Tag: 2021

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 opens with Dave Markarian, CEO of Interstellar Master Traders, arriving at work to anxiously prepare for a visit by a representative of the alien Brot. During the three page wodge of exposition that follows, we learn that the Brot have the economic (and military) whip hand over humanity, and use us as an economic subject race (I guess you could view this as an extreme version of China’s relationship with many developing countries).
The middle act of the story sees Old Salty (the name given to the Brot representative by Dave) arrive in a gossamer bubble that is beyond human science or comprehension. When Dave welcomes Old Salty, the alien almost immediately tells him that this will be his last visit as he is returning to his home planet. Then they set off on a tour of the premises so Old Salty can inspect the devices that are being built there (the devices have “Made on Earth” on the base, and the workers manufacturing them have no idea of what they are, or how they work). During the visit Dave walks on eggshells—even though he is friendly with the alien, or as friendly as you can be with aliens who have, in the past, levelled a city for unfathomable reasons.
Before Old Salty leaves Dave invites the alien to have a farewell drink with him (“the Brot could handle methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol”) and, during this get together, Dave presents Old Salty with a going-away present, a set of plastic “California Raisins” toys that were originally given away with fast food meals in the 1980s:

“I see,” Old Salty said, which gave not the slightest clue about what he/she/it thought.
He/she/it picked up one of the Raisins: Beebop, the drummer. His/her/its eyestalks swung toward Beebop for a close inspection, and tentacles felt of the small plastic figure. “On the bottom of one foot I the inscription ‘Made in China’ find.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Dave nodded. “I know that, these days, China’s right up with the United States or maybe even ahead of us. That wasn’t true then, though. China was just starting to turn into a big industrial power. Peasants would come off the farms and move to the big cities to work in factories.”
“We this phenomenon on other worlds also have observed,” the Brot said.
Dave Markarian nodded again. “Yeah, I figured you would have. Some of those peasants would have made their livings painting eyes or gloves or shoes or whatever on the California Raisins, over and over again. Same with the detailwork on all of these other little plastic toys. They wouldn’t have known why the figures were supposed to look the way they did. They wouldn’t have seen the advertising campaigns or games or films the toys were based on—they lived in a faraway country that used a different language. I sometimes wonder what they thought while they painted every toy the same way while they went through their shifts day after day.”  p. 38

After more small talk, Yoda—sorry, Old Salty—leaves in his gossamer bubble.
The final act of the story (spoiler) sees Old Salty back on his home planet, and we see him visit his sister and her children. Old Salty gives each of the children one of the devices made by Dave’s company, and we learn that they are cheap junk toys for kids. Old Salty reflects that the master/peasant relationship between the Brot and humanity is similar to the one between American consumers and Chinese workers in the 1980s. The alien hopes that humanity will develop spaceflight and find races that can work for them, but doubts that will be the case.
This is a plodding, expository, and clunky story with a very old-fashioned feel and a dispiriting vision of interstellar commerce. I also note that the repeated “he/she/its” pronouns used for the alien are irritating—what is wrong with “they” and “its”?
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story was fourth in the Analytical Laboratory Poll for 2021 stories. There is more information about the poll finalists here.

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #175, April 2021)1 opens with the narrator, who has had a copy of his mind beamed into a “blank body” on a far-flung alien planet, recording in his log that he is the only one who has made it—all his colleagues’ downloads were scrambled and their blanks recycled. Worse still, he finds the planet is a polar wasteland that appears inimical to human life.
He subsequently decides to try and make it to a depot that is thirty clicks away, even though he is hampered by problems with his suit’s battery draining faster than he can recharge it (the surface of his suit doubles as a solar panel). During his journey he sees thermal vents (a sign of heat sources under the ice) and feels the vibrations of glaciers moving beneath him. Then he finds signs of alien life, the brittle chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals which he scans and photographs. During this process he realises he may be the first human to discover alien life, but that he has no-one to share it with.
Then, shortly afterwards, he makes an even more profound discovery:

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.
There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high.
Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.
That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?
Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning. It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.
Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.
And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.
Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees him working his way through the maze while he appears to be stalked by the alien—which, at one point, when he partially falls into a crevasse, he throws an axe at to scare away. Then, when he reaches the depot and finds an alien burial cairn nearby, he examines the body and sees that it appears to have the kind of impact damage caused by a crash.
The last pages see the narrator’s tent blown over in a storm, a concussion, and him waking to find that he is being dragged through the snow by the alien. He ends up in a warm cave with the creature observing him. Then, when he attempts to communicate with the creature, he discovers it is actually the sentient EVA suit of the buried alien—and it finally opens up so he can climb inside.
The strengths of this story are its cracking beginning and The Thing-like polar setting and suspense. Unfortunately it drags a little in the middle (the story is probably a little longer than it needs to be) and the ending verges on the far-fetched (i.e. the idea that the alien/suit would be able to provide life support to the narrator—although it must be said that the dead alien may have a similar biochemistry to humans or it probably wouldn’t have been sent to that planet). Overall, a good piece.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story Link.

1. This was joint seventh place in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories. Another of Nayler’s stories, Yesterday’s Wolf, was the winner.

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #180, September 2021)1 opens in what later appears to be a remote tribal area of a near-future post-war Central Asian country. There, a father and his daughter Elmira find one of their lambs has been savaged by wolves on their summer pasture. The brother of the family says to Elmira (who we later discover is tech wizard) that it is a pity that she can’t reprogram their old and partially blind sheepdog.
In the days following this comment Elmira gets a chance to do something similar to her brother’s suggestion when her father brings back an inactive robodog found on his neighbour’s pasture. She starts working on this abandoned weapon, and eventually manages to get it reprogrammed and working again—in a way that will help her family:

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the karaitter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb.
The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.
She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.
Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.
“No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.”

After this set-up, which sees Batyr successfully scare away but not kill the wolves, a couple of other sub-plots begin. One concerns Elmira meeting a friend called Jyrgal in town and discovering that she has been kidnapped, raped, and forced into an arranged marriage—a common custom in Elmira’s society. Elmira then learns from her father, in an extended conversation on their way home, that her mother was also kidnapped and raped when she was young but was rescued by him before she could be married.
The other sub-plot sees another kara discovered by Jyrgal’s family but (spoiler), when they power the robodog up, it attacks them. After Elmira is told by her father about this, she reprograms Batyr before they go to help the family. When they arrive at the other family’s settlement Batyr tracks down and fights the other robodog, putting it out of action. During these events Elmira and her father find that Jyrgal is still alive but that her husband, father- and mother-in-law (i.e. the ones involved in the kidnapping) are conveniently dead.
The story closes with Elmira and her father returning home to see off a government official, his son, and a marriage proposal/demand.
This is a well done piece but it struck me as rather glib, at least in its treatment of the forced marriage aspects. First, the main character is atypical in that she is both young and highly capable,2 which makes the story more of a wishful feminist fable than a convincing SF story. Second, although many readers will be tutting in disapproval at what happens to Jyrgal, I doubt many will have a reaction beyond that as the true horror of her terrible experience is never explored (it is all related second hand, and is very safe-space). Finally, just as in the superhero movies, there are no real world solutions or suggestions as to how to curb this terrible practice. Although this looks like a story about forced marriage (at least in part), I don’t think it is.
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.
2. This is the third Nayler story I’ve read in recent months that has an uber-capable young female protagonist—the other two are Eyes of the Forest (F&SF, May-June 2020) and Muallim, Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021). The latter story also has a remote Central Asian setting and young cyber-whiz daughter.
I find these characters unconvincing and uninteresting, and I wish that male writers using female leads would default to more complex protagonists, like the mother in Rich Larson’s You Are Born Exploding (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021)—or even the ageing woman in Nayler’s own Rain of Days (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022).

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

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.

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #172, January 2021)1 is set in the same series as the recently reviewed Sun from Both Sides (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019), features the same two characters, Eva and Dee, and takes place before, during, and after that story.
This one starts with a rather confusing prologue where Brother-Adita, Sister-Marcus and an Admiral track down a “shell” (a robot cum AI, I presume) and—when they unexpectedly find it is still active—the Admiral throws the other two out of the cave and brings the roof down on himself and the shell.
The rest of the story consists of three interwoven narrative threads titled “Now”, “Then”, and “Before”. The “Now” thread opens with Eva and Dee at home talking—or rather signing (again, for some reason, they mostly communicate this way even though they can speak and hear)—about a goat they have bought before it is suddenly turned into gore. Dee realises that one of Sister’s drones has tried to kill Eva (Sister is Eva’s AI twin), and the rest of this passage turns into a combat chase with Eva ending up partially injured and hiding on a riverbank. Dee eventually manages to save her, while Sister—who realises she has been hacked—shuts herself down.
After the couple get back to their house, Eva gets a message from her daughter on Kairi and find outs (after they travel to make a secure call now that Sister is disabled) that there has been a Consortium attack on Eva’s people, the Kairi Protectorate, and seven people have been killed. They also learn that this was accomplished by hacking into Sister and using her “kinnec”, a communication system.
The rest of this thread sees Eva travel home to learn that the Consortium has discovered that she destroyed one of their ship AIs (this event is described in the Sun from Both Sides) and that their attack was retaliation. Eva also ends up in a political fight with the rulers of the Protectorate about what should happen to Sister (Eva opposes their plans to reboot her as it is apparently equivalent to death, and something that has already happened to Sister before).
The second thread, “Then”, begins (confusingly as this opens immediately after Sister’s attack in the previous thread) with Eva in a crashed, partially submerged ship (Sister) with someone cutting her out. We later discover that person is Dee, and that this is how the pair met. The rest of this thread mostly focuses on her recovery and their developing relationship. Eva eventually learns (during a long heart-to-heart) that Dee is an exiled Grand Master of Valencia, while Dee learns she is a Primarch of the Kairi Protectorate.
The third “Before” thread is chronologically the earliest of them all, and recounts a previous battle with the Consortium at the Cuffie Protectorate which ended with Sister damaged and Eva executing a (spoiler) “Nightfall Protocol” that wipes Sister and kills a lot of the Consortium AIs.
These three threads eventually merge together as we see, among other things: Eva getting a dispensation to marry Dee; Eva mind-merging with Sister to sort out the virus problem; Eva vetoing war at the Kairi Parliament and opening negotiations with the Consortium; and the repatriation by the Consortium of the minds of the children they kidnapped. One these minds, Xandar, joins Sister in her ship at the end of the story after the AI has been cleared of the virus. Eva and Dee now have a kid.
I didn’t enjoy this story as much as Sun from Both Sides for several reasons: first, there is far too much plot here (see above), which makes it hard to keep up with what is going on—something compounded by having three stories running in different time periods; second, some of the description is unclear (e.g. the opening passage); third, there is no real climax to the story, but what feels like a series of negotiations instead; fourth, some parts of the story feel padded (the family get-togethers and the Eva getting to know Dee scenes dragged on and, while I’m talking about family matters, I’d suggest you don’t have far-future children call their mothers “Mom”, as that colloquialism catapulted this non-American reader right out of the story—as did a later “asshole”); fifth, the sign language is presented as italic text, which makes for a lot of tiring reading (and can also cause difficulties for those with dyslexia); sixth, and following on from the latter, if you are using masses of italics for speech why wouldn’t you use a bold typeface for the Now/Then/Before chapter headings and perhaps number and/or date them? Readers would then have a better idea of where they are in the chronology of events. I’d also add, with respect to chapter headings, that the “Philia”, “Eros”, “Storge”, “Agápe”, and “Pragma” ones seemed completely irrelevant to the story. I still don’t know how they fit in.
So, in conclusion, too (unnecessarily) complicated, too unclear (in places), and probably too long as well. This wasn’t bad but it was a bit of headscratcher and/or slog at times.
** (Average). 21,000 words. Story link.

1. This is a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful).3 5,500 words. Story link.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

3. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

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).