Tag: Clarkesworld

Commencement Address by Arthur Liu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Commencement Address by Arthur Liu,1 translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is a very hard to follow story that appears to be (a) partly an extended message from a father to his daughter, composed as he plummets to his death in an airplane accident (he uses the VR space in his head to stretch the time available to three days); (b) partly a series of their family’s stored memories; and (c) partly an account of the technology that allows the latter (and the rise of “Dream Architects” who invented it). The accounts of the memory storage technology are mostly detailed in italicised data dumps.
I almost gave up on this piece two pages in, when I hit this passage:

On Tomb-Sweeping Day, conciliation commenced in the rain. Two girls shook hands in forgiveness by a headstone. Four months ago, one had rallied a crowd against the other and called her a “bastard.”
At your classmate’s mother’s funeral, I saw two versions of you. She who represented you from the past was in anguish. When she saw you, panic colored her tear-stricken face.
Your teacher was the one to extend the invitation. During one of her home visits to us, she learned of my role in the research and development of Erstwhile. I said yes, so the girl’s mother might appear once again with the vivacity of her lifetime. I brought a beta test augmented reality device and gave the girl a chance to bid farewell to her mother.
The spirit of the dead shall eventually rise. Now that they had finally parted ways, the father clasped his daughter, while she burst into tears.
Then, she saw you. Standing face-to-face, your eyes alighted on each other.
At that moment, you stepped forward and pulled her into an embrace.

What on Earth is going on in that passage?
– (Awful). 3,500 words. Story link.

1. According to a note at the end of the story, this was “originally published in Chinese in the 2017 Science Writers Hunting Project (Ranked as Outstanding)”. Lost in translation.

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm—the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we have a near-future society that is sophisticated enough to fit high-tech prosthetics to injured people, but where they are still doing manual labour in factories that apparently have no concept of health and safety. In short, the arm is from the 2050s, the factory setting from the 1970s.
Jacob then returns to his home town for his father’s funeral. He is greeted by his brother, to whom he hasn’t spoken for years, and then learns that that his mother has turned into a bed-bound vegetable:

Ma, who was only fifteen years older than me, but whose hair had already turned gray. Ma, who joined the plant soon after she had me, where she got a job at the head table. They called it that because that’s where pig heads ended up. After noses and eyes and ears and cheeks and jowls and snouts were removed, the brains got scooped up. The Company sold the slurry to canned goods producers. It made soups thicker.
Back then, it used to be that one had to work through the skull with a meat saw, and then cut the brain out. One day, the Company figured it was faster firing compressed air into the skulls, then siphoning the remains.
Ma inhaled pig brain for years. Her own body, going into overdrive, started destroying itself. Who knew pig brains and human brains shared so much biology? Not something they taught at my school. Built and paid for by the Company.

The rest of this piece is an equally miserabilist, anti-capitalist tract that has (spoiler) the brother try to convince Jacob to come back to work in the company-run town. Jacob refuses (obviously). Then, after their father’s funeral, Jacob’s brother reveals his plan to keep his father’s prosthetic arms and have them attached to himself after having his arms surgically removed (the company are looking to recycle the—ten, fifteen-year old?—prosthetics onto another maimed worker, but the brother has a plan to trick them). Jacob becomes complicit with his final words, “Let’s talk to the doctor tomorrow.” This latter development doesn’t really flow from what has occurred previously, but it is maybe suggesting that “you take the boy out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the boy”.
As I’ve suggested above, this is a rather backward looking story (and the arms plot at the end makes it an unlikely one too), and I couldn’t help but think that this would probably have worked better as a straightforward literary small press piece—where the writing and characterisation wouldn’t have been hobbled by the unconvincing premise.
Finally, even if factories like this are still around today (it’s hard to believe such appalling Health & Safety would be tolerated in Western countries), the robots are coming.
* (Mediocre). 5,000 words. Story link.

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as “Deadwife” for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.
The story alternates between Sandra’s dream therapy sessions—she is suppressing memories about Deadwife—and her time in the facility. Although the story generally has a brooding atmosphere (Sandra is troubled, and it has been raining for days), some of the snarky interactions between the residents and the robots are quite droll:

Annabel shakes her head. One of the service bots is clearing the table. She reaches over and thumbs the sticker from her banana peel onto its head, where it joins the hundreds of other stickers Annabel has been plastering it with since she got here.
“Is that my tip?” the bot asks.
“No, this is your tip: Electricity and water don’t mix. Whatever you do, stay dry on the inside.”
“Useful information. I’ll keep it in mind for the robot uprising. Gotta work on our weak points.” It totters off with our trays.
“I like that one,” Annabel says. “Of all the things in here that talk, I think it has the best sense of humor.”
“I’m taking that personally.”
“You should.”

