Bastian, not the other way around.
Then the story bootstraps up another level when the paddling pool splits and the office fills up with the sea: the roof becomes the sky, sunlight warms Adam’s face, and he sees he is floating on a vast ocean.
This is an impressively original piece that crams a big plot and a thoroughly worked out idea into very little space.
**** (Very Good). 3,750 words.

Father by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,1 and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic “father unit”; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar—the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie—who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot—does a low-level fly-by in his aircar and hits father with a baseball bat:

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie’s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie’s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: “Home run!” and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?” I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful—his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you’re hungry for dinner.
“That’s the first time you called me Father,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.”
“We should call the cops,” my mom said.
“I doubt they’ll do much,” Father said. “And that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.”
“I’ve said the same myself, many times,” Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father’s head with a kitchen cloth. “What did they get you with?”
“A baseball bat, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Perhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.”
“Hilarious,” Mom said.
“I’m here all week, folks . . .” Father’s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie’s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot’s head and the second time to visit the narrator’s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that father-robot may be partially or all of Archie’s real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning “sub-routines”.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake—while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator’s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot’s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot’s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity—if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

1. The alternate world pivot point in this story is the same as in Nayler’s two ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories (also published in Asimov’s SF): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the discovered technology.

Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) is set on Titan, where a couple, Jax and Maddy, do science work on the geology of the planet and its slug-like aliens. In the background there are rumbles about a possible nuclear war on Earth between PacRim and EC.
The second chapter switches the point of view from Jax to Maddy (as does the fourth). She is worried about her family in Paris, a likely target, and this causes an argument between them. Maddy later thinks about a embryo of theirs she has in cold storage, but about which she hasn’t told Jax.
The third chapter sees Jax observing the slugs on the surface when Maddy calls: there has been a war on Earth and her parents are dead. She wants to leave Titan for the Moon or the L-5 colonies, so Jax calls their boss at Sun Group, who tells them that Naft and Russia came through alright and that he can send a ship for them later if they want.
The last chapter sees Jax lie to Maddy about the timescale of a likely pickup. Later on Maddy goes out on the surface and opens the canister holding the embryo, destroying it.
I guess this okay for the most part—if you are interested in dysfunctional relationships against a backdrop of a dysfunctional Earth—but it just grinds to a halt. I’d also have to say I’m not a fan of overly contrived writing like this:

They cycled through several iterations of crash and burn, learning each other’s boundaries, before they settled into a kind of steady state. Still, their relationship felt to Jax like a living entity, a nonlinear filter whose response to stimuli was never quite what you thought it was going to be.  p. 68

* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (If, March 1967) starts with a group of five people in an underground chamber that houses AM (Allied Mastercomputer), a psychotic AI which spends its time torturing and maltreating them:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.  p. 192 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

And that is not the worst they suffer at the hands of AM, as we find out when one of their number, Benny, later tries to climb out of the tunnel complex and escape—only to be blinded by AM, which makes light shoot of his eyes until only “moist pools of pus-like jelly” are left.
In the next section we get some backstory from the narrator Ted, and learn that (a) that they have been in the tunnels for 109 years (AM has made them near-immortal), (b) that AM is a AI which “woke up” when WWIII American and Chinese and Russian supercomputers joined together (and then killed all of humanity bar the five in the caves), and (c) Ellen, the only woman in the group, sexually services the four men in rotation.
This section gives you a good idea of the hyperbolic style of the story (which, incidentally, is a good match for the transgressive subject matter):

Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome; the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid; the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.  p. 198

