Tag: short story

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2022) is set in a future where humanity has uploaded itself to a virtual reality where people spend their time experiencing a variety of simulations:

Closing his eyes, Felix took a sip of the tea, held it in his mouth, and felt its warmth diffuse through his sinuses. It was an incredible detail, just like every other detail in the place. The feeling of physical presence, of reality, of existential weight. He could not deny that the Trainview Café was utterly unlike any other simulation program he had experienced in the decades since he had left his own human body behind. But all the same, Felix couldn’t see what all of these finely turned details added up to. What was the point, except to remind him of what he no longer was?
Slowly, Felix inverted the paper cup over the edge of the platform. Steam rose hissing as the remaining tea splattered onto the gravel below, staining it dark gray. He squashed the paper cup and threw it down onto the tracks, wondering how much longer he had to wait before he would be disconnected. He vaguely recalled that the program had charged him for forty-eight minutes. It was an unusual increment of time, but it had been the only one available. And it had been expensive, too: more expensive than twelve hours in most other high-end simulations. Yet, here he was, only twenty minutes in and already bored.  p. 118

Felix eventually becomes so bored that he goes down to the tracks and lies there, waiting for the next train to come—but, before this can happen, he is asked by a woman to move. She adds that his behaviour is spoiling the simulation for everyone else and, if he doesn’t do as he is told, she will disconnect him.
Felix gets back on to the platform and ends up having a conversation with the woman, Nancy, who tries to explain to him that the simulation is not event driven but is dedicated to detail. She then takes him to see goldfinches at a birdfeeder, explaining that the birds are rendered at close to cellular level, never repeating themselves or looping as would be the case in other simulations (“Practically speaking, at every level above the size of a cell, they are real birds”). Felix doesn’t get it, but the challenge of trying to understand what other visitors are getting from the simulation breaks through the ennui he has recently been experiencing (something highlighted when he revisits the Blue Glacier climbing simulation, an experience that was thrilling the first time he made the ascent but has now lost its attraction).
Felix subsequently makes another visit to the Train Station simulation, and once again upsets the people there by banging on the window and frightening the goldfinches away. Then, on his next trip, he arranges to meet Nancy, and they have a long back and forth conversation about the simulation and the philosophy behind it. Nancy suggests that, if he wants to spend more time there, he could become an admin. Felix declines. Then Nancy offers to show him one of the hacks that she and the other admins have been working on—the ability to get on an outbound train and stay there all night until they return to the train station the next day (this enables the users to permanently stay in the simulation, which would otherwise be a very expensive proposition due to the processing power required).
There are shortcomings to this hack, however, as Felix finds out when they both set off on the “Night Train” and he is told to close his eyes and keep them closed. When he does, Felix experiences the motion and sound of the train, but (spoiler) he is unable to just lie there and enjoy the limited experience and, when he eventually opens his eyes, Felix finds himself in an unsettling low-resolution world of lines and unfilled spaces, an image that reveals the “endless nightmare” that he and (I think) all uploaded humans are trapped in.
This is a slickly told story—Bennardo has a concise and transparent style—and the concept is pretty neat. That said, I don’t think the ending is as good as the rest of it, possibly because it doesn’t clearly make its point. (Is this his personal nightmare or one for humanity? Do people really desire thrills or normal life?) Not bad at all, though, and I’ll be interested to see more work from this writer.
*** (Good). 6,950 words. Story link.

