Tag: 3*

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.1 (Galaxy, April 1953) is set in a future where many humans are now “amphibious”, i.e. incorporeal, and when they need a human body they borrow one:

My old body, which [my wife] claims she loved for a third of a century, had black hair, and was short and paunchy, too, there toward the last. I’m human and I couldn’t help being hurt when they scrapped it after I’d left it, instead of putting it in storage. It was a good, homey, comfortable body; nothing fast and flashy, but reliable. But there isn’t much call for that kind of body at the centers, I guess. I never ask for one, at any rate.

Then the narrator later recalls the time he got conned into borrowing Konigwasser’s body (the inventor of the amphibious process) to lead the annual Pioneers’ Day Parade:

Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.
They’ll have a tough time getting me into that thing again—ever. Taking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and still is the sweetest person you’d ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out.
We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers’ Day parades, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger.

This last passage basically summarises the thrust of the story, which is that most human bodies are unsuitable for the minds that inhabit them—an idea which is examined in a quirky way during the first part of the story (along with the advantages of not having a body, and how Konigwasser discovered the process).
The second part of the story then introduces the “enemy”, the people who have stayed behind in physical form:

Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics— job politics, social politics, government politics.

The enemy manage to trap the narrator and Madge in two bodies that they have taken from the storage centre, and the pair are subsequently tried for desertion. After some witty back and forth between the two sides at the trial, the narrator manages to bluff their way out.
This piece is more quirk and wit than story, but it has an interesting—and sometimes Laffertyesque—perspective on the subject.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. There was some speculation about the Unready to Wear title when we did the group read of this in one of my Facebook groups: a composite suggestion is that the title is a play on “ready to wear”, and that either humans are either not ready (or willing) to wear bodies, or the bodies themselves are not ready for human use.
The “amphibious” description comes from a reference at the very end of the story about the lack of interest among the young for the bodies available at the storage centres:

So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.

The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell

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The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell (F&SF, May-June 2022) is a short-short that starts off at an annual lunch for time travellers:

They only ever had it in 1984, always traveling to meet each other in the same place and the same time. Pele, Jordansko, Marissa, and Merc sat at their own table. Plentiful versions of the foursome sat at plentiful versions of their own tables; they occupied every table in the Filipino restaurant, and all the tables on the curb outside. Rumor had it that their final party from the farthest flung future was having brunch on the rooftop.  p. 254

The shenanigans start when Pele pays for brunch, and the others then try to retrospectively beat him to the check with their time-travel tricks. Jordansko tells him Pele he wired the money to him ten years ago; Marissa says she loaned the family who own the restaurant the money to buy it in 1939; Merc shows them photos of a trip back to the dawn of civilization where he invented the idea of the dining industry.
Pele has the last word, however, when (spoiler) he asks them why they think they meet at the restaurant on Father’s Day.
An amusing conclusion to a clever idea.
*** (Good). 850 words.

Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra

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Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Kaalratri, a spaceship AI, asking Deenu a knock-knock joke on a neural link that no-one else can overhear. We then learn that Deenu is on the bridge of the ship trying to work out a course to their destination beyond the asteroid belt (Captain Miral likes to train his crew in various skills). Then, as Captain Miral needles Deenu about her performance, we learn she has been bonded for three years after one of the Kaalatri’s drones rescued her from the wreckage of the colony on Luna.
Deenu is spared further torment when a Peace ship hails them, and its commander, Captain Zhao, tells Miral that they intend to board his ship. When Zhao and his party do so, Miral quickly realises that they are imposters—and he is shot for his trouble. Then, after some backchat, Miral is shot again, but not before he puts the ship into lockdown:

“Override the ship,” snapped Zhao. “You’re next in command, aren’t you?”
“That would be me,” said Lieutenant Saksha, straightening and speaking with an effort. “But I cannot override her. It was the captain’s last order before you…before she…” She paused to swallow. “The ship will lift the lockdown only when she deems the threat is over. You could kill us, but it will serve no purpose.”
“Hey, Ship, can you hear me?” shouted Zhao.
“Yes,” said Kaalratri, her voice remote.
“Would you like me to kill the rest of your crew? We can start here, with these officers. Then we’ll break down your door and go for the rest of them. Would you like that, eh?”
“Would you like to hear a joke?” said Kaalratri.
“What?”
“Knock knock,” said the ship.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” screamed Zhao.
“You are supposed to say, who’s there,” said the ship.  p. 17

The rest of the story sees Deenu overhear Zhao talk to the rest of his crew in Lunarian, and she realises they are refugees like herself. Deenu pretends to sympathise with them, and takes the group to the supplies they want. As they walk to the main bay (spoiler), Deenu hatches a plan with Kaalatri on her neural link and the latter organises an ambush. They are successful, the Captain and First Officer are still alive and are treated, and Deenu is rewarded by having her debt written off.
The plot of this is too straightforward, and the story also tries to have its violence cake and eat it (the gunshot injuries to the Captain and First Officer are severe but both recover), but, that said, the interaction between Deenu and the joke-telling computer is quite entertaining, and the story has an interesting setting.
*** (Good). 5,700 words.

Gamma by Oskar Källner

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Gamma by Oskar Källner, translated by Gordon James Jones (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022)1 opens with two interstellar beings, spawn of earlier civilizations who now live in the “quantum foam” of the universe, meeting at a black hole. There, Gamma, and another of the “Collective”, Kthelk’tha, absorb energy by flying through its Hawking radiation. We subsequently learn more about them and the universe’s recent history:

When the stars had begun to fade, none of the contemporary civilizations were bothered. There would be thousands of millions of years before dark energy ultimately tore the galaxies apart, before the hydrogen ran out and the residual heat dissipated. And of course, they were right. Not the slightest trace of their civilizations remained when the end came. The races that were unfortunate enough to be born in the twilight era tried desperately to find ways to slow down the cosmic expansion, to invert the dark energy and make the universe contract. They were doomed to fail.
Others tried to accumulate enough matter to build new suns. Some such projects met with success. Controlled wormholes stripped nearby galaxies and interstellar space, and enough elementary building blocks were amassed to construct yellow, fusion-driven suns. Dyson spheres as big as solar systems were built around each new star, to harness all its energy. Thereby, they created the conditions necessary to prolong life for a few billion years more. Yet eventually even those stars burned out, the Dyson spheres fell apart, and the last remaining stardust was consumed by supermassive black holes. The universe entered the era of darkness.  p. 97

Some time after this encounter they fall out and separate, and then Gamma learns of a war started by a Collective faction called the Light Connexion. Gamma subsequently finds Kthelk’tha and sees she has been infected by a virus. Gamma destroys the virus and revives Kthelk’tha, and they decide to head into deep space as there will only be ongoing war at the black hole.
Out in the depths of the dying universe they begin to run low on energy and become dormant, but later wake when they find a Dyson sphere with an anti-matter generator that still has fuel. They explore the sphere and we learn about the builders.
The story ends (spoiler) with Gamma and Kthelk’tha having children (even though their progeny will only have limited life-spans). Then they discover that the builders of the Dyson sphere had developed an Omega device that can change the structure of the universe, alterations that would make it contract and cause suns to be formed. However, to do this, one of them will have to spread themselves throughout the universe and activate the device. Gamma realises that whoever does this will die but, despite Kthelk’tha’s protestations, she sacrifices herself anyway:

Then she plunged into a subdimensional barrier, and her fingers touched the outer boundary of the universe. With the last of her strength, she activated the inversion protocol and several of the universe’s constants were rewritten. The universe slowed down. She could feel it. It would soon begin to contract. New stars. New life. New possibilities.
Her body dissolved and spread as virtual particles throughout the universe. Through them vibrated a final thought:
It is finished.

A suitably cosmic ending. This tale probably resembles other cosmic tales that have appeared in the field over the decades, but it is well enough done, and a change from some of the usual subject matter you find nowadays.
*** (Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

1. This was originally published in Swedish in Efter slutet, Catahya, 2017.

Child’s Play by William Tenn

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Child’s Play by William Tenn (Astounding, March 1947) opens in Mimsy Were the Borogoves territory when a struggling lawyer called Sam Weber accidentally gets a Christmas present from the future. When Weber finally manages to open the package (it eventually responds to his voice commands), he finds that it is a children’s “Bild-a-Man” kit:

Bild-a-Man Set 3. This set is intended solely for the use of children between the ages of eleven and thirteen. The equipment, much more advanced than Bild-a-Man Sets 1 and 2, will enable the child of this age group to build and assemble complete adult humans in perfect working order. The retarded child may also construct the babies and mannikins of the earlier kits. Two disassembleators are provided so that the set can be used again and again with profit. As with Sets 1 and 2, the aid of a census keeper in all disassembling is advised. Refills and additional parts may be acquired from The Bild-a-Man Company, 928 Diagonal Level, Glunt City, Ohio. Remember—only with a Bild-a-Man can you build a man.

