Tag: 3*

The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly

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The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with Chester Drummond, an ex-politician, taking a train to a “refusenik” farm for those that have not had the Carcopino-Koster treatments (these are never really explained in any detail, but have given the vast majority of the near-future human race an emotional stability and intellectual uplift that has radically changed society).
When Drummond arrives at his station he is picked by Roberta, a woman from the farm who has had the C-K treatment, and travels to their destination along with another new inmate, the charismatic Brother Emil Sangar.
After they arrive, Sangar, who wants society back the way it was, goes to see Drummond, who has similar plans. Sangar tells Drummond that there is a woman called Elizabeth Wiley at the farm who, after an accident, reverted to pre C-K state and did not want to undergo the process again. Sangar wants to recruit her as he thinks her perspective will prove useful (he describes her as “the Holy Grail”). Later, the pair meet Elizabeth, who says she is in communication with the Virgin Mary (she says she gets messages in the veins of leaves), as well the farm’s other inmates (one is an SF writer “who predicted this” but “my books never sold”).
Further on in the story Drummond learns from Roberta, to his surprise, that he isn’t a prisoner at the camp and can leave any time he wants (she adds that there are only two C-K people at the camp and that they are there as helpers, not as guards). Roberta also tells him about a therapy class, and Drummond’s subsequent visit there (most of chapter 5) is the highlight of the story, as it consists of some entertainingly demented one-liners and exchanges:

Roberta opened the session by focussing immediately on the new arrivals. “Let’s start with you, Brother Emil,” she said. “You were saying this morning that you wanted to be cured.”
“Cured, yes,” said Brother Emil. “Of the coercion of the state. Of the tyranny of reason.”
Roberta raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Allan Fence, the writer, quickly rose to the occasion. “What coercion?” he said. “You checked yourself in here voluntarily, Brother Emil. Of your own free will.”
“When we were neanderthals,” replied Brother Emil, “we developed a taste for mastodon. You know how we hunted them, my friend? We’d form a hunting line and drive the herd toward the edge of a cliff. Within the bounds of that line each mastodon exercised free will, yet today”—he waved at the window, which looked out over the fields—“one very rarely sees a mastodon.”
“No, no, that’s terribly wrong.” Linda Bartly was upset. “We’re not all mastodons, we’re not all the same. They’re like a hunting line, but what they’ve crowded together is a flock of creatures: sloths, butterflies, leopards, loons, platypusses—”
Loons indeed, thought Chester.
“they want us all to be the same, but we’re not—”
“Linda,” said Roberta, “would you like to tell the group what you see in Brother Emil and Chester’s auras?” She turned and explained to Chester: “Linda sees auras. But not around those of us who’ve undergone Carcopino. We’ve lost ours.”
Brother Emil held up his hand. “It will avail us nothing to become mastodons, certainly. But if we all grew wings together, the onrushing cliff would become an opportunity.”
“Or arm the mastodons with machine guns,” said Allan Fence thoughtfully. “Suitably adapted for physiological differences, of course. Trunk triggered, air-cooled fifty calibers with cermet stocks.”
“Mr. Drummond’s aura is huge,” Linda Bartly stage-whispered. “Big enough for all of us. But it’s gray—”
“I’m interested in what the group thinks of Brother Emil’s image of the wings,” said Roberta. “Implicitly, he’s proposing to lead you, to turn you into his followers. He’s not a man who gives up easily—only last year he was preaching the end of the world to his cult on Mt. Shasta.”
“It was postponed,” said Sanger.  p. 155-156

The rest of the story (such as it is) concerns the manoeuvrings of Sangar and Drummond in their attempt to recruit the enigmatic Sister Wiley to their cause. During this, Drummond walks to Roberta’s nearby house and ends up sleeping with her when she arrives to find him inside. At the end of this encounter she tells him that he can’t change the world (and Drummond also later discovers that the explosive he has hidden in a bust in his room has been taken away).
Finally (spoiler), Elizabeth converts Drummond and Sangar to the C-K treatment (Sangar is told that he must take the treatment so he can save C-K souls), and we find that she intends taking the treatment herself, but only once she has convinced the last of the unconverted to do so.
This piece doesn’t have the strongest story arc—the ending, where the unreasonable are converted into the reasonable, seems rather unlikely—but it works on an ironic level, I suppose. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining read, sometimes very much so.
I’d add that it seems a remarkably uniform work given that it has three writers involved.
*** (Good). 10,900 words.

