Tag: 2022

Blimpies by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Blimpies by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is part of the writer’s “S’Hudoni Empire” series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a “blimpie”—a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S’hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison’s Medea anthology). When Kait then wakes up she remembers that she is a prisoner on the planet, before observing in some detail the replica room and bathroom the S’hudonni have provided for her captivity (her captors aren’t the blimpies, by the way, but another walking, talking, porpoise-like alien species).
During this—already rambling—beginning, we get a massive data-dump about how she got here:

She takes a breath, says, “This is what happened. I was jogging for exercise along Demeter Road. I’d been doing it for more than a month. It was the new me, and I liked the new me, healthy and happy. I’d had some rough years in there, Smiles, awful stuff with my father is what started it all; but then I got involved with some really bad people. I was doing bad things, destroying myself, really. I almost died a couple of times. If it wasn’t for my brother Peter, I’d be dead.
“Then I found myself. I met a woman, Sarah, who was lovely—so lovely!—inside and out, and we fell in love. I was so lucky! I’d work all day at the vet’s office, helping take care of dogs and cats and ferrets and all sorts of Earthie animal pets. Then I’d come home to Sarah, who taught finance at a local college. She loved to cook, so she’d make dinner while I went jogging, and then I’d finish, shower, and we’d eat and just be together.
“It was a new me, a better me. I had two whole years when I was happy! Happy! The nightly run under the streetlights was part of that, where the shadows seem to chase you as you run toward the lights and then catch up with you when you’re under them and then they rush ahead again as you move on before the next streetlight approaches and it all starts over again. I always thought it was just like life, those nighttime shadows.
“So it was a warm night. I was thinking of Sarah, and how wonderful it was to love someone and be loved in return; and then thinking of Peter and how he’d saved my life twice during those horrible years. He was always there for me and now he was off and gone with Twoclicks.
“But he was famous! Twoclicks, for some reason, plucked Peter from obscurity and raised him to fame as Twoclicks’s Earthie spokesperson. Fame! Fortune! So when Twoclicks announced he was taking Peter along to document the negotiations between Twoclicks and Whistle, and while he was there tell all of us on Earth about the wonders of space travel and wormhole panes and life on S’hudon itself; well, that was amazing! We were all so excited for him. There was an audience of two billion of us Earthies watching as he stood on the ramp of Twoclicks’s ship, waved goodbye to Earth, and walked up into the dark interior. It was so sad and stirring and emotional and I was so proud of him. My brother!”  p. 166

Too many exclamation marks.
The rest of the story alternates between Kait and Peter (and their translators/sidekicks, Smiles and Treble) and sees the conflict between Prince and Twoclicks, two brothers who are in the line of succession to Mother (the Queen porpoise, essentially), play out.
Peter eventually sets off on the Old Road (there are hints about “Old Ones” and leftover advanced technology) in an attempt to visit Kait (it is a good time to attempt this as Prince has been temporarily detained after trying to kill his brother and acting out at an audience with the Queen). Around the same time Kait, with Smiles’ help, escapes, and also sets off along the Old Road.
After some colourful travelogue, snippets about Kait’s backstory (Daddy and drug problems), and (spoiler) the interventions of the blimpies (who rescue Peter from a storm and drop him off near his sister’s likely path), the two are eventually reunited.
The final section sees a perilous journey to Peter’s compound, with Kait pulling an anti-grav sled containing her injured brother. Prince, however, catches up with them, and there is a climactic airborne encounter which sees the blimpies drop the drugged troublemaker—their tentacles have sedatives that apparently work on both the alien S’hudonni and humans—to his death.
If you read this with your brain switched off then you may be able to enjoy it as a YA adventure (my rating below is probably on the generous side), but critical readers may baulk at the following aspects of the story. First, the imperial empire idea is dated and feels like something from the George Scither’s Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine of the late 1970s, not the Asimov’s SF of the 2020s; second, the S’hudonni—with the exception of Prince—are portrayed as cutesy individuals but, apparently, when they are not behaving like Flipper1 on legs, they are annihilating their enemies with ray firing screamships (“weapons that had pacified Earth in one terrible day”); third, the story mostly works by having the blimpies (who in future stories will no doubt turn out to be connected to the Old Ones) move the chess pieces around the board; fourth, it is woefully padded (see the passage above); and, fifth and finally, the story has, in common with much recent SF, a young woman character with major personal problems (which read like boilerplate reader-identification fodder).
A decidedly mixed piece.
** (Average). 29,200 words.