The Station of the Twelfth by Chaz Brenchley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Station of the Twelfth by Chaz Brenchley (Tor.com, 8th September 2021) has a long opening passage that describes a monorail on Mars and the names of the different stations. One of them is called “The Station of the Twelfth”, and people wait on the platform during an Armistice Day service to explain to visitors how it got its name. This involves the description of a steampunkish alternate world where the British and Russian Empires were at war and, in particular, of a battle on one of the moons of Mars, Deimos, where a British Empire regiment made a valiant last stand:

The Twelfth Battalion of the Queen’s Own Martian Borderers, our very own regiment: they made their stand on Deimos, while the last transports flew the last divisions away from there and brought them home. The word we had, they gathered about their colors and stood fast. Not one made a run for safety; not one has been returned to us, alive or otherwise. They would have died to the last man sooner than surrender. That much we know. And this also we know, that the Russians had no way to return them, dead. The merlins would refuse to carry bodies in an aethership; the way we treat our dead appals them deeply. Their own they eat, as a rule, or let them lie where they fell. The Charter allowed us one graveyard, one, for all the province; that is close to full now, for all its size. We think, we hope they just don’t understand our crematoria, which have proliferated now perforce all through the colony.
When challenged about the Twelfth, the Russians will say only that the matter has been attended to, with great regret. Our best guess is that they built their own crematorium for the purpose, there on Deimos. What they did with the ashes, we cannot know.
So we made this, the Station of the Twelfth: here is their last posting, this cemetery to which they can never come. Its very emptiness speaks louder than tombstones ever could, however many. It embraces the city like a mourning band, for the Twelfth were local lads, the battalion raised and barracked here.

A good mood piece.
*** (Good). 2,850 words. Story link.

Jody After the War by Edward Bryant

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jody After the War by Edward Bryant (Orbit #10, 1972) opens with the narrator and Jody walking on a mountainside trail until they get to a picnic site overlooking Denver (one of the cities that survived a nuclear war). During this we get some backstory about the conflict, learn how the couple met, and see them discuss her PTSD and unwillingness to have children because of what she saw at one of the target cities.
Eventually, after munching through more related angst and the picnic, the narrator tells her he knows what he is letting himself in for and that he still wants marry her and move to Seattle.
A short slice-of-life/relationship fragment. Early-ish Bryant; he would do better work than this.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.

The Wheel by John Wyndham

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Wheel by John Wyndham (Startling Stories, January 1952) opens with an old man dozing at a farm wake up to see his grandson appear with a box that is riding on four improvised wheels. Before he can say anything the mother appears and screams, which brings the rest of the family. The mother then orders the boy, Davie, into the barn. When she tells the grandfather that she would never expected that sort of behaviour from her son, he says that if she hadn’t screamed no-one would have had to know. She is scandalized.
The reason for this puzzling behaviour becomes obvious when the grandfather subsequently goes to talk to Davie. He asks the boy to say his Sunday prayers:

“There,” he said. “That last bit.”
“Preserve us from the Wheel?” Davie repeated, wonderingly. “What is the Wheel, gran? It must be something terrible bad, I know, ’cos when I ask them they just say it’s wicked, and not to talk of it. But they don’t say what it is.”
The old man paused before he replied, then he said: “That box you got out there. Who told you to fix it that way?”
“Why, nobody, gran. I just reckon it’d move easier that way. It does, too.”
“Listen, Davie. Those things you put on the side of it—they’re wheels.”
It was sometime before the boy’s voice came back out of the darkness. When it did, it sounded bewildered.
“What, those round bits of wood? But they can’t be, gran. That’s all they are—just round bits of wood. But the Wheel—that’s something awful, terrible, something everybody’s scared of.”  p. 118

The grandfather’s further explanations to Davie make it apparent that they are living in a post-nuclear holocaust world, and one where there is a religious prohibition on technology. The grandfather explains that the priests see devices like the wheel as the work of the Devil, his way of leading mankind astray, and, when they find such inventions, they not only burn them but their inventors too. He then tells Davie that when the priests question him the following day, he must tell them he didn’t make the wheels but that he found them. Then, after a final observation about progress being neither good nor evil, the grandfather gives the boy a hug and leaves.
The final section (spoiler) sees the priests arrive to find the grandfather busily making two more wheels. They are horrified, the box is burnt, and the grandfather is taken away. The ending is nicely understated:

In the afternoon a small boy whom everyone had forgotten turned his eyes from the column of smoke that rose in the direction of the village, and hid his face in his hands.
“I’ll remember, gran. I’ll remember. It’s only fear that’s evil,” he said, and his voice choked in his tears.  p. 120

A short piece but a solid one.
*** (Good). 2,700 words. Story link.