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

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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

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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).

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw

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Dankden by Marc Laidlaw (F&SF, October-November 1995) is the first of a series about Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with a difference:

His musical deficiency owed much to the fact that his right hand was made entirely out of polished black stone, carved in perfect replication of a human hand, so detailed that one could see the slight reliefwork of veins and moles, the knolls of knuckles, even peeling cuticles captured in the hard glossy rock. Most of the fine hairs had snapped from the delicately rendered diamond-shaped pores, but you could feel where they had been, like adamantine stubble. His left hand was more dexterous than most, and his calloused fingers hammered the strings as best they could to make up for the other hand’s disability; but his rock-solid right hand was good for nothing more than brutal strumming and whacking. He couldn’t pinch a plectrum. The soundbox was scarred and showed the signs of much abuse, the thin wood having been patched many times over.
“It’s a gargoyle affliction,” he said to most who asked. “Comes and goes. I’m looking for the treacherous slab who did it to me and disappeared before he could undo it.”  p. 202-3

If you read on through the series you will discover that Gorlen and a gargoyle called Spar, who is introduced later, were cursed by a wizard who swapped their hands for reasons connected to a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. None of this backstory is particularly germane to this particular story, however, which has Gorlen arrive at the town of Dankden, a place located in a swamp and whose streets are (literally, as it turns out later) rivers of mud. We subsequently discover that the town is populated by human inhabitants and by creatures that are half-human, half-phib (the phibs are amphibious creatures that live in the swamps).
Gorlen falls into the company of a woman and her brother, and soon encounters their phib hunting father. Then, shortly after this meeting, there is a commotion in the street when a number of half-phibs gather to complain about the killing of one of their young and, during an altercation, the hunter’s son is taken hostage. The rest of the story concerns his rescue, and Gorlen’s dawning realisation that the hunting community has been killing half-breed phibs rather than taking the wild (and non-intelligent) ones.
This story doesn’t entirely work, partly because of the odd and unlikely interbreeding, and partly because of the depressing genocide subplot. There are also a couple of loose ends, and one of these (spoiler) is why one of the phibs would give Gorlen an underwater kiss of life to save him from drowning when he is in the process of trying to escape from them:

The water, black until now, began to fill with streaming lights. A distant liquid music swelled in his ears as though an operatic riverboat were passing overhead. This developed into a rich, throaty vibration, a catfish purr. According to those who had been revived from the edge of watery death, drowning was almost peaceful once you gave in and inhaled the waters, once the body surrendered and let the soul drift free. Gorlen clung to this last hope as he opened his mouth and inhaled—
Warm, fishy air.
He nearly choked. Cold lips out of nowhere pressed tight to his own. Opening his eyes in disbelieving terror, he saw nothing. Nor could he move, something powerful bound his arms to his sides, albeit without hurting him. Reflexively he breathed in deep, then deeper still, unable to believe that there was air enough to fill him. There was a rich taste in his lungs, an undercurrent to the clammy essence, some perfume that flooded his brain and seeped down his nerves like a whisper, nudging him with secret knowledge, eking out revelation on such a fine level that he felt his atoms1 were conversing with a stranger’s atoms. The mouth sealed to his own began a slight suction, encouraging his exhalation, he gave up the stale air gladly. On the second inhalation—shallower, less desperate—his blinded eyes lit up with a vision of the swamp, all its tangled waterways cast through him like a glowing net whose intricacies were as homey and familiar as the sound of his own pulse. He knew his location: near the sea, not far from Dankden. Dankden! Human town! At the thought of the place, he felt a violent urge to flee at any cost, to swim and keep swimming until he had put that loathsome blot far behind him. An evil paradox posed itself in the same instant: there was literally nowhere left to run. The swamps, once vast enough to remain uncharted even by their most ancient inhabitants, had dwindled alarmingly within the span of several generations; encroached on by human dwellings, drained and poisoned and tamed by air-breathers, the swamps had been reduced to a few last drops.  p. 228-9

Notwithstanding my reservations above, the atmosphere and setting in this story are pretty good, and it’s also an entertaining piece.
*** (Good). 14,300 words.2

1. “Atoms” is not a good word for a fantasy story.

2. This is listed in the magazine as a novella, but it isn’t even close.

Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia

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Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019) opens with (for the first few pages anyway) a fairy tale-like beginning where “a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman”. We see that Eva and Dee live in a forest, and watch their lovey-dovey domestic routine until husband Dee goes missing. Then Eva travels into the nearby town (which has a church belfry) to make enquiries, and sees that it has been largely laid to waste. Eva then learns that Dee has been taken by interplanetary slavers.
At this point the story becomes something else entirely, and we see Eva tap a command on her wrist and summon Sister (her AI “sister” spaceship) and its drones to search for Dee. The rest of the first part sees Eva track down the slavers and then fight a high tech battle with the AI captain of the Consortium ship, which she eventually wins (we learn during this that Eva is a fearsome Kairi Primarch). She retrieves her husband, and they fly home in Sister. Meanwhile, the evidence of the destroyed slaver ship is sent to another solar system.
This first quarter of the story eventually turns out to be a set-up for the remainder of the piece and, while this section is okay action/combat SF, it turns out to be a longer setup than is required for the next part of the story; I’d also add that the first four or so pages (the fairy tale/domestic part) are a little dull, and tonally dissonant when compared with the rest.
The final three-quarters of the story (which takes place some time later) is a different, and much superior, kettle of fish, and begins with a robot, a Valencian Knight, arriving with a summons for Dee. In the conversation that follows there is a lot of information imparted, but the gist of it is that Dee used to be Grandmaster Lucochin on the planet of Valencia, and the new Queen is demanding his presence at the Greatwood there. Although Dee tries to refuse the summons, he and Eva soon have a speck of Corewood implanted in them and fly up to Knight’s ship to travel home via the onboard Vineyard. (Sister covertly follows the pair after dropping them off there, but has to make her own way):

His wife squeezed his fingers to get his attention before signing, “Smells wonderful.”
“It’s the Vineyard,” he explained. “The ship is grown around it to infuse it with the vine’s atoms. It gets into every part of the vessel and flowers. Even when they’re not flowering, the mirror Vineyard on Valencia, or other ships, might be, so ships end up smelling like this all the time.”
They were in the corridors now. Petrified carbon curved under and around them, the same color as his wife’s startlingly light brown eyes, the whorls and rings rippling through the surface a testament to the ship’s advanced age.
This Vineyard was one of the massive fleet his people maintained to trade and lay seedlings in space to create Arbors, so that ships could travel ever further by navigating from one Arbor or Vineyard to another. No matter how far they explored, all other ships, seedlings, and Arbors, remained permanently entangled with Valencia and each other, allowing Valencians to travel vast distances in an instant and trade reliably with many other colonies.

The pair soon pass through the Vineyard portal and arrive on Valencia—almost immediately, Dee discovers that his Lucochin estate and all the people on it have been liquidated rather than taken over by one of the other houses (Dee served the former King, and his attempts to encourage democratic reform saw his lands confiscated and him exiled). The intrigue continues that night when the pair are gassed as they sleep, and Dee awakens to find that Eva has been taken hostage. Then, when Dee is taken to see the Queen, he discovers that she is his ex-wife. The Queen tells him there is a blight causing the Greatwoods and the Vineyards to die and, if he does not cure them, he and Eva will both be handed over to the Consortium slavers from the first section (who have subsequently discovered who destroyed their ship).
The description of the chess-based Valencian society in this part of the story is pretty well done (the ranks appear to go from Grandmaster down to Pawn, with the oppressed masses below the latter; the various characters often wear masks to hide their facial expressions; they complete “moves”, etc., etc.). Also well done is the Game of Thrones-like intrigue that takes place between the various houses. Another strength of the story is the Greatwood/Vineyard handwavium, and the hint that Valencia was originally settled by a generation spaceship full of “First Gardeners”.
Indeed, one of the best parts of the story involves Dee entering the Greatwood to discover why it is dying:

