Tag: novelette

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) opens with Rand Conway dreaming that he is on Iskar, and his dead father is telling him, “I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of Gone Forever.” Conway then wakes, realises he is on his way there in a spaceship, and he thinks about the great wealth that he may find at the lake. Shortly afterwards, Rohan (a rich man who is connected to Esmond, the ethnologist fiancé of Conway’s daughter Marcia) comes to tell him that they are about to arrive.
After they land, the crew get the sledges out and they head for the nearest village: Conway, Rohan and Esmond travel, but Marcia is left behind with the ship. Several hours later, and after they continue on foot, they eventually come to the city:

It spread across the valley floor and up the slopes as though it grew from the frozen earth, a part of it, as enduring as the mountains. At Conway’s first glance, it seemed to be built all of ice, its turrets and crenellations glowing with a subtle luminescence in the dusky twilight, fantastically shaped, dusted here and there with snow. From the window openings came a glow of pearly light.
Beyond the city the twin ranges drew in and in until their flanks were parted only by a thin line of shadow, a narrow valley with walls of ice reaching up to the sky.
Conway’s heart contracted with a fiery pang.
A narrow valley—The valley.
For a moment everything vanished in a roaring darkness. Dream and reality rushed together—his father’s notes, his father’s dying cry, his own waking visions and fearful wanderings beyond the wall of sleep.
It lies beyond the city, in a narrow place between the mountains—The Lake of the Gone Forever. And I can never go back!
Conway said aloud to the wind and the snow and the crying horns, “But I have come back. I have come!”  p. 69

When they arrive at the city an armed group meet them before an old man arrives and identifies them as Earthmen. The old man, Krah, mentions someone called “Conna”, which Conway presumes is his father. Krah tells him and the other Earthmen to leave but, when Conway threatens war, Krah reluctantly orders the gates opened. Esmond and Rohan are not happy at Conway’s conduct, but he is determined to get to the lake.
The rest of the story unravels the reasons for Krah’s dislike and suspicion of the visitors—which are mostly connected with Conway’s father it seems—among the complications introduced by a native girl called Ciel, who causes trouble by trying to visit Conway, and Krah’s production of Conway’s daughter Marcia, who followed the group after they left and ran into trouble with the native women.
Ciel later shows Conway a way out of the city that leads to The Lake of Gone Forever and (spoiler), after Krah and his men pursue the pair there, the climactic scene sees Conway arrive at the lake, which is “semi-liquid” and contains valuable “transuranic elements”. He is told by Krah (who, like his men, has left his weapons outside the entrance to the lake) that their dead are put in the lake, and that it acts as a repository of the Ishtar people’s memories. Conway then sees a vision of his younger father together with his native wife and then, over the course of several visions, Conway sees his father consumed with greed at the thought of the wealth in the lake. Later there is an altercation when he tries to take a sample of the liquid, and he is stopped by his wife in the presence of Conway as a baby. During the struggle between Conway’s father and mother she falls into the lake and perishes. Conway’s father subsequently flees the planet.
Conway realises, after seeing the visions, that his mother was Krah’s daughter and so he must be Krah’s grandson. He gives up his dreams of wealth and asks Krah if he can stay on the planet. Krah agrees, and Ciel becomes Conway’s wife.
There is quite a lot going on at the end of this story after quite a protracted and unnecessary build-up (the story could probably start with Conway arriving at the city, and you could lose most of the other characters). Also, the idea of a radioactive (I presume) memory lake is poetic but doesn’t entirely convince. If you read this for the description and atmosphere it’s not bad, and I suppose it is a change, albeit a long-winded one, from the more prosaic delivery of the other stories of the period.
**+ (Average to Good). 13,400 words. Story link.

Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark (Analog, September-October 2020) has an overly long and discursive start that sees Luis watch a dove die while he waits outside Medellín airport in Columbia. The body of the dove is subsequently disposed of by a woman using nanotech.
The rest of the story suffers from the same long-windedness as it goes on to tell the story of Luis and his partner Elena’s attempt to stabilize a over-mined and potentially hazardous mountain (also using, I think, nanotech). However, there have been problems elsewhere in the world with this technology:

Luis took a second to process the metaphor.
He knew that among the Embera-Katio animalism connected three realms of existence, with serpents and other critters of the soil sometimes taking mythopoetic revenge upon mankind by dragging sinners to the lands below. Rarely, though, did others refer similarly to the Six-Cities incident: twelve days when hacked nanotech, the likes of which had been developed to process rare-earth metals with greater ease, devoured cities whole—people, pets, cars, buildings—while the rest of each affected country scrambled to contain the spread. Japan. Indonesia. Benin. Colombia. Madagascar. France. The UN Accord against private access to whole bodies of nanotech research had come swiftly, with only the U.S. and Bangladesh holding out in the initial rush of militarized search-and-seizure, at least until scares hit them in turn. (A prank, as it turned out, in the midwestern U.S.—but near enough the home of an online celebrity that the famed musician had rallied his fan base through social media: enough, for once, to turn the political tide.)  p. 115

Luis later goes out to talk to a holdout on the mountain, an old man called Bidø. The man tells him about a piece of rogue nanotech that killed an ocelot, and he also says that he wants to die on the mountain.
There are other events that occur, and these include, variously: the discovery of the bones of a baby near one of the probe holes; continued funding problems for the project; the disappearance of a young worker and his girlfriend; the arrival of the Feds when illegal nanotech (or somesuch) is discovered on the mountain, etc. etc. Matters are eventually wrapped up (spoiler) when the couple are found on the mountain with Bidø, and we discover there is a family connection. The girl is pregnant, so Bidø finds a new lease of life and agrees to leave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got some of this detail wrong (especially about whether Luis and Elena are using nanotech or another technology to stabilise the mountain) because the story, although well enough written on a sentence and paragraph level, just has too much ephemeral detail and no sense of tension or pacing—so it is very easy to become bored and tune out. And even when the story does come together at the end it seems to be as much a family soap opera as science fiction.
A short story buried in a very long novelette.
* (Mediocre). 14,800 words.

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor.com, 12th August 2020) opens with Rue Savenga, a museum curator at on the planet Sarona, receiving an unexpected visitor just before closing time. The man tells Rue that his name is Traversed Bridge, and that he has been sent by the Whispering Kindom of the Manhu to find their ancestors.
It materialises that Bridge’s people are descended from a Saronan tribe called the Atoka (long thought extinct) who, after being persecuted on both Sarona and another planet called Radovani, ended up on Exile. When Bridge says he wants to see his ancestors, Rue takes him instead to see a painting of a woman called Aldry:

People called it a painting, but it was actually an elaborate mosaic, made from pieces so small it took a magnifying glass to see them. Rue had commissioned a scientific analysis that had shown that the colors were not, strictly speaking, pigments; they were bits of bird feather, beetle carapace, butterfly wing-anything iridescent, arranged so as to form a picture. And what a picture it was: a young girl in an embroidered jacket and silver headdress, looking slightly to one side, lips parted as if about to speak. Operas had been written about her. Volumes of poetry had speculated on what she was about to say. Speeches invoked her, treatises analyzed her, children learned her story almost as soon as they learned to speak. She was the most loved woman on Sarona.
“We call her Aldry,” Rue said.
Traