Tag: 1*

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (F&SF, October-November 1995) sees a woman wake up in her bed to find two other bodies beside her. She realises that they are versions of herself, Fat Self and Little Self. They subsequently keep her captive in her apartment and force feed her:

“Eat,” said Little Self, and it and Fat Self worked together to get her out of bed and into the kitchen. Little Self tied her to a chair with clothesline, and Fat Self cooked pancakes. The kitchen smelled of sizzling butter, and flour marrying eggs and milk. Little Self got out the ice cream Iris had hidden in the tiny freezer compartment, the secret shame she couldn’t resist, even though she had been dieting and exercising rigorously for five years. She still cheated some nights when the loneliness overwhelmed her. Mornings after those nights, she adjusted her exercise regimen to work off the extra calories.
Now Little Self was holding out a spoonful of chocolate chocolate mint. Iris heard her stomach growl. She opened her mouth.  p. 95

Later, when the woman is allowed to exercise, she sees Little Self grows larger; this cycle of eating and exercising goes on for some time (the woman is trapped in her apartment, and realises that someone else must be doing her job).
Then, at the end of the story, she wakes up one morning to find they have been joined by a scrawny and starved and crying version of her: the final line is “Overnight, the population of the city expanded. Trails of crumbs led the lost home.”
I have no idea what these final lines have to do with the rest of the story (and, even if I did, I don’t have much interest in surreal fantasy stories about first world problems like dieting or body image).
* (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro (Analog, January-February 2021) is a piece of flash fiction that initially sets up the connection between stories and the outward urge:

At one point, someone wondered, what’s beyond the next hill?
No one had been there. No one had worked up the nerve to go there.
So, someone asked, “What if we went?”
A story got told.
And as time went on, and people went beyond that hill, it happened again.
“What is it like on the other side of the river?”
A story got told.
“What is it like past those distant mountains?”
A story got told.  p. 42

After a bit more of this (and some description of the human race spreading through the Galaxy) I would have expected the last line to echo the connection above, but instead the piece finishes with the question (spoiler):

“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good . . . but what’s out there?” p. 43

This appears to be a non-sequitur as that question illustrates human curiosity, which may be related but isn’t the same thing.
* (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link.

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021)1 has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
* (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 5th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously caused them to level a city, the relationship is more complicated than that) before the alien, who Dave calls Old Salty, arrives (this is the point where the story should have started):

At 2:00:00.00, the paranymphic glider touched down on the roof. Had Dave’s phone shown the time to be a hundredth of a second earlier or later, he would have assumed it was wrong, and never mind that it took the time straight from Earth’s master atomic clock. A Brot who said two o’clock sharp meant two o’clock sharp.
Old Salty got down from the glider and walked/moved/flowed toward Dave. He/she/it looked something like a prune, something like a sea sponge, something like a slug. Several eyestalks stuck up from his/her/its front end; they looked every which way at once. The alien’s underside had lots and lots of little tiny legs.
He/she/it said something in his/her/its own language. Inside his head, Dave heard (he supposed he heard; that came closer to describing it than anything else), “I hail to you say, my hypothetical friend.” People who were able to work in Brot establishments and make Brot widgets picked up on the meaning in Brot noises. To the rest of mankind, those remained alien gibberish.
“Good to see you, Old Salty,” Dave answered. The Brot didn’t mind the nickname. He/she/it could understand the same smallish set of humans who could follow the speech and subspeech of his/her/its kind. Communication had been dicey when the aliens first landed: lots of pointing and pictures. Little by little, things got better. Not good, not yet, but better.  p. 33

The rest of the story has the same clunky delivery.
Dave quickly learns that this will be the Old Salty’s last visit (it is returning to its home world), and he then takes the alien on the scheduled tour of the premises. We see that the business makes gadgets with an unknown function for the Brot.
Throughout the story Dave walks on eggshells but, before Old Salty leaves, they have a drink together (the aliens can drink both methyl and isopropyl alcohol) and Dave presents the alien with a going away present of four plastic figures (these are California Raisin toys given away with American fast food meals in the 1980s and 90s). They have “Made in China” on the base, and Dave comments that the “peasants” who painted the toys would have had little or no comprehension of what they were. Old Salty leaves soon afterwards.
The story ends (spoiler) with the alien back on its home world. Old Salty arrives at his swarmsister’s house and gives her kids presents—the gadgets that were made by Dave’s company (“Made on Earth”). We see that these aren’t alien miracle devices like the paranymphic glider which Old Salty used to arrive at Dave’s business, but are actually cheap disposable toys. The story then makes the leaden point that humanity is to the aliens as the Chinese workers were to Western consumers in the last century, i.e. “peasants”.
The story closes with Old Salty wondering if humanity will ever spread out into space and find races that we can view and/or treat in the same way as the Brot treats humanity—but the alien doesn’t expect that will happen any time soon.
This is a dull and old-fashioned piece, and the idea of this kind of economic imperialism rolling through the galaxy is just dispiriting. I note in passing that (a) the repeated use of “he/she it” for the aliens rather than “they” or “it” is clumsy and (b) there seems to be no piece of American cultural ephemera so obscure that US writers will not shoehorn it into a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story placed 4th in the 2021 Analog Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Baby Steps by Lettie Prell (Analog, November 2015) opens with Fu-Hau calling a computer tech-type called Jayden to say that one of her patients has just died and that the upload to a virtual reality afterlife has not worked. As Jayden types in his report later on, the “subject has failed to coalesce on upload and has no VR form at present”.
Jayden quickly takes control, and the point of view switches from Fu-Hau to him as he works on the on the dead woman’s file. As he does he sees a strange corruption in the code and, when he later talks to what he thinks the virtual copy of the woman, gets odd responses:

“Hi Angela. My name is Jayden.”
“I am-was Angela. True. Yet it is also true that I’ve burst into existence only now, from the seed state of humanity. I am an unfurling of consciousness from the enfolded places into something greater.”
Whoops. Not out of the danger zone yet. He should get to work on that file next. He shifted his gaze to the other screen and swallowed hard. The mystery file was humongous. An extra eight gig, easy.
Meanwhile, the stream of words continued. “Much self was coiled up tight in other dimensions, unexpressed in the ordinary facets of the physical world, and suppressed by what was once the core identity. No longer. I am free. I know now.”
He’d been thinking what to do with the mystery file. “Know what?”
“Curled inside mundane words are worlds of meaning. I should not expect you to understand.”
He realized he was holding his breath. He tried to think what to say. He wanted to ask something.
“A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
Holy hills she’d gone on random shuffle. Whatever he’d been starting to think this might be, some advanced mind . . . He took it all back. It was like a whole jug had been poured over his head. This gibberish was his call to action. That mystery file had to go.  p. 48

It will be pretty obvious to most readers that a nascent AI that has come to life during the dead woman’s upload process, so I’m not quite sure why Jayden is dismissing the idea (probably because the writer wouldn’t then be able to expand the piece into a novella1).
Eventually, Jayden manages to prune the excess from the file and the old woman coalesces. Jayden welcomes her to her afterlife in VR, and then goes home. The story closes with him in the parking lot remembering that he has forgotten to delete the mystery file. . . .
This didn’t grab me as I’m not interested in stories about stereotypical computer types (or their Jordans, caffeinated water, or Chinese take-out littered work spaces—it’s one of those stories with that sort of detail), or in story about a newly born AI and its cod-profundity (I’m pretty sure I read enough of those in the cyberpunk era).
The story is also a fragment that reads like the beginning of a longer piece (and now is, see below).
* (Mediocre). 2,050 words.

1. This piece forms the beginning of Prell’s novella, Uploading Angela (Analog, May-June 2021). The beginning of the novella is almost identical to this story (although the point of view in the first section of the original short story is changed from Fu-Hau to Jayden in the novella).
The introduction to the novella wrongly identifies the earlier story as Emergency Protocol (Analog, September-October 2017).

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld #174, March 2021)1 opens with a women being told about the death of her grandfather by her “instance”:

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

So, the basic situation here is that (a) the woman receiving the call in America is the peaceable doppelganger of the woman in Korea, and (b) the instancing process is widespread in this world, most particularly among emigrants. Of course, this is all just an unexplained gimmick/metaphor (it might as well be magic) that lets the writer do a lot of identitarian hand-wringing over the next twenty or so pages:

America assumes instances will stay forever.
Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.
Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