The Greatwood’s iridescence dimmed to a shifting, multicolored glow as he exited the transport and four Knights surrounded him. He was marched alongside the Queen into the low-hanging needle-leaves that spun and glinted in the wind, until they reached the Barrier, which kept all but the Grandmasters from entering. A cylindrical drone swept over to verify his seedling, then retreated to its charging station somewhere beyond the Barrier. He walked into the heart of the Greatwood, sensing the Queen’s unwavering gaze on his back. At the transport hub a short distance from the Barrier, he got into one of the small carts and let it take him on its pre-programmed route to the Coretrees. The sweet, musky perfume of the flowering vines draped on the trees surrounded him like a blanket, but for the first time, he caught the dank scent of rot underneath it all. Purple, red, golden, and green seedpods peeped between the branches, but many were shriveled and blackened, and heaps of spoiled pods had burst open on the ground. He heard the rustling of small animals in the undergrowth, but sobered by what he’d seen, he focused on clearing his mind for the task ahead.
The enormous stand of Coretrees rose out of the deep forest like a monolith, entwined trunks and quantum vines woven together into one massive, flowering, windblown, pulsing glare that forced his mask to its maximum setting. But there were also large dark areas within the Coretrees, where saplings had faded and died. More than ever before.
As the cart halted, a vibration prickled his skin, and heat blasted him. He made his way to the nearest annex in the group of hollowed-out beds at the roots of the Coretrees. He lay down, heart hammering in his chest at the thought of what he was about to do, adrenaline making his fingers shake as he wrapped a Corevine around the hand implanted with the seedling. The needle-leaves sank into his arm, tiny stinging points.
Instantly, he was weightless, his body free of pain and filled with the euphoria of the joining. His mind squeezed with energy and impressions, even as it grew to include every scrabbling life in the Greatwood, every vine curtain on every Vineyard ship, every needleleaf that draped over his paralyzed body, every quark in every Arbor floating in the silent dark.

The climax of the story (spoiler) later takes place at a meeting of Grandmasters where Dee manages to instigate a coup by telling the various Houses that he is the only one who can repair the Greatwood and maintain their space-wide Empire. He also tells them the masses must be enfranchised.
(If I recall correctly, the problem with the Greatwood has something to do with exchanges that he and the previous King had with the sentient trees that comprise it—something about feeding them emotion rather than logic and puzzles, although there is also a reference to problems that Dee left unfixed before his exile. Whatever the explanation was, it wasn’t particularly convincing.)
The story ends with Dee meeting Sister, who has been quietly subverting various AI systems and ships to get to the planet and rescue Eva. They collect her and go home.
This is a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, but the best of it, which is very good in parts, outweighs its flaws. It also struck me that this writer has more in common with previous generations of SF writers than current ones—there are flashes of C. L. Moore here, the sensory stuff about the Vineyards; Jack Vance, the odd and complex Valencian society; and Iain M. Banks—the AI/robot superbeings, and Dee’s “free the masses” politics. The story is also quite heavily plotted, and Garcia’s storytelling is largely brisk and clear (clearer than I’ve been above, I fear, but there is a lot going on in the story and I read it a couple of weeks ago).
A writer to watch, I think.
*** (Good). 16,450 words. Story link.

A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg

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A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg (F&SF, July 1975)1 is a meta-story and a piece of recursive SF where the writer describes a story that that he might write but cannot, because “it partakes of its time, which is distant and could be perceived only through the idiom and devices of that era.”
He goes on to say that the story would be about a spaceship that is trapped in a “black galaxy” (I think he means black hole) that results from the implosion of a neutron star:

Conceive then of a faster-than-light spaceship which would tumble into the black galaxy and would be unable to leave. Tumbling would be easy, or at least inevitable, since one of the characteristics of the black galaxy would be its invisibility, and there the ship would be. The story would then pivot on the efforts of the crew to get out. The ship is named Skipstone. It was completed in 3892. Five hundred people died so that it might fly, but in this age life is held even more cheaply than it is today.
Left to my own devices, I might be less interested in the escape problem than that of adjustment. Light housekeeping in an anterior sector of the universe; submission to the elements, a fine, ironic literary despair. This is not science fiction, however. Science fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback to show us the ways out of technological impasse. So be it.

The writer then reflects on his personal life in Ridgeway Park (“I would rather dedicate the years of life remaining (my melodramatic streak) to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class town”) before setting out his notes for the story. These cover various facets of the prospective piece: the characters, which include a female captain and her cargo of “the embalmed”, five hundred and fifteen dead people who will be reanimated at some point in the future; possible sex scenes; data dumps of astronomical physics; a scene where the dead come to life; and, eventually, the open ending of the story—which, as it happens, sees the ship vomited from the black hole after engaging its tachyonic drive, depositing the occupants in Ridgefield Park in 1975 (which neatly ends the story).
It’s very hard to synopsise this as it is much more than a series of events or notes but, perhaps, as well as the passage above, the following will also provide a flavour of what the story is like:

Lena is left alone again, then, with the shouts of the dead carrying forward. Realizing instantly what has happened to her—fourteen thousand years of perception can lead to a quicker reaction time, if nothing else—she addresses the console again, uses the switches and produces three more prostheses, all of them engineers barely subsidiary to the one she has already addressed (Their resemblance to the three comforters of Job will not be ignored here, and there will be an opportunity to squeeze in some quick religious allegory, which is always useful to give an ambitious story yet another level of meaning.)
Although they are not quite as qualified or definitive in their opinions as the original engineer, they are bright enough by far to absorb her explanation, and this time her warnings not to go to the portholes, not to look upon the galaxy, are heeded. Instead, they stand there in rigid and curiously mortified postures, as if waiting for Lena to speak.
“So you see,” she says finally, as if concluding a long and difficult conversation, which in fact she has, “as far as I can see, the only way to get out of this black galaxy is to go directly into tachyonic drive. Without any accelerative buildup at all.”

This is an intense and original piece, but it felt overlong, and I suspect it is a story that people will admire more than enjoy.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

1. The story is dedicated to John W. Campbell.

The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg

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The Time of His Life by Larry Eisenberg (F&SF, April 1968) opens with the scientist-narrator brooding about his life—not only has his early promise failed to amount to anything, but he is beginning to tire of married life and fatherhood. Added irritation is provided by his Noble Prize-winning father, who not only didn’t acknowledge the son’s contribution to his prize-winning work, but now chides him for not pulling his weight and for having an affair with one of the graduate students who works in the lab.
Later on in the story the father summons the narrator-son to his office, and there follows a conversation about the direction time flows. The father then reveals an artificially aged monkey, and tells the narrator he wants him to slow down the field fluctuations that cause the effect.
While the narrator works on process, there are further arguments between the men about the narrator’s extra-marital relationship. Then the son sees that the monkey is young again and, when he reveals this to his father, and suggests himself as a human test subject (hoping to become the same age as the grad student and restart his life), the father shows that he has already tested the method on himself when he removes a wig and makeup to reveal his younger self. When the narrator says he also wants to be twenty years younger, and that his father can have his wife and children (we are told earlier he is an attentive grandfather), the father mocks the suggestion, if only because of the questions that would be raised when his older self vanished.
The narrator subsequently goes on a multi-day drunk and (spoiler), when he wakes up, discovers he is now as old as his father—he realises they have swapped places but, in a final twist, shows he doesn’t care—he is the one who is now the Nobel Prize winner.
This has a cleverly convoluted plot, but one that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny (e.g. the makeup scene). However, the warped, almost reverse-Oedipal father-and-son relationship is intense and weirdly fascinating, as is the son’s acceptance of what happens at the end of the story (it would have been easy to have this as a straightforward victim ending).
*** (Good). 3,500 words. Story link.

Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys

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Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys (Galaxy, December 1961) opens with Sollenar, a media mogul, receiving an unexpected victor from the Special Relations Office of the International Associations of Broadcasters. The visitor, a man called Ermine, tells Sollenar that a competitor called Cortwright Burr may be about to threaten his broadcast monopoly by introducing a device (created by Martian scientists) that will render Sollenar’s technology—which creates “complete emotional rapport between the viewer and subject matter”—obsolescent.
After this rather technical and business-heavy (or data-dump) beginning, the second chapter changes pace completely, and sees Sollenar enter into a bizarre life and death struggle with Burr. This begins with Sollenar in a helium-filled plastic drifter (invisible to radar) gliding down towards the roof of Burr’s tower block. Sollenar breaks in and finds Burr, who has a sphere of orange-gold metal in his hands. Sollenar shoots Burr, but when he goes over to his body he sees Burr is still alive and holding onto the ball. Sollenar fires again and again, but he can’t seem to kill Burr and—even when Sollenar flees and returns to the balcony of his own tower block—he is just in time to see Burr climbing over the edge of the parapet. Sollenar beats at Burr’s hands, and he finally falls into the water far below. Even after this Burr isn’t finished though, and Sollenar meets him at a TV ball where Burr reveals a cadaverous body beneath his costume.
Also at the ball is Erimine, who demonstrates his incorruptibility to Sollenar when the latter tries to bribe him:

Ermine bared his left arm and sank his teeth into it. He displayed the arm.
There was no quiver of pain in voice or stance. “It’s not a legend, Mr. Sollenar.
It’s quite true. We of our office must spend a year, after the nerve surgery, learning to walk without the feel of our feet, to handle objects without crushing them or letting them slip or damaging ourselves. Our mundane pleasures are auditory, olfactory and visual. Easily gratified at little expense. Our dreams are totally interior, Mr. Sollenar. The operation is irreversible. What would you buy for me with your money?”

Sollenar quickly leaves the Ball and gets on a flight to Mars, but Ermine appears and points to Burr a few seats away. Then, when they land, Sollenar stuns Ermine and flees. At this point (spoiler) Ermine phones Earth and confirms what will already be obvious to most readers about the fantastic events that have occurred so far:

“Sollenar is en route to the Martian city. He wants a duplicate of Burr’s device, of course, since he smashed the original when he killed Burr. I’ll follow and make final disposition. The disorientation I reported previously is progressing rapidly. Almost all his responses now are inappropriate. On the flight out, he seemed to be staring at something in an empty seat. Quite often when spoken to he obviously hears something else entirely. I expect to catch one of the next few flights back.”

Then, when Sollenar finds the Martian engineers’ quarters, he too realises that he has been living a storyline generated by Burr’s device. However, when he sees Ermine outside with a rifle, he gets the Martian engineers to build another of the devices.
The story concludes with Sollenar going out to confront Ermine, and is apparently shot. The last scene has Ermine pick up the device that Sollenar has had manufactured—at which point he realises that he can feel again. Ermine is delighted but, when he later gashes his foot, he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. At this point the reader realises that Ermine is also experiencing his own reality.
This is a bizarre and tricksy piece that is interesting more than it is successful. Some of the setup is contrived (Ermin’s lack of senses to make him incorruptible), and I was unsure whether Sollenar is actually killed at the end of the piece. It is also one of those reality-shifting stories that, after you have finished, you want to go back and read again to find out exactly what was going on. A story I found impressive or notable more than I liked, perhaps.
On reflection, this struck me as the kind of thing you would expect from Philip K. Dick (and I’d be interested to know if this predates Dick’s use of multiple reality states). Also, in some respects, it feels like a proto-New Wave story, with its unrealiable narrators and/or protagonists, and its focus on the “inner space” of its characters (that said, it has the form of a pulp adventure). I also note in passing that the very powerful man setup at the beginning recalls his 1976 novel, Michaelmas (if I remember correctly from my reading of it over 40 years ago).
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein

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Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) starts with a wealthy businessman called Bronson Van Vogel deciding that he needs to one-up an acquaintance:

Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus.
He had mentioned it at breakfast.
“Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”
“Not especially. Why?”
“I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”
“A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”
He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Hartmann was around the club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund—must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha—me landing on the Club ’copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”
She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband. She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear.  pp. 46-47