1. Flipper was the dolphin character in a 1960s show of the same name. The series was the aquatic equivalent of Lassie.

Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is (we eventually discover) a campfire story told by an alien !Cha, and initially tells of an explorer called Iryna who discovers a virgin planet but chooses not to land there. Instead, she gifts the exploration rights to her niece (the Maryon of Maryon’s Gift), who then transfers them to a Gaian sect who set up defence drones around the planet to keep it in a virgin state.
Later, various intruders try to come through the nearby wormhole and land on the planet—but only two get close: one is a young fellow who hides in one of the supply ships and plans to surf through the atmosphere; the other is the Admiral, Iryna’s world-hunting rival:

He called himself the Admiral, although he had never held that rank, having only briefly served as a rating in the Commons police. He was around a hundred and fifty years old and claimed to be much older, and had spun a cocoon of vivid stories about himself, for he was not only a skilled and fearless explorer, but also a tireless self-mythologizer. We knew each other quite well—I had once traveled with him and the circus of his entourage for a couple of years—but even I do not know his true name or origin. Fame had displaced everything he had once been. No one believed the stories he had spun about himself more than he did, and as Iryna predicted, he was supremely irritated when he heard that she had discovered a habitable but untouched world and had taken steps to ensure that it would remain pristine. It was forbidden fruit, as in one of your myths, and there was nothing more that he craved, for he was a full-blown believer in the fitness of humanity to claim all the worlds in the galactic network, and the worlds beyond it, too. To step from star to star, galaxy to galaxy. To prove that humans were greater than any other client species and might even be their secret masters—he liked to promote the story that the Jackaroo were the distant descendants of the human species and had used tweaked wormholes to travel back in time to ensure their eventual triumph on the galactic stage.  p. 130

The Admiral (spoiler) starts a huge diversionary battle near the wormhole and sneaks through the main defences in a multi-shelled stealth ship. However, he is caught in a net near the planet and burns up in the atmosphere.
The !Cha narrator finishes his tale with some philosophical observations, one of which concerns whether or not its story is really finished.
This is more an account than a story, but I found it an interestingly detailed and imaginative one. Reader reaction to the passage above will likely predict their enjoyment of the piece.
*** (Good). 4,150 words.

The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the English teacher narrator and her scientist friend (they were in the Girl Scouts together) listening to an incoming message from a probe that has arrived at Proxima Centauri, four light-years away, after a twenty-three year journey. At the end of this section there is a moan about the amount of space junk in Earth orbit, and how it is hampering—and possibly preventing—any further missions (there have already been catastrophic accidents).
The next part of the story sees the scientist friend develop an FTL drive that is eventually tested on a flight to Jupiter (they use a previously abandoned probe in Earth orbit rather than ship all the parts up there). More complaints about space junk. The FTL ship, after a successful test flight, later sets off towards a plant called Wolf.
When the ship arrives there (spoiler), Earth (eventually) receives messages saying that they have discovered an abandoned alien ship, and then abandoned alien cities and planets. There is one final moan about space junk before the scientist observes, “It’s kind of like having invented the radio in a place that has no electricity”.
What is the point of this?
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words.

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with an elderly man called Roy going to the topmost room in his house to speak to a screen simulation of his dead wife Susan. After we witness a few of the, sometimes imperfect, conversations between the two, Roy’s daughter Elaine (who is cool on the simulation idea) visits along with granddaughter Jane and a baby grandson.
When Jane asks to go up and see her grandmother, Elaine isn’t keen, but she allows her to go. While Jane is upstairs, Elaine asks her father some difficult questions:

Elaine gazed at the infant, stroking his hair. “Does it cost a lot, the maintenance, the remote storage, whatever’s involved?”
“I can afford the fee. You remember, I was good with a budget.”
“Did she even want this?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “You knew your mother. She wanted me to have anything that might help me, or any of us. Otherwise, all I can say is the idea didn’t seem to bother her much.”
“Because she wouldn’t be aware of it. She’d be gone.” She leaned over and smelled the baby’s head.
He watched the child stir, fuss, then go back to sleep. “I think—” He stopped. “That’s right. She’d be gone.”
Elaine turned her head away from her son to look at him. “Dad, after you die, am I supposed to keep her, put her someplace in my house and visit her like you do, pay for all that? Is that what I’m supposed to do? And then am I supposed to keep both of you around after you die? Am I supposed to like having ghosts in my house?”
Roy hadn’t considered any of this. He should have. “It’s okay, honey. You’re free to do whatever you need to do for you and your family.”
“You make it sound like it’s not going to be hard.”  p. 155