After this the story switches to the law office where Weber works, where we find out that Weber has a crush on Tina, the office secretary, but so has the more successful Lew Knight. We also see Tina tell Weber that a strange-looking old man has been enquiring about him.
The rest of the story runs along the twin tracks of (a) Weber experimenting with the Bild-a-man set (he creates various malformed creatures which he eventually disassembles, and then a copy of a baby he is minding for the parents—which he eventually drops off at an orphanage); and (b) Weber watching as Tina goes out with Lew and eventually gets engaged. This latter event makes Weber decide to create a copy of Tina (who he convinces to scan herself in the office on the pretence of getting a wedding present for her), but he then makes a copy of himself first to make sure he has perfected the method.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees the duplicate Weber wake up and destroy the dissassembleator. There is then some back and forth between the pair just before the strange old man arrives at Weber’s flat (Weber’s landlady mentioned earlier that the strange old man has been looking for him). The man reveals that he is the census keeper for the twenty ninth oblong, and explains why he took so long to arrive at Weber’s flat even though he knew that Weber had accidentally been sent the Bild-a-Man kit from the future (procedures, etc.).
The old man then scans the two Webers and decides the most coherent personality (the Bild-a-Man kit is supposed to produce neurotic, unstable individuals) is the duplicate Weber and proceeds to disassemble the original.
This piece rather feels like a run-of-the-mill Henry Kuttner story with a standard ironic ending1—but, although it is competently executed, the office relationships rather date the piece, it tends to plod along, and it doesn’t have the sense of wonder of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves, or the darkness of Cyril Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag.2
*** (Good). 10,550 words. Story link.

1. Coincidentally, I later found this passage in Josh Lukin’s interview of Willian Tenn, A Jew’s-Eye View of the Universe, reprinted in Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn by William Tenn, 2004:

WT: And then I went to sea as a purser on a cargo ship. A purser is a staff officer, head of administrative matters on board a ship. And the reason I went to sea was that I was still living at home at the time, and I had to write on the train going to and from my job. So I found out that on a cargo ship, when the ship is at sea, the radio operator is very busy, and he has nothing to do when the ship is in port, so he takes off The purser, on the other hand, is very busy when the ship is in port, but has litde to do while the ship is at sea. So I figured I would make enough money to support my family and have time to write. And while at sea, I wrote “Child’s Play,” which was my second published story, and of which I was for a long time reasonably proud. I’m not ashamed of it now, but it’s a story by a juvenile: I’m not as proud of it as I was at one time. But it was a tremendous success.
JL: It’s been dramatized for radio at least twice…
WT: Oh yes, for radio, for television—it was anthologized about fifty times, at one point more than almost any other story, all over the world. Clifton Fadiman wrote a nice mention of it for The New Yorker.
JL: I see Kuttner’s influence…
WT: At a given point, I became aware that I was writing what I thought was a Lewis Padgett story. This story is, in a sense, a “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” I began feeling that I was writing a story that Padgett would have written, and since I loved Padgett, I now had the pleasure of finding out what was going to happen next! It was definitely a Kuttner story. I didn’t know then of Henry Kuttner: I knew Lewis Padgett. I didn’t know that Lewis Padgett was Kuttner or C.L. Moore or anything of those people.
That sold very well. All kinds of New York science-fiction magazine editors wanted stories by me. Ted Sturgeon became my agent. I had met him before the war, in a cafeteria in 1939 on 57th Street. He was the first professional writer I met. He had just been beached: he was a sailor at the time. He had sold two stories to Campbell: one to Unknown, “A God in a Garden,” and one to Astounding, “Ether Breather.” I got to know him, and he was the only professional writer I knew for a long time. I looked him up after I came out of the Army and he came back from the tropics. I’d read his work in the meantime. And when I wrote “Child’s Play,” he told me that he was then functioning as an agent for Damon Knight, Jim Blish, Judy Merril, Chandler Davis, and a whole bunch of other people. He was a very good agent. So he became my agent and helped me get published in all sorts of magazines: Campbell’s Astounding, of course, as well as those of lesser stature.  pp. 258-259

2. According to Robert Silverberg’s introduction to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, this story was supposed to be included in that volume but the rights could not be obtained. I think it would have been shown up by the Kuttner & Moore and Kornbluth stories mentioned above and, apart from that, it would have been the third story in the book using the same basic gimmick.