The next part of the story takes place at the ranch, where the couple see a variety of bio-engineered animals. However, after a long lecture from one of the company’s scientists about how a flying horse is an impossibility without massively changing its shape and metabolism, Van Vogel settles for one something that will look like a Pegasus, but will not fly (although this is only settled on after the scientist consults with a Martian alien called B’Na Kreeth). Meantime, Van Vogel’s wife Martha buys Napoleon, a midget elephant that can write with its trunk. Then, as the couple leave the complex, they pass through the breeding laboratories that produces the “apes”, anthropoid workers that are used for labouring.
Towards the end of their visit the couple pass an enclosure of old apes, and some of them crowd the wire and beg for cigarettes. The supervisor apologises, but Martha goes over to one of the apes and gives it a cigarette anyway. The ape thanks her and tells her it is called Jerry. Then, when Martha asks it why he looks sad, Jerry replies that it has no work, and therefore can’t get any cigarettes. Subsequently, Martha learns that the apes in this enclosure are either old, senile, or have medical conditions (Jerry has cataracts) and, when she asks the manager why other work can’t be found for them, her husband, irritated by her concern, tells her that old apes don’t retire—they are liquidated and then used as dog food.
At this point the story pivots in a couple of ways. First, the focus of the story completely switches from Van Vogel to Martha and, second, we find out that (as hinted at the end of the quoted passage above) she is the one with the money. Further to this latter fact, when the manager of the facility doesn’t agree to her request to give her Jerry and to stop the killings, she calls her business managers and begins a hostile takeover of the company.
Martha’s attempt to buy the breeding ranch eventually proves abortive (by making the call in front of the manager she has tipped her hand and others have bought up stock) and Martha ends up having to employee a “Shyster” called McCoy. He decides, after seeing Jerry sing (and lie to Napoleon), that their best bet is for Jerry to bring a lawsuit against Workers Inc. (During all this, Martha also discovers that her husband is working against her, and unceremoniously dumps him.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees Jerry in court. At the end of the trial he is declared a man because (among other reasons) the Martian who appeared earlier in the story is also considered a man due to an Earth-Mars treaty. The story concludes:

“We are exploring the meaning of this strange thing called ‘manhood.’ We have seen that it is not a matter of shape, nor race, nor planet of birth, nor of acuteness of mind. Truly, it cannot be defined, yet it may be experienced. It can reach from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry—will you sing your new song for the judge?”
“Sure [Mike].” Jerry looked uneasily up at the whirring cameras, the mikes, and the
ikes, then cleared his throat:
“Way down upon de Suwannee Ribber Far, far away; Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber—”
The applause scared him out of his wits; the banging of the gavel frightened him still
more—but it mattered not; the issue was no longer in doubt. Jerry was a man.  p. 60

This is an entertaining piece, if not the most convincing one, this latter perhaps partly caused by its kitchen sink quality (apart from uplifted animals used in a labour economy, we also have Martians, and some sort of dodgy legal system that requires the use of “Shysters”, etc.), and partly due to its rationale for Jerry’s humanity (he can sing, lie, and appears less monstrous than the Martian who testifies).
I’m also not sure what to make of Jerry’s song at the end of the story: I assume this, and the fact that Jerry calls everyone “Boss”, is a reference to pre-Civil War slaves and their lack of civil liberties—or was Heinlein thinking about the situation of minorities at the time he wrote the piece?
Finally, I note that this story has a powerful and rich female character at its centre, which is unusual for SF of this period (and I suppose that the reason that Heinlein started with the husband as the main character and then switched was to wrong-foot his readers).
*** (Good). 9,150 words. Story link.

Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey

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Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator arriving at a hospital to see her dying father. She isn’t there in person but as an avatar (a robotic telepresence). As she talks to her father it becomes apparent that she is using this method of visiting because she is almost totally paralyzed, and has been since she was a child. We also learn that, when it became apparent she was never going to recover, she was introduced to virtual reality games and eventually managed to attend architectural college and graduate. Now, by the use of avatars, she works all over the world.
The last part of the story sees her watch her father pass away. There is a good penultimate line:

And how strange it is that, in just a few minutes, there will be two bodies in this room whose consciousness had left them to go elsewhere.  p. 41

A slight piece—but it has a neat idea, and the elegiac feel at the end is well enough done.
*** (Good). 3,600 words. Story link.