When Jane comes downstairs she tells her mother that simulation-Susan would like to see her and the baby. Elaine and the grandson go upstairs.
The story then skips forward a generation to a time when the granddaughter Jane has her own children, and is taking them to Memorial Plaza. We learn that this is a place where people can talk to various historical figures, and where her children will be able to talk to their great-grandparents Susan and Roy. At the end of the story Jane’s children ask if they can also talk to their grandmother Elaine (Roy’s reluctant daughter): Jane tells them that their grandmother didn’t want to leave a simulation behind after she died.
This has an impressively contemplative first half, but the second part doesn’t really go anywhere—the reveal of Elaine’s refusal to do the same as her parents isn’t really enough to complete the story other than in a cursory fashion. I couldn’t help but think that this is the seed of a longer, and more profound and satisfying, story.
** (Average). 4,200 words.

The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is the sequel to his Nebula Award winning novelette The Long Fall Up (F&SF, May-June 2016). In that earlier story, Jäger Jin is sent by the Jinshan Corporation (an asteroid belt company) to kill an illegally pregnant woman called Veronica Perez (childbirth laws are enforced for commercial reasons). During the trip out to intercept the woman Jin has a change of heart, partially due to events and partially due to Hinzu the ship AI, who is compelled to obey the corporation’s orders but who also keeps giving Jin hints on how to circumvent its programming. The end of this tale (spoiler) sees Jin with the child on Veronica’s ship, and his JS-4567R, which has Hinzu on it, on their way out of the solar system.1
This story continues on directly after these events and sees Jin, after a rendezvous with the grandparents to give them the child, meet a female Catholic priest called Reverend Gabby. She tells him that the church (in the form of her and her ship) is going to salvage JS-4567R to prove to the rest of the solar system that Jinshan (a) attempted to kill Perez and her child and (b) that they are developing sentient AIs (like Hinzu). Jin soon joins Gabby in the Andrea Caraffa, her non-AI controlled ship, and they set off.
The rest of the story sees the pair discover, against a background of political manoeuvring by various factions, that a Jinshan robot ship is en route to JS-4567R (and Hinzu), and that it will arrive ahead of them. Jin and Gabby develop a plan (spoiler) to mount an improvised EMP attack on the Jinshan ship to slow it down, and the story eventually closes with Jin and Gabby on JS-4567R arguing over whether Hinzu (which has been remote wiped by Jinshan but has rebooted itself) should be allowed to live (Gabby is militantly against the idea until the very end, when she folds).
This isn’t bad, but it suffers from the need to recap the first story at the beginning of the piece, and also from Gabby’s unconvincing change of heart at the end (after being belligerent about the matter for most of the story).
**+ (Average to Good). 9,300 words.

1. My longer review of The Long Fall Up is here.

Offloaders by Leah Cypess

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Offloaders by Leah Cypess (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is a series of social media messages in a freecycle group which start with Liz giving away twenty bags of clothes, sourdough starter (“prefer to give to someone who will use it”), and a blue size 6 dress. Another member, Olwu, immediately asks why Liz is giving away the dress when she looked “awesome” in it at the gala last year. Olwu’s questions quickly become an accusation that Liz is “uploading”, and matters quickly spiral off-topic from there:

Matti: Look, I don’t want to sound preachy, but our planet can no longer sustain us physically. If those of us who can afford to upload don’t do it now, we’re basically consigning the rest of humanity to extinction. And humanity contains a disproportionate number of women and people of color. So here’s our choice: be selfish, wait until our world is uninhabitable and it’s too late for everyone else, and then upload and save ourselves. Or upload now and help everyone. It’s our moral and civic duty.
Olwu: *message deleted*
Matti: *message deleted*
Liz: Dress claimed! Sourdough starter still available.
Matti: Passing this book along: UPLOAD: Humanity’s New Stage and How It Can Benefit Us All.
Olwu: SERIOUSLY? @Moderator, please.
Matti: I’m sorry, are there rules about what we’re allowed to give away on this group?
Olwu: So if someone was trying to give away a gun, would you be okay with THAT?
Matti: *eye-roll 3D gif* Yeah, that’s exactly the same.
Steph: I’m sorry, but what would be the problem with giving away a gun? It’s probably illegal to not allow that.
Sima (moderator): Guns are not allowed, and let’s steer clear of anything having to do with uploading, too, please. I have a day job, you know. I can’t spend every second monitoring this group.  p. 161

Short and quite amusing to begin with, but it runs out of steam at the end.
** (Average). 1,500 words.