Mixed in with this agonising, and the narrator’s trip to Korea for the funeral where she meets her duplicate family, is a related fairy tale about a fisherman who spends a night with the mermaids, doesn’t realise that thirty years have passed, and goes home to find himself in bed with his wife. When the fisherman stabs the man in the bed, he switches to the man being stabbed. (The myth of Odysseus makes an appearance later on in the story as well.)
At the very end of this piece the subject of de-instancing surfaces, and (spoiler) this is what eventually happens—possibly against the American instance’s wishes—when the other woman takes her hand (I assumed it wasn’t what she wanted from the fact that the story cuts to a final line from the fairy tale about a knife in the heart).
This is (as is probably obvious from the title) mostly a literary tale about immigrant identity, and only tangentially an SF story. I had zero interest in its concerns, and am truly baffled as to why anyone would waste a moment of their lives thinking about this sort of thing—who wants to be defined by where they come from or the country they live in?
* (Mediocre). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. This was fifth equal out of eight finalists in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld #173, February 2021)1 begins with the female narrator going to a restaurant and munching her way through bread rolls while she savours the various food scents. She doesn’t have anything else to eat because she has been told by her internship supervisor that she should wait for eighteen hours after returning to Earth before exposing herself to strong aromas and tastes.
After this (largely irrelevant start) she meets an older version of herself, and we learn that the narrator was cloned from this person, Diana. Part of the explanation about this makes no sense:

“[Our parents] speed incubated the cells from the eyelash up to when you were thirteen, so I would have a wide memory base and they would only have to worry about raising me through high school and college. It’s a method that took them—”

How do you clone someone’s memories?
After this the older Diana launches into a parental issues diatribe (which, in one form or another, is what the story is):

“But I wasn’t—” I start.
“A disappointment?” Original Diana says, her lips tugging at the seams. “Yes, you’re now the same age I was when I ruined things for everyone and drove my life down the gutter. I was a selfish brat who got into Pitt instead of Carnegie Mellon, switched my major from galactic finance to art history, dropped out when I was twenty-one, and haven’t been seen since the screaming match with my parents about wanting to be a chef. All they ever wanted to do was look out for me when I had myopic dreams that would never take off. I was just some spoiled brat like all the white children whose parents didn’t know how to raise them.”

And:

 “There is no version of us that will ever make our parents completely happy,” she says. “There are only versions of us that have done our best to make ourselves happy.”

Diana then tells the narrator that she is the fourth clone the parents have created in an attempt to have a daughter who will have a prestigious career and be someone of who they can approve. Then, when the narrator, the original Diana, and the other clones meet up later, the narrator finds they have become, variously, a chef, tattoo artist, etc., instead of the career in cosmocurrencies that their parents wanted them to pursue—and for which the narrator is currently interning on the Moon. Eventually, at the end of the story, she too gives this up to become a parfumier.
I note that, despite the original Diana and the first three clones having gone on to do their own thing, they are co-dependents who perversely keep squabbling with the parents rather than just moving on (they regularly send their parents samples of their DNA along with a cheque for a large amount of money, stipulating they can have one but not the other).
Those readers with their own unresolved parental issues may get something out of this solipsistic moanfest; others will, as I did, start skimming.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint fifth place out of eight in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for stories published in 2021. There must be a lot of disgruntled children out there.

When It Changed by Joanna Russ

Posted on by Paul Fraser

When It Changed by Joanna Russ (Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972) has an opening passage that describes the narrator’s fast-driving wife Katy and her engineering skills before speculating about how long it will be before one their daughters, Yuriko, goes off on a seemingly rite-of-passage trip to kill a cougar or bear armed only with a knife (there is also mention of the narrator having fought three duels). Then the story flips (1972) reader expectation about the narrator’s sex (she is female not male) by revealing that something awful has happened: men have returned to Whileaway.
The middle section of the story details the meeting between the narrator and the four men who have landed (“I can only say they were apes with human faces”, “muscled like bulls”, “I thought they would be good-looking!”), and we soon discover that men died out in a plague on Whileaway six centuries earlier. The rest of their conversation is mostly made up of the men’s patronising observations of Whileaway society and the women’s bridling and hostility, something which culminates when Katy feels that one of the men has insulted the couple and she tries to shoot him. The narrator manages to knock her wife’s laser-rifle off-target at the last moment.
The story concludes with the narrator giving an extended elegy for her planet and its society:

But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason, about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now but one can’t throw away six centuries, or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers.

Well, at least the Earthmen won’t be killing them in duels.
There are a number of things that I don’t like about this piece or don’t think work: first, it is a polemic and not a story: second, its misandry (see the comments above and the general “men will ruin everything” vibe of the last pages); third, the culture the women have developed (or have allowed to develop) on Whileaway seems very odd—it is possible that women could develop a violent society (the teenage bear hunting, the duelling, the attempting shooting after the perceived insult), but it seems rather unlikely; fourth, the story (what there is of it) doesn’t address the issue that most of the women on Whileaway would probably be sexually attracted to any male settlers (six hundred years of cultural conditioning isn’t going to trump three hundred thousand years of evolution); finally, the more interesting story would have been what happened when the men actually arrived, not the temper tantrum that takes place beforehand.
The story went on to win the Nebula Award but it was only a finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards. I would suggest it is an excellent example of a story getting its awards or nominations for surfing the zeitgeist—the Equal Rights Amendment had recently been passed in the USA and the ratification process had just begun.
I didn’t think much of this story when I first read it in the late-seventies and I thought even less of it this time around.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words. Story link.

Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan, translated by Judith Huang,1 (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) opens with Ding Jie arriving at the planet Yan: he is there to get a delicacy for the Emperor, the tongue of the Silver Rat. Jie is surprised to discover that a close friend, Chen Guang, is in charge of this bleak outpost. Then, after they catch up (at length) with each other’s news, Guang tells Jie that the Silver Rat’s tongues are now black and poisonous. Guang has one edible tongue left, however, and he gives Jie a taste:

He opened his mouth and bit into the tip of the tongue.
Suddenly, the whole busy world before his eyes grew dim.
The taste skated across his consciousness and melted a little in his stomach.
He was overwhelmed with the feeling that nothing he could remember that came before this amounted to anything, and his very life appeared barren and meaningless, reduced to something absurd. He thought back to the magnificent fireworks bursting over the roof of the Royal Palace, the most splendid of skies he had ever seen, and they all those memories seemed strangely leached of color. Even the most complex, most spectacular and intricate architecture he had seen in the Afang palace, dating from the Qin dynasty, its exquisite beauty beyond anyone’s imagination, now seemed boring and monotonous in comparison.
Every single taste bud in his mouth exploded simultaneously, like a singularity bursting and expanding into infinity.
This extraordinary taste had flown beyond all description.
Could this thing still be considered food? Or was it rather, a vast epic rushing through the tongue and vaulting past the stomach walls, a mighty poem redolent of ancient song.  pp. 46-47

The rest of the story sees the implantation of a mind-reading device into one of the rats, which later reveals that, when the rats meet each other in the wild, their tongues entwine—this is the way they communicate.
After this discovery Jie suspects the Silver Rats are sentient and he decides to decipher their language, a process that leads to the Silver Rat he has implanted eventually meeting the Grand Rat. When the Grand Rat then offers the implanted rat some dried tongue, the latter appears to gain access to all the Grand Rat’s memories.
Eventually Jie discovers that (spoiler) the rat’s memories and souls are contained in tongues, and the hatred they feel for humans—who have been hunting them—has made them poisonous. Guang subsequently hatches a plan to kill the Emperor by supplying him with a poisoned tongue, but what actually happens is that the Emperor falls ill (the rats have learned human language and made a taste that makes him feel nauseous every time he feels anger).
This story didn’t work for me, probably due to the strange (and barely) science fictional ideas which have been dropped into what feels like an oddly plotted fantasy. I think this would have worked slightly better if it had junked the SF furniture and been a fantasy.
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words. Story link.

1. There are unnecessary translation notes at the start of the story, mostly about the references to Chinese history: these could have easily been put at the back of the story, and then I wouldn’t have had to plough through them in case they were required to understand the story (they aren’t). Also, there are, for a story that is told in otherwise neutral fantasy language, a few odd colloquialisms: “nothing would have induced him to leg it” on p. 40; “it became super popular to eat Silver Rat meat”; “When their tongues met and entangled, the Silver Rats were, in fact, talking, not making out” on p. 51, etc. Jarring.

Vagrants by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Vagrants by Lavie Tidhar (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) sees a man return to a space station he passed through twenty years ago, when he was on his way up from Earth and out into the solar system and what became his life (fighting in a war, etc.). He has various encounters with a robotnik beggar, a bar singer, and a robot hotel receptionist, during which various life observations are delivered:

“There’s a world right here”, Red said. She took a sip and studied him over the bottle. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said.
“Get what?”
“You think going out there fixes what’s inside here,” she said. She tapped him on the chest. It pushed him up so for a moment he was floating, just an inch or so above the seat. “Yeah,” Red said. She finished her beer and tossed it back to the bar. It floated to the old bartender. “I see guys like you every day of the week,” Red said. “Young and ignorant when you come up the gravity well. Old and ignorant when you come back. You think, if only you went out there you’d find whatever it is you’re searching for. But you never did find it, did you?”
“I don’t know,” Nugget said. “I lived a life.”
“No,” she told him. “You only ran away from one.”  p. 69

This is an okay read, I suppose, but it’s a fragment not a story.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.