Kora is Life by David D. Levine

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Kora is Life by David D. Levine (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with Kestrel Magid practicing for an air race on the alien planet Kora. He is the first ever human to fly in this particular competition:

A roar off to my right caught my attention. A pure white practice wing like mine, but with struts painted in red and blue . . . it was Skeelee. Of course. She gave me a roguish salute as she passed me, climbing fast.
My patrons were the Stormbird clade, their colors yellow and black. The Sabrecat clade, red and blue, was Stormbird’s longest-standing and most hated rival, and the loathing was mutual; Skeelee had given me nothing but shit since I’d arrived here last month. I had tried to maintain a professional, sportsmanlike attitude in the face of her provocations . . . but this was no competition, not yet. This was only a practice session. So maybe I could rag on her a little without betraying my principles. I squeezed the throttle and surged upward after her.  p. 29

This passage illustrates the personal and clan rivalries that run through the remainder of the story.
Skeelee gets the best of Magid in this duel (his Earth-built jet engine flames out on short finals to their landing zone on the beach), and (spoiler) she goes on to do the same again in the two formal practice runs before the final race.
In between these contests we see: Kora’s planetary and inter-clade politics at work; internal tensions in the Stormbird Clade that Magid represents (later on in the story their engineer commits suicide because the Stormbird Clade’s engine isn’t being used); and Magid generally acting like a fish out of water (getting into trouble with the aliens when sober, and also when drunk).
The story comes to a climax in the final race, during which Magid has to cope with not only the murderous Coral Clade, but also the stormy weather and the knowledge that, if he wins, the culture of Kora will be changed forever. Needless to say, Magid wins even though he crashes short of the finishing line (his engine runs out of fuel this time, but the nose piece of his wing crosses the line first).
This piece has pros and cons and, as it happens, most of the pros are noticeable when you are reading the story, and most of the cons occur to you afterwards. So, the pros: it is a good light adventure story (verging on YA) which is well paced, generally well-plotted, and is concisely and transparently told (oh, the joy of not having to hack through endless MFA verbiage). The cons: this is essentially a non-SF story about jet powered hang-gliders which has been moved to an alien planet; the bouncing nose-cone ending is weak and unconvincing; and the aliens are sketchily drawn (apart from the fact they have fur, we find out little else about their physicality). I’d also add that Magid starts off the story as a fairly callow sort, and ends up pretty much the same despite everything that happens to him. Notwithstanding the latter reservations, this is an enjoyable and easy read.1
*** (Good). 18,050 words. Story link.

1. In some respects, this story reminded me of the kind of thing that used to appear in the George Scithers-edited Asimov’s Science Fiction (or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as it was then) of the late 1970s. I think there is probably a gap in the current magazine market for a publication that emphasises lighter, entertaining, and more traditional work, and which avoids political division and lectures, solipsism, apocalyptic fiction, and MFA-inspired writing in general.

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick

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The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick (New Worlds, 2022) sees Ray, the war veteran protagonist, buy an old ground drone at a yard sale:

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.
The 6G was, in Ray’s opinion, the finest patrol and reconnaissance ground drone ever made. He had qualified on it during Operation Bolivian Freedom, back when he was young. He had hunted down insurgents with one, working from a combat recliner in a secure base across the border in Argentina. He’d known what it felt like to be the most dangerous thing in the jungle at night. He had never experienced anything like that before.
He wanted to feel something like that again.  pp. 87-88

After repairing the Leopard, Ray hooks up to a VR set one night and sends the drone out into the forest. After chasing raccoons and the like for a while, he senses another Leopard in the forest. He contacts the operator, and finds out it is a woman called Helen: she challenges him to find her. When he does they explore the forest together.
Eventually, after a period getting to know each other, they arrange to meet in person at a restaurant. When they arrive, however, they are horrified by what they see across the room: Helen is older than Ray expected, and using a walker, and she is equally horrified by the old, pot-bellied and balding Ray. They both flee. Then, when Ray gets home to his wife Doris, an alcoholic shrew of a woman—but a smart one who has used her previous tech skills to work out what Ray has been doing—she guesses what has happened at the restaurant, and turns the knife, “She was old, wasn’t she? Old like you.”
Ray flees downstairs and straps on his VR set, and sees that Helen’s Leopard is perched on the limb of a nearby tree waiting for his drone—“That’s not who I am,” she says.
The rest of the story details (spoiler), in parallel with the Ray and Helen’s further excursions, Doris’s increasing bitterness about Ray’s extra-marital relationship: she eventually threatens to tell the police about his “terrorist weapon” unless he blows it up and then kills Helen with his own hands. Ray and Helen then conspire to kill Olive, and the story proceeds to an ending where Olive gets the drop on both of them (those tech skills again): she scares off Helen, and then wears a triumphant smile as the Leopard comes down into the basement for Ray. There is a good payoff line:

There was the strong, willful woman he had fallen in love with all those many long years ago.  p. 98

The beginning of this is pretty good in its depiction of old people wanting to recapture their youth, but the back end is more a series of plot manoeuvres, and there is perhaps a little too much going on in that part of the story. Still, not a bad piece.
*** (Good). 3,900 words.