Hunger’s End by Robert Cheetham

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunger’s End by Robert Cheetham (New Worlds #171, March 1967) sees Caroline listening to Jimmy at a party. He says that physical beauty is valueless as it contributes nothing to functionality; she disagrees and, deciding that he doesn’t know what he is talking about, eventually dismisses him. As Caroline hands her glass to him so that he can get her another champagne, she notices a minute chip in it and deliberately drops it to the floor where it smashes.
The rest of the story alternates between Caroline’s adulterous affair with another man called David, who was at the party with his wife, and a sponge-like alien life-form that has been feeding on the seabed for aeons. The alien sponge is later harvested and put on sale, during which period it starts to starve. Caroline buys it (“huge, ovoid, delicately violet”).
The final scene (spoiler) has Caroline discussing her relationship with David on the phone before she goes to have a bath. She dreamily slips her finger into a hole in the sponge, and the alien bites it off. The story close with this:

“Then there’s the transiency of beauty,” said Jimmy. “Symmetry exists only so long as the apposite dimensional planes are exactly complimentary. Alter one side, change its shape by one iota, and symmetry, beauty, perfection, value—everything is gone.”  p. 126

I’m not convinced by the point the story is trying to make, or that it would stop Caroline attracting David, but I suppose it is a short and effective enough piece.
** (Average). 1,700 words. Story link.

The Empty by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Empty by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2022) opens with Sal seeing a motionless red dot on her screen—one of her remotely supervised self-driving trucks has broken down.
The rest of the first half of the story describes Sal’s uncertain unemployment (she is continually assessed by Amazon-like metrics and there are lots of other people waiting to take her job), her location (she works in a portacabin complex in the car park of an abandoned Wallmart carpark in the middle of nowhere, presumably because of the tax breaks), and her possible future (when she goes to see her supervisor about the breakdown, she learns she is about to be promoted).
When Sal subsequently uses the truck’s remote bee- and monkey-like drones to remotely inspect the damage, she sees that the truck has hit a drone:

There really wasn’t much left of that thing. Her truck must have been the third or fourth one to hit it. Something that small, it would barely register on their sensors.
The trucks weren’t going to slam on the brakes for every jackrabbit that launched itself into their grills. Sal heard the stories from the drivers who had worked their way up from the service depots: You power-washed a lot of gore off these things. Blood, bits of bone, quills, hooves, and antlers. At two hundred kilometers an hour, at least it was over quickly for the animals.
The trucks were failsafed to spot humans near the road and brake—but she’d heard things. And they weren’t going to stop for anything, human or otherwise, out here on U.S. 50. This was the Empty. Population density below the safety threshold. The trucks automatically turned the failsafe off. Whoever lived out here (did anyone live out here?) knew you’d better look both ways when you cross these roads. And look again.
White paint, though. She’d never seen that.  p. 68

Then, while she waits for the repair truck to arrive, she walks the monkey over to a deserted diner—and sees “HELP” written on the one window that isn’t boarded up, with a handprint pointing into the desert.
The rest of the second half sees Sal go to investigate, all the while worrying about the cost that she is incurring (after she has used the allotted amount of time for inspecting the damage, Sal’s company starts charging her). Eventually (spoiler), Sal finds the remaining survivor of a nearby, unattended retirement settlement (we learn that the drone the truck crashed into is actually the settlement’s medical bot).
The story ends with Sal calling for a rescue drone, and later being let go by her employers. She subsequently gets a thank-you message from the woman she saved.
This story has a very convincing near-future setting—there is a wealth of throwaway, Heinleinesque detail about this increasingly automated society—but the capitalist excesses (paying for a SAR drone, being laid off for saving someone’s life) almost stretch credulity to breaking point, as does the rescued woman’s comment about never being able to repay Sal. Well, the woman could say she was going to leave her estate to Sal for saving her life—but, of course, that would ruin the tale’s miserablist finger-wagging about dystopian capitalism. This latter spoils the story somewhat.
(**+) Average to Good. 5,600 words. Story link.