The story ends (spoiler) with the alarms going off in the middle of the night and Sandra awakening to find the Lifter robot picking her up. She is taken through the pouring rain to the refuge of a nearby lighthouse. There she reunites with the other residents, and they watch a tsunami hit the facility. During this cataclysm, Sandra remembers walking through tropical rain to the hospital and discovering her partner, finally named as Josephine, dead.
I liked this, but it is essentially a mainstream story about a woman triggered into remembering a traumatic memory—albeit one pepped up with snarky robots and a disaster movie ending.
*** (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, a bioengineer, getting a commission from a client to make a dragon for Chinese New Year:

People had been asking for dragons for a while, but this client—I think he was a hedge fund manager who was starting a new entertainment streaming service, but possibly he was an entertainment streaming service CEO who was starting a hedge fund. Did I mention I’m bad at paying attention in meetings?

The first dragon was about the size of a cat, and since the client had refused delivery, I kept him. I fed him crickets and mealworms, shaved carrots and diced peppers, crunchy cat kibble, and occasional cans of sardines. The dragon grew plump, developed a habit of begging at the table, and shredded my sofa and curtains with his claws. He also liked to lie across the back of my shoulders when I was working, like a tiny scaly heating pad. (Despite the scales, he wasn’t a reptile; I had thought a warm-blooded dragon would have a more interesting personality. There are scaled mammals, like pangolins.) He ran around the house with a little galumphing hop.

After the first dragon is rejected by the client—no wings, no fire, wrong colour, wrong size, etc.—she starts work on a second dragon. This one—larger, with feathers, teeth (although still no fire due to potential insurance problems)—is also rejected. After this, her business partner fires the client. The partner takes the second dragon home while the narrator keeps the first, which she names Mr Long.
Time passes. The dragons prove popular when each of them is out and about, which leads to further work for her and her partner’s company.
The last part of the story (spoiler) has the narrator hear of a fire at the CEO’s company: she realises that he must have found someone to create a fire breathing dragon for him. Then, sometime later, when she hears rumours of a strange creature in the wild (“the Palo Alto Hippogriff”), she realises that she had better go and find it (fire breathing dragons and dry Californian forests are not a good mix). With the help of her dragon she does so. Minor problems with their ex-client ensue.
This has a slight story line, but it is an entertainingly told piece.
*** (Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan (Clarkesworld, October 2020) gets off to a fairly leisurely start with Rufus meeting a woman who knows Linus, his brother: it materialises that Rufus and Linus share memories, and that he has disappeared. We also learn, later on in the story, that there are four brothers (the others are Caius and Silus), and that they were originally part of a cult that biologically modified them as a part of an attempted hive-mind project that was later shut down by the authorities (we find most of this out when Rufus consults a PI called Leong about his brother’s disappearance):

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”
“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”
Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.
“You were born on the Physalia?”
“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.
“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”
“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”
“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.

The rest of this piece is, essentially, a missing person story. When Leong produces a picture of Linus leaving Sydney airport the brothers don’t have the money to fund a worldwide search, so they create a social media app that scans submitted photographs for evidence of their brother in the background. Eventually (spoiler), they track him down to a college in France where he has won a scholarship. Further investigation reveals that Linus is being sponsored by an aging billionaire called Guinard (who may have part-funded the Physalia project).
Caius flies to France to question Linus (the point of view moves through all the four brothers during the story), and discovers that Guinard is sharing his memories with Linus and grooming him to become his successor (this is portrayed as a form of immortality for Guinard).
Events then see the three brothers attempting to kidnap Linus when they can’t convince him to spend some time on his own, unconnected to either them or Guinard—so Linus can learn to be himself, neither in their shadow, as he complains, nor as a receptacle for Guinard.
The kidnapping attempt fails when it is stopped by Guinard’s security, and the story ends with Linus thinking to himself that he doesn’t intend to be a receptacle for Guinard, only his protégé, and that he cannot reveal this deception to his brothers until the billionaire dies.
This is pretty good in parts—there is commentary about personhood, and some dry humour—and it is generally interesting, but the ending doesn’t really convince, and a lot of the story is taken up with inter-brother relationship tensions. Although this is a solid story, it struck me as Egan on cruise-control.
*** (Good). 13,050 words. Story link.