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson

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Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gets off to a flashy start:

Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red

wakes

up!

Later:

Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?

Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
*** (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke

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Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke (Astounding, May 1946) opens with an alien spaceship commander telling the crew of the S9000 that they are about to arrive at the third planet of the solar system ahead—and that they only have four hours to explore before its sun goes nova! We then find out why the aliens have so little time:

“You will wonder how such a disaster, the greatest of which we have any record, has been allowed to occur. On one point I can reassure you. The fault does not lie with the survey.
“As you know, with our present fleet of under twelve thousand ships, it is possible to re-examine each of the eight thousand million solar systems in the galaxy at intervals of about a million years. Most worlds change very little in so short a time as that.
“Less than four hundred thousand years ago, the survey ship S5060 examined the planets of the system we are approaching. It found intelligence on none of them, though the third planet was teeming with animal life and two other worlds had once been inhabited. The usual report was submitted and the system is due for its next examination in six hundred thousand years.
“It now appears that in the incredibly short period since the last survey, intelligent life has appeared in the system [and a] civilization that can generate electromagnetic waves and all that that implies [has existed for two hundred years].”

“As you know, Bob, [insert explanium or handwavium here].”
When the S9000 arrives in Earth’s atmosphere two hours later they find they are too late: there are no signs of life, and the wildfires that have raged across the planet are dying out (they have run out of fuel).
Two scout ships are dispatched to explore the planet anyway. The first finds a set of mirrors that appear to be transmitting TV signals out into the galaxy; then they find a deserted city, apparently abandoned by humans years earlier when they returned to the live in the countryside. On return to the S9000, the crew find that the other scout ship has not returned.
The second ship, meantime, has found a huge administrative centre (jam packed with filing cabinets full of computer punch cards!) Then, when they leave to return to the S9000, they spot a huge tunnel opening and quickly decide to explore it—only to find themselves trapped by closing subway doors, and whisked off in a train that eventually takes them under the ocean.
The third act of the story sees the S9000 follow the train and rescue the scout ship crew at the next station. As they get them back on board, the sun goes nova (the ship is hiding in the lee of the Earth and the aliens see the Moon light up). The S9000 accelerates towards light speed as they leave the system.
There is final section to the story which sees the aliens realise that the mirrors are sending video signals of the catastrophe in a particular direction. When the S9000 follows they eventually see a “great fleet” of human generation ships ahead.
The last paragraphs see one of the aliens say they feel rather afraid of the humans’ fleet, and another reply that they are a “very determined people”, and that they had better be polite to them as “we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one”.
I liked this well enough, but it’s basically an overlong story (the two scout ship accounts have needless overlap and duplication) about aliens wandering about on a depopulated Earth and getting themselves into trouble. The strongest parts are probably the astronomical setup (the nova, the ship hiding in the Earth’s shadow), the dying Earth descriptions, and the slingshot ending where they find the generation ships (although not the last line, “Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny”, which seemed a rather dissonant and threatening expression of human exceptionalism).
*** (Good). 10,300 words. Story link.

Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan

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Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan (New Worlds, 2022) is a short piece that begins with all of England’s dogs being brought together to feed on the tongues that have been cut from the mouths of “tattles” (“women, mostly, because telling tales has always been a woman’s offence”):

There is always some gentleman complaining in the parliament of the cost of this waiting, this gathering, this holding. Would it not be more efficient, he wonders, to take in smaller batches of tattles and of dogs, closer to the conviction dates, hard upon each assizes, and closer also to the district where the judgements are passed?
Whereupon other good sirs leap up to correct him: It is a national scourge, this betrayal, this calumny, and should be dealt with in a nationalised manner. The horror is not for the fact that a dog, any local dog, should have a taste of you, but that every dog in England shall have his little bit. A convicted tattle should never know whether any dog she meets thereafter contains a particle of herself. She has become dog, and that knowledge is brought home to her, not only by her silence but also by the sight of any representative of the creatures from wolfhound to lady’s lap dog, forever after.  p. 115

The rest is not much more than a (grisly) description of how offenders’ tongues are surgically removed in the Cutting Hall, ground up, and then fed to the massed pack of dogs in the Distribution Hall (the narrator’s job is to ladle out the minced tongue meat to the animals). While the dogs eat, the punished and the public watch on.
There is no story here, just a descriptive account of a bizarre practice—but it is a striking and immersive piece for all that.
*** (Good). 2,750 words.