Tag: 2.5*

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.

Kitecadet by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kitecadet by Keith Roberts (Interzone #6, Winter 1983) is the second in his series of ‘Kiteworld’ stories, all of which are set in a post-holocaust world where Kitemen fly patrols in huge kites over the radioactive badlands which surround the Realm: this one opens with a newly graduated Kitecadet called Raoul getting on a transport to go to Middlemarch, the Realm’s main settlement.
During Raoul’s preparations to leave, and his journey to the city, we see the day to day detail of a Kitecadet’s life, and learn that (a) Raoul is newly qualified (despite not having completed his first operational flight) and (b) that he and another cadet called Olsen bear a serious grudge against each other.
Later in the journey, Raoul gets his first sight of Middlemarch:

Far off, the mountains of the Westguard loomed in silhouette, like pale holes knocked in the sky. To right and left, as far as the eye could reach, the land rose to other heights; while below, dwarfed by the vast bowl in which it lay yet still it seemed stretching endlessly, lay Middlemarch, greatest city in all the Realm.
Somebody whooped; and abruptly the spell was broken. The Cadets fell to chattering like magpies as the Transports began their slow, cautious descent. Raoul joined in, pointing to this and that wonder; the Middle Lake, the great central parkland where on the morrow the Air Fair would begin, the pale needle-spires of Godpath, Metropolitan Cathedral of the Variants. The sprawling building beside it, he knew from his books and lectures, was the Corps headquarters; beyond was the Mercy Hospital, the Middle Doctrine’s chief establishment. Beyond again loomed other towers, too numerous to count; while in every direction, spreading into distance, were the squares and avenues, the baths and libraries and palaces of that amazing town. To the south Holand, the industrial suburb, spread a faint, polluting haze, but all the rest was sparkling; clear and white, like a place seen in a dream.  p. 29

The next day the cadets go to the Air Fair and see a character from the first story, the legendary kiteman Canwen, make a record breaking altitude attempt. Then they attend a ceremonial dinner attended by another first story character, Kitemaster Helman. After this they go out on the town and, at one bar, Raoul starts chatting up one of the local barmaids. Later, when a drunk Olsen steams in and starts pawing her, a violent fight breaks out between Raoul, Olsen and some of the others, leaving Olsen badly beaten. The barmaid takes Raoul to her place before the Variant police arrive, and there she attends to his wounds before they later make love. Raoul leaves to return to base the next day.
After this the structure of the story becomes quite choppy—the next scene leaps forward in time to Raoul’s second visit to Middlemarch and the barmaid, where he is obviously traumatised by something that has happened to him. Then the story flashes back to his first operational flight (which presumably occurs between their first and second encounters). During this (spoiler), and as a result of the sabotage of his kite by Olsen, Raoul crashes in the badlands and has an encounter with one of the creatures that live there:

The shouts carried to him. ‘The basket, the basket. . . .’ He understood, at last; it was tilted to one side, carrying far too much weight. He grabbed the pistol from its wicker holster, but he was too late; the thing that had boarded him already had his wrist. It was no bigger, perhaps, than a three or four year child, and its skin was an odd, almost translucent blue. It was mature though, evidently; he saw that it was female. Dreadfully, appallingly female. The gun went off, wildly; then it was jerked from his hand. The basket rebounded again; but the other didn’t relax its grip. He stared, in terror. What he saw now in the eyes was not the hate he’d read about, but love; a horrifying, eternal love. She stroked his arm, and gurgled; gurgled and pleaded, even while he took the line axe, and struck, and struck, and struck. . .  p. 42

The last short scene sees Raoul fleeing from the barmaid in some distress.
This is a story that, although I enjoyed its separate parts, doesn’t work structurally. Part of the reason for this is the change of pace and time that occurs in the last part—for most of its length it is a slow-moving piece that describes the character’s world and his place in it; at the end the climactic scenes jump about in time and the kite accident section is much faster paced. I’d also add that the first time I read this piece I had no idea that the blue creature was a mutant and not some other demon or monster. There is probably be an argument for this story and the third one, Kitemistress, being combined into a longer piece, but I’ll perhaps come back to that with the next story.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,900 words. Story link.