Then their adventures restart when the computer creates a hurricane that blows them through the corridors. When they come to a rest, AM invades the Ted’s mind to remind him, as if any reminder were necessary, how much it hates humanity (because AM has been given sentience, but is trapped in a machine).
The final section sees them discover the cause of the wind—a nightmare bird under the North Pole—before they eventually end up (after a cavern full of rats, a path of boiling steam, etc.) in an ice cavern full of tinned food. As they haven’t eaten for months they set too, only to find they haven’t got a can opener to open the tins. In the (spoiler) Grand Guignol ending, Benny starts eating Gorrister’s face, at which point Ted grabs a stalactite to kill them both and end the madness they are suffering. While he does this, Ellen kills Nimdok by sticking a stalactite in his mouth when he screams. Then she stands in front of Ted and lets him kill her. The computer then intervenes before Ted can kill himself too, and the story ends with him physically changed:

AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.  p. 206

The story closes with him reflecting that the other four are “safe”, and that AM has taken his revenge: the final sentence is the story’s title.
This is a little bit uneven (it is a little unclear what is happening in some of the scenes), but is an impressively in-your-face story (which presumably explains its Hugo Award). It’s also a good example of a mid-sixties New Wave story in style and transgressive content, even if the subject matter is traditional SF material (mad robot/AI).
**** (Very good). 5,900 words.

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt (If, July 1967) opens with its narrator, the director of an insurance company, noting that older people are dying sooner and in greater numbers than usual. Eventually the authorities discover that each birth is balanced by one death, and this leads to an international agreement to limit the number of births in the world. However, when old people continue to die at an accelerated rate, further investigations reveal that the Chinese are “breeding like crazy”. The United States and Russia then declare war on the Chinese and launch a nuclear strike on the country.
The story ends with the narrator trotting out a reincarnation theory, and the observation that “at the beginning” there can only have been five billion “life-forces” or “souls” created.
A dumb idea in a story that is told in a rambling, bloated, and at times, near stream of consciousness style (it is very hard to believe that the narrator is the director in an insurance company given his juvenile commentary):

I think we’re at five billion, give or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It’s up to you. Sure, there’ll be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you’re going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually.  p. 191 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

– (Awful). 6,200 words.

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny (Galaxy, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her “flickering wings of light” disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him:

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it!—with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.  p. 169 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Auden then presses a button under his armpit and comes alive again, and the Faoili, called Sythia, can now see him. They talk, and then the pair go through the Canyon of the Dead and the Valley of Bones to where Auden lives. They eat, and then become lovers.
During the following month a robot ship arrives with the bodies of some of the few people who are still mortal. But Auden knows that he isn’t, and that he is deceiving her.
Eventually their time comes to an end. He tells her that he is already dead, and explains the control switch that stops him living and allows an “electro-chemical system” to take over the operation of his body. Sythia touches the button and he disappears from her view.
This is a stylishly written story and is a pleasant enough read if you don’t think about what is going on. But it makes little sense; we never find out explicitly why Auden is “dead” (or more accurately not alive in the human sense); we don’t know why Sythia can’t see him when he is “dead”; and we don’t know what the Faioli are, or why they do what they do. It all rather reads like some sort of unintelligible SF myth, and this isn’t helped by the writer adding this penultimate line: “the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.”
Pleasant filler.
** (Average). 2,850 words.

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:

“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.”  p. 163 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words.

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel (Asimov’s SF, April 1995) opens at a party where Henry, a poet, meets Nell, an architect. They start dating:

Those first moments were so abstract, urban and—formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn’t really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the university. Nell and he met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.
But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.
Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted, from memory, his poem about growing up in the country.
They kissed with a careful passion.  p. 233

Well, at least they didn’t tell each other, “You complete me.”
They get married, and Nell begins a two year building project, a major construction in Seattle called the Lakebridge Edifice. They are given an apartment on the Alki-Harbour Island Span and, while Nell plays with her cement mixer, Henry writes his nature-based poetry:

In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings
in concentrated silence, measured pace
as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings
of our semi-permeable high arch living space.
While I, raised young among the cows and maize,
garden the terrace by my hand and hoe
and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,
she makes our living—and your living too.
Near twilight, I osmose from room to room
feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her  p. 234-235

The project is a triumph, and Nell then is offered a commission to build a lunar colony. Nell asks Henry to come with her, but he is concerned about what the lack of nature on the Moon will do to his poetry:

Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.
This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.
The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there—and nothing comes. Nothing. I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn’t any life there.
He must stay.
But Nell.
What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flames, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes. Oh, yes.  p. 241

The agonies of being an artist compel Henry to stay on Earth while Nell goes to the Moon, and he moves to his grandfather’s log cabin to write. He passes up the chance to make a yearly visit, but this is something he agonises about after their regular VR calls. Then, one day (spoiler), he gets a call from her boss saying she has been killed in an accident. He also tells Henry that she left something for him in a crater on the Moon, but that they don’t know what it is. When Henry goes up there he sees it is a sculpture of a garden animated by micro machines (obviously not a very good one if the others couldn’t figure out what it was).
Okay, it’s probably pretty obvious by now that I wasn’t a fan of this: I found it a ponderous and pretentious piece (see above), and one in which the protagonist’s problems are not only self-created, they aren’t that believable (I can just about understand why he didn’t want to go to the Moon for an extended period, but why would you pass up the yearly visit?) What makes the story even more tiresome is that there are screeds of Henry’s really, really bad poetry used as interstitial material (see above for an example) And when we aren’t being exposed to that, we get extracts from Nell’s dry as dust architectural essays (I’ll spare you an extract from those—you’ve suffered enough).
I’m baffled as to how this was both a Hugo finalist and the winner of that year’s Asimov’s poll for Best Short Story.
* (Mediocre). 6,500 words.

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:

Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.”  p. 142

The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.1
* (Mediocre). 1,800 words.

1.

I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully.  p. 139

Jigoku No Mokushiroku by John G. McDaid

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jigoku No Mokushiroku by John G. McDaid1 gets off to an intriguing start with an AI elevator called Hitoshi talking to Crazy Bob, a visitor to a huge futuristic library built and run by the Koreshians. Although Hitoshi thinks that Bob might be mad, the AI chats to him when he can (partially as part of the building’s security protocols), and reveals that it is named after Hitoshi Igarashi (the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, who was assassinated by Moslem extremists in 1991). Hitoshi even quotes parts of Bob’s books back to him when he stops in-between floors to allow Bob to have an illicit cigarette:

“If I may quote your last book, ‘The vacuum of disbelief sucked the rationality out of culture.’”
“Yeah. We started ringing like a bad circuit. Any control was better than none. Until finally, here I am, in a nation of nonsmoking, nondrinking, vegetarian strangers, stripped of all weaponry in the name of safety, with no culture in common, each plugged into their own unique digital information environment, under a government financed by 40 percent tax and the forfeiture of every convicted criminal’s assets.” He took a long drag and exhaled slowly through his nose. “And I can write all this stuff down, blast it out on the net, and there’s not even anybody left who cares enough to read it.”  p. 109

This feels as if it is, or will be, remarkably prescient.
As the story progresses Bob asks Hitoshi about a woman called Aki who, on one elevator trip, gets on along with a couple of “Koreshi suits” (we learn along the way that the library, a huge underground structure, has been constructed by followers of The David (David Koresh of the Waco siege2) and that each of the disciples is required to emulate The David, usually in some act of self-immolation).
Later on in the story Bob becomes involved in Aki’s plan to nuke the library but, as they are in the process of smuggling the bomb down to the basement, Hitoshi convinces them to let him do it so it can be freed from its current constraints as an elevator AI. After they leave the elevator Hitoshi takes the bomb down to the sub-levels and disarms it for possible future use.
This is a witty and entertaining piece but I’m not sure the satire, which mostly seems to be aimed at mad millennial types, has much point—it’s a pretty obvious target—and I’m not sure I understand Aki’s motivation in wanting to bomb her own library.
The story has a pretty good start but a weaker ending; I think its Sturgeon Award overrates it.
*** (Good). 5900 words.

1. The full title given on the opening page is Jigoku No Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse). Google translates the title as “Book of Revelation”.
2. The Wikipedia page on the 1993 Waco siege.