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race by J. G. Ballard (Ambit #29, 1966)1 does what the title promises:

Oswald was the starter.
From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.
Kennedy got off to a bad start.

The rest of this short piece provides a number of oblique observations about this historical event:

[It] has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop [Kennedy] completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald.

The final observation, “Who loaded the starting gun?”, is an effective finish.
I thought this was a striking piece when I first read it many years ago, but it is one that is bound to have less of an effect the second time around.
*** (Good). 700 words. Story link.

1. This piece (which was inspired by Alfred Jarry’s The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race) was reprinted in New Worlds #171, March 1967.

The Ersatz Wine by Christopher Priest

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ersatz Wine by Christopher Priest (New Worlds #171, March 1967) opens with a man fleeing his pursuers and hiding from them in a building. Inside he sees a girl sitting at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She holds out her hand and takes him up to a room where they have sex. He leaves in the morning. His pursuers find him later, leaning against a pile of crates: they wonder how they can keep his batteries charged.
Inserted into this brief story are seemingly random passages:

“Two fat ladies: eighty-eight,” said the Bingo-caller.
“Three and seven: thirty-seven. Key of the door: twenty-one. On its own: number six. . . .”  p. 117

“My work,” said the Artist, “is a total expression of my soul. It relates in terms of colour and image the visual interpretation of consciousness.” His audience nodded and smiled, staring in serious awe at the canvas behind the Artist. It was daubed with shredded inner-tubes and random streaks of motor-oil.  p. 117

Some of these may have an oblique connection to the story:

“What right have we to keep this man alive?” demanded the Surgeon. “Transistors and batteries are bastardising God’s work!”  p. 118

“My life,” said the Actor, “is a constant lie.”  p. 118

A taste of what was to come in the pages of the large format New Worlds.
– (Poor). 1,650 words. Story link.

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick (The Book of Dragons, 2020) begins with Olav’s backstory, and we learn that he is a wanderer and adventurer and was briefly married to a witch—until he caught her coupling with a demon and slew them both. When we catch up with him he is working as a guard for a desert caravan, which is later ambushed by brigands. Only Olav and (what he thinks is) a young boy survive. Then, when they camp that night, a demon comes out of the forest for Olav, and they only just escape after Olav sets the dry undergrowth on the periphery ablaze.
When the pair arrive at the city of Kheshem, Olav works as a cutpurse to get them the money they need:

The day’s haul was such that he bought the two of them a rich meal with wine and then a long soak in hot water at the private baths. When Nahal, face slick with grease, fiercely declared himself in no need of such fripperies, Olav lifted him, struggling, into the air and dropped him in the bath. Then, wading in (himself already naked), he stripped the wet clothes off the boy.
Which was how Olav discovered that Nahal was actually Nahala—a girl. Her guardians had chopped her hair short and taught her to swear like a boy in order to protect her from the rough sorts with whom traveling merchants must necessarily deal.
The discovery made no great difference in their relationship. Nahala was every bit as sullen as Nahal had been, and no less industrious. She knew how to cook, mend, clean, and perform all the chores a man needed to do on the road. Olav considered buying cloth and having her make a dress for herself but, for much the same reasons as her guardians before him, decided to leave things be. When she came of age—soon, he imagined—they would deal with such matters. Until then, it was easier to let her remain a boy.
At her insistence, he continued the lessons in weapons use.