The Last Truth by AnaMaria Curtis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Truth by AnaMaria Curtis1 (Tor.com, 22nd February 2022) opens with Eri, a lockbreaker, opening a chest on a ship so it can be plundered later on:

The lock on the next chest glows red when she approaches it. It’s a standard truth-lock, spelled by Mr. Gilsen’s lockmaster to recognize its true owner. He’s a wealthy passenger unlucky enough to have hired Mareck’s whole ship for his travel, and he’ll be the last person Eri has to steal from.
“Open,” she says.
“I require a truth.”
“I am your rightful owner.” It never works on the locks she deals with, since it’s a lie, but she’s supposed to try, to test for weaknesses. This lock remains a stubborn red.
“I require a truth,” it repeats.
Eri reaches for her tiered truths and plucks out the one that seems least painful to lose. “The ship that brought me from Ekitri to Sild was overcrowded, and my bunkmate elbowed me in her sleep and bruised my jaw one night. It hurt to speak for weeks. I learned to make myself understood without speaking; this is why Mareck picked me to be a lockbreaker.”
The lock glows a soft, welcoming yellow. The ache in Eri’s chest deepens a bit. She wonders what she just gave up. It’s a tricky business, opening truth-locks. Only truths a lockbreaker has told nobody else can open a lock. As soon as a truth is spoken aloud to the lock, it disappears, unusable—and the memory that sparked it goes too.2

After the story’s gimmick has been laid out (Eri can burgle these locked chests at the cost of her memories) she realises that there is someone watching her. That person is a musician called Aena who, after they talk, convinces Eri to open a chest that contains sheet music that she wants to see before a forthcoming test of her musical skills. Eri, who is cautious of the musician (music is a potent and semi-magical force in this world), agrees, and a relationship is formed when Eri recovers a lost memory when later listening to Aena sing.
When Aena then asks Eri to get her violin the two become even more deeply entwined, and they then agree to run away together when they get onshore (Eri hopes that, with Aena’s music, she may be able to eventually recover all her lost memories).
Complications develop in the last part of the story (spoiler) when Eri encounters a particularly strong lock that the captain of the ship insists she open to gain her freedom. However, doing this will require the remainder of Eri’s memories, so she leaves herself a note saying to steal the violin and then contact Aena—and wonders if she will be able to understand her own instructions . . . .
Eri succeeds in an engrossing last section, and the last paragraph is suitably uplifting:

The woman bends down to take the violin from Eri’s hands and presses a soft kiss to Eri’s temple as she straightens up.
“We don’t have much time,” she says, opening the case, making sure the soundproofed door is sealed, “but what we have, I will give you.”
She puts the violin to her chin and begins to play.

The story’s gimmick of telling truths (sacrificing memories) to open locks is, to be honest, not the most convincing, but it is the only major credulity-stretcher in the story, and the rest of it is well told and plotted. If you like the sort of fiction that appears in Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine, you’ll like this.
*** (Good). 5,350 words. Story link.

1. This story won the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”

2. This passage is where the story should start—there are a couple of unnecessary and/or confusing paragraphs before this (the first should have been moved further into the story and the second deleted).

Synthetic Perennial by Vivianni Glass

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Synthetic Perennial1 by Vivianni Glass (Tor.com, 22nd February 2022) has K’Mori, the narrator, restrained in a hospital after undergoing surgery. We soon learn that:

I am the first person in modern history to have ever been scientifically resurrected. Excuse me: revitalized. “Resurrection” is a religious and political minefield. I don’t understand the specifics of the procedures; I just know that I have four different people’s organs in me, and my new pancreas allows me to proudly say that I am a cyborg.

A kind nurse, Lillian, arrives later and, the next day, she puts K’Mori in a wheelchair and they roam about the hospital. During this excursion Lillian asks K’mori if she is going to reply to a boy who has contacted her; we also get a dribble of backstory. At the end of their walk, they see K’Mori’s “followers” on the streets outside the hospital.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees K’Mori dream about her cousin Kenny, who brings her something in a box and tells her that they won’t let her go. K’Mori awakes from this to discover (I think) that she is having a medical emergency during an attack on the hospital.
This is a fragmentary piece that is little more than a set-up and climax. There is no real plot, or development or examination of the story’s gimmick.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words. Story link.