Soroboruo Harbormaster’s Log by David Whitaker

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Soroboruo Harbormaster’s Log by David Whitaker (Analog, January-February 2022) is a short piece told in the form of AI diary entries (mostly) and tells of the arrival of a colony ship at a planet. Later entries tell of other ships that arrive later, some of which had been dispatched earlier than the first arrivals:

Soroboruo Colony
Sol Standard 16.42.12.18.2792
Arrival of Colony Ship Abel Tasman.
Vessel shows signs of minor damage, to be expected for pre-light-drive tech and duration of crossing. Still plenty of value, salvage crews dispatched.
Passengers surprised to find planet already settled, despite pre-launch briefing that postlaunch technological developments may present this possibility. Work force assignments drawn up and distributed.
Planetary Population: 16,973  p. 86

As earlier and earlier ships arrive, we see that some of them have fared poorly (especially the generation ones). Finally there is reasonably neat twist ending where (spoiler) they leave the planet for another one (humanity still hasn’t learned to live in harmony with its environment and has laid waste to the planet and surrounding solar system).
This isn’t bad (and is a lot better than most short-shorts) but some of the middle sections aren’t as effective as the others, and don’t seem to contribute to the thread of the story (the Junta one for instance). I think in something this short all the parts need to add something.
**+ (Average to Good). 700 words.

Orientation by Adam-Troy Castro

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Orientation by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, January-February 2022) takes the form of an alien giving an orientation briefing to a human abductee (or more accurately, a facsimile of a human—we learn from the briefing that the original remains untouched). We also learn, after various reassuring digressions caused by the off-stage questions from the human, about what is happening to them, where they are going, and the experiment in which they will have to participate.
This latter part, where the abductee is told (spoiler) that they will have to cooperate with another person—someone they can’t stand—stretches credulity somewhat, and the story doesn’t really convince. That said, this is entertainingly told, and has a great line: “It has become much more difficult to explain ourselves to our human test subjects, this past century or so. So many of you think you know everything.”
**+ (Average-Good). 3,250 words.

Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family’s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son’s in June, the daughter’s in August, and her dead husband’s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother’s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband’s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn’t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn’t think she was either.
The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.
This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.
 **+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nova Oobleck Surfs the Second Aether by Paul Di Filippo (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with Oobleck being accosted by a partner from a recent heist: Oobleck has swindled Manzello Lorikeet of his share, and he takes her sigil and a copy of her Kirlian aura (to unlock it). Lorikeet then shoots transposon particles at Oobleck, which sends her to the Second Aether, a multidimensional nexus that sends her to various other timelines over the course of the story:

For an infinitesimal moment after she was shot, a period that was all time and none, Nova Oobleck saw the essence of the Second Aether, with its hyperdimensional moonbeam roads twisting to infinity. And then she was jarringly reembodied in a new brane.
Stable once more, however temporarily, Nova felt her insides still shimmering from the invisible massless bundle of transposons that had burrowed into her gut at the impact point of the blast from Lorikeet’s Tegmark gun. It seemed almost as if the active particles were writhing like snakes inside her. Now and then, it struck her that she could sense an individual transposon dart away from its fellows, radiating outward and losing contact, thus bringing her that much closer to the end of her unanchored status and a permanent renewal of solidity. She sensed that when the knot of transposons achieved a certain phase-state, she would again be ejected from her place in this merely eleven-dimensional reality and sent randomly across the Second Aether. And there was nothing she could do to prevent it.  p. 51

Oobleck ends up in a timeline where she is the bombardier on an aircraft that is (according to the pilot) en route to bomb the Sultan’s Palace. At the same time as she drops the bomb the transposon particles energise to shift her to another reality, but the decoherence effect of the weapon sees the pilot and the plane come with her. They force land, and Nova gets out. When she is attacked by three trolls the pilot (a hive being) disassembles and attacks them.
When Nova shifts again she does so alone, and finds herself on a desert planet called Spalt. Eventually she comes upon the house of a self-exiled scientist called Barxax. He manages to stabilise her but, when he dies a year later, she shifts again. This time she ends up back in the Second Aether, where (spoiler) she is finally rescued by a multiverse ship commanded by Ona Von Bek. They then set off to retrieve Oona’s sigil.
This is a readable and engaging piece—there are touches of Vance and Moorcock—but ultimately it is a series of loosely connected episodes with a deus ex machina ending. Pleasant enough, just no real plot.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,050 words.