Olav ends up working for a wizard called Ushted the Uncanny after Ushted materialises in their room and tells Olav that if he continues to steal purses he will be caught. The wizard explains that he can time-travel, and has talked to a condemned future-Olav in his cell. To prove his point, Ushted then takes the current Olav forward in time to show him what happened, and brings back an ashen-faced one in need of drink.
After this there are two other developments, Nahala makes a friend of her own age called Sliv (he doesn’t know she is a girl), and the demon from earlier in the story sets up a lair on a hillside near the city.
The story eventually concludes with Olav, Nahala, Ushted and Sliv going to confront the demon (the creature is terrorising the area and Ushted has volunteered his services to the city’s rulers), and the story proceeds to a busy conclusion which includes (spoilers): (a) Sliv discovering that Nahala is a girl and consequently showing his contempt; (b) Ushted the wizard making a deal with the demon (who is revealed as Olav’s witch-wife) for a time-travelling amulet; (c) Ushted giving Sliv the amulet after Sliv is revealed as the younger Ushted; (d) Nahala acquiring the amulet but being unable to use it; (e) a future-Nahala arriving and killing Ushted the wizard and the dragon-witch. After all this Nahala admires her future self, and the future-Nahala admires the unconscious Olav; she then tells the younger Nahala to tell him it was he who slew the dragon when he wakes up (“you know what a child he can be”).
If this all sounds over-complicated, it is—and it doesn’t explain why the time-travelling Ushted didn’t see what was coming. A pity, as it is reasonably entertaining story to that point.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

New-Way-Groovers Stew by Grania Davis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

New-Way-Groovers Stew by Grania Davis (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the lesbian narrator’s description of the 1960’s Haight-Ashbury scene—which includes, atypically for the time of publication, a frank description of her elderly gay friend:

He’s always so funny, and admittedly, more swishy when he has a new lover. Not that any of them appreciate his wit, his charm, his intelligence. The old fairy usually manages to dig up some tight-assed sailor from the Tenderloin, or a motorcycle freak from one of the leather bars. He buys them new clothes, prepares lavish and tender gourmet meals, and gazes at them with sad, baggy basset-hound eyes, waiting for some small sign that some of the feeling has been appreciated, perhaps even returned. That maybe (but this is really too much to hope for) something might develop. Something permanent, a real relationship with warmth, love. But it never does.
When Jule excused himself for a brief visit to the john, his latest Chuck (or Stud) started eyeballing the prettiest girl in the room, boasting loudly, “I hate faggots, and I hate this nancy food, and the only reason I’m hanging around with that old auntie, Jule, is cause I’m temporarily short of bread. Soon as I get me a bankroll, I’m getting a big red steak, and some pretty blonde pussy. And all you queers can shove it up your ass!”  p. 62

There is a bit more about the narrators and Jule’s friendship before the story turns to the Flower Children who are beginning to converge on Haight Ashbury. We learn about the latter’s communitarian lifestyle, and how they initially coalesce around the New-Way-Groovers Free Store, an establishment which freecycles goods and also provides a daily stew, made from various scavenged foodstuffs, to all-comers.
The narrator and Jules occasionally visit with the people at the store, and Jules later gets involved in a long argument with a man called Tony, during which, among other things, they discuss morality (Tony states at one point, “The highest morality is to take care of yourself”). This idea later manifests (spoiler) when the narrator gets a note from Jules saying he has gone away, and to send all his money to his sister in Detroit. When the narrator goes to ask Tony where Jules has gone, she is given a bowl of stew that is much richer than normal and which has chunks of meat in it. Tony tells her that they stole some meat, got themselves a “fat old pig”.
This piece contains quite a good portrait of alternative life in 1960’s Haight-Ashbury but, even after the morality argument, the cannibalism ending is silly and a bit over the top. So this is a game of two halves as a horror story—but is maybe notable as an early example of one with lesbian/gay characters.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.