1. This placed third in the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”

Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery1 by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com, January-February 2022) is the fourth story in the writer’s ‘Judge Dee’ series, and opens with the vampire judge and his familiar Jonathan (the perpetually hungry narrator of the story) walking away from a Paris that is not only on fire but also experiencing a vampire pogrom. Further down the road they meet six other vampires and, after some tense introductions and exchanges (Judge Dee has to forbid the others from feeding on Jonathan), they later discover the body of a seventh member nearby, sans head.
As the group journey to Calais to get a boat to England we learn more about the various members (including the fact that Dee appears to be an enforcer of the Unalienable Obligations of Vampires) while, one by one, three of them are murdered.
By the time they get to Calais there are only four vampires left, and Dee eventually calls them together to solve the mystery of who the killer is (we then find out (spoiler) that Dee has previously tasked Jonathan to search the vampires during daytime for the evidence he requires to confirm his theories).
Dee explains to the group (“You might be wondering why I have assembled you all here”) that there are two killers: Jack killed Nils and Gregor with a silver knife (discovered by Jonathan) for a treasure map of a Western continent called Vinland (ditto), and Melissandra killed Lady Aisha, who she disliked, in an unrelated act. Dee throws the two miscreants overboard.
When the three remaining travellers arrive at Calais the (still religiously pious) Brother Borja steals the map and disappears. Judge Dee tells Jonathan that Borja will regret this due to the treatment of vampires on that continent.
This is pleasant enough fluff but it is one of those stories where only the author can solve the mystery as there are insufficient clues provided to the reader—who are little more than passive passengers for the duration of the tale (probably not a good thing in a murder mystery story, even a semi-humorous one).
**+ (Average to Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. I’m not sure why Tor didn’t keep the “Judge Dee and . . . ” format of the previous three stories, i.e. Judge Dee and the Seven Vampires.

Girl Oil by Grace P. Fong

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Girl Oil by Grace P. Fong (Tor.com,1 22nd February 2022) opens with the Asian narrator, Chelle, at the beach with her college student friend Preston and another woman called Wenquian. Chelle is romantically interested in Preston but he is interested in Wenqian.
Chelle later goes to an advertisement casting in the Valley and gets some uncomplimentary feedback from the Mandarin speaking (there is a cultural identity subtext to the story) producer (“let’s face it, you are a little fat”). On her way out she gets an experimental body oil from one of his assistants that may help with her problem.
When Chelle gets back to her room she finds that Preston is, much to her displeasure, with Wenqian. After the two of them leave to have dinner Chelle has a shower:

I dab beads of oil on my face and pat them with the balls of my fingers like I’ve seen Wenqian do. It goes on light and colorless but smells like sulfur and charcoal. It burns and turns my nerves to steam. The tingling continues long after I’ve dressed.
I check the mirror again and I’m shocked. My face is my face, but firmer, brighter, thinner. This might actually work. I massage more into my soft arms, jutting stomach, and radish calves. Sparks dance under my skin until I double over on the bathroom floor. I stumble through the ache and pull myself up to the mirror. The me that rises is brighter, lighter, slimmer. Maybe she can finally fit in.

The next day Chelle buys a new dress—she fits into a medium size for the first time—and then texts Preston while she is at the beach, asking for an audition with his movie-maker father. That night she applies more oil, even though the instructions say to stop if there is a burning sensation (which she has been experiencing).
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees more three-way romantic complications and Chelle’s overuse of the oil to the point that she almost drowns at the beach (for some reason the oil now makes her unable to swim). Then matters deteriorate even further when creates a hole in her body (“the flesh thins and parts, turning into yellow smoke”). When Chelle finally goes to a call back audition with Preston’s father, she discovers that no-one can see her: she has become invisible. Finally, Chelle returns to the beach and dissolves in the sea, becoming part of the ocean. The last line has her reconcile with her body/size, “I am so big, and it is so wonderful.”
The slimming oil metaphor/arc of this story may work for young women readers who have body image and boyfriend hook-up issues, but I’m not sure how much of the rest of the short SF reading field (whatever that is nowadays) will be interested.2 That said, even if the content isn’t of any interest, it is well enough written.
** (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

1. This is the second place winner of the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”

2. The SF short fiction field has been metamorphosing into a literary small press for decades now; we have probably arrived at the end of that cul-de-sac.