Sector General by James White

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sector General by James White (New Worlds #65, November 1957) is the first of a long series of stories,1 and it gets off to a pretty good start with an alien spaceship coming out of hyperspace beside the Sector Twelve General Hospital:

The Telfi were energy-eaters. Their ship’s hull shone with a crawling blue glow of radioactivity and its interior was awash with a high level of hard radiation which was also in all respects normal. Only in the stern section of the tiny ship were the conditions not normal. Here the active core of a power pile lay scattered in small, sub-critical, and unshielded masses throughout the ship’s Planetary Engines room, and here it was too hot even for the Telfi.
The group-mind entity that was the Telfi spaceship captain—and crew—energised its short-range communicator and spoke in the staccato clicking and buzzing language used to converse with those benighted beings who were unable to merge into a Telfi gestalt.
“This is a Telfi hundred-unit gestalt,” it said slowly and distinctly. “We have casualties and require assistance. Our classification to one group is VTXM, repeat VTXM….”  pp. 4-5

After this the story continues with Dr Conway, a medic who has recently arrived at the Sector General. As he wanders around its corridors, we learn that (a) all species are described by a four letter codes, (b) there are doctors from a variety of species in the hospital (c) the hospital has multiple treatment environments, and (d) the pacifistic Conway does not like the Monitors, the “military peacekeepers”, who run the hospital.
The rest of the tale is a fairly episodic affair. Conway is summoned to treat the Telfi, but first has to go to the tape room, where he will be programmed with an alien physiology learning tape. When Conway sees the Chief Psychologist in charge of the process, O’Mara, is a Monitor, Conway’s attitude shows. O’Mara subsequently tells Conway that he wants to talk to him after the tape programming is removed.
Conway then goes to treat the Telfi, later dodging the interview with O’Mara by not getting the programming removed. Instead, he goes on his rounds but, after dealing with his first patient, a hypochondriac crocodile-like being called Chalder, Conway starts to feel cold and lonely. This turns out to be a side-effect of the learning tape, which is making Conway act like a Telfi, and his symptoms develop to the point that he leans against the dining hall oven and scorches his clothes. When he eventually recovers consciousness he gets a dressing down from O’Mara for not mentioning it was his first tape (which made him more susceptible to what happened).
The next part of the story sees Conway encounter a large number of Monitor troops who have arrived at the station; they have been in combat and need treatment, and this causes the doctor to do more brooding. Before he can consult another doctor about the way he feels, more troops arrive needing attention. As he treats them Conway learns that they have been intervening in a human-DBLF (a caterpillar-like alien) war, and that the Monitor who is telling Conway about this looks as disgusted as he does. Eventually, Conway learns the Monitors aren’t the warlike people he thinks they are, and that his own social group is a “protected species”:

Conway said, “What?”
“A protected species,” he repeated. “Shielded from the crudities of present-day life. From your social strata—on all the worlds of the Union, not only on Earth—come practically all the great artists, musicians, and professional men. Most of you live out your lives in ignorance of the fact that you are protected, that you are insulated from childhood against the grosser realities of our interstellar so-called civilisation, and that your ideas of pacifism and ethical behaviour are a luxury which a great many of us simply cannot afford. You are allowed this luxury in the hope that from it may come a philosophy which may one day make every being in the galaxy truly civilised, truly good.”  pp. 26-27

At the end of this lecture/data dump (spoiler), a spaceship crashes into the station, and a blundering alien patient runs amok in the gravity control section. This sets up an extended final act, which sees Conway make a perilous journey into the area where the alien is rampaging. There he undergoes a crisis of conscience when he is told to kill the alien to stop the catastrophic casualties that the fluctuating gravity field is causing. (Conway eventually, and reluctantly, does so, but the author bottles out of his Trolley Problem2 by having Conway later discover that the alien has the sentience of a dog).
This story has some pretty good parts (the multi-species hospital, the interesting aliens, etc.) but it is (a) overlong (the couple of thousand words after the climax are largely redundant, not to mention Conway’s overdone—and at times somewhat unconvincing and ill-informed—pacifistic agonising), (b) uneven (the gobbets of exposition and moralising), and (c) generally gives the impression of a writer who is trying to run before he can walk. The later stories were better, but this is a promising start.
**+ (Average to Good). 17,700 words. Story link.

1. The ISFDB page for the Sector General series is here.

2. The Wikipedia page for the philosophical conundrum of the Trolley Problem.

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.

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.

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:

Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning.  pp. 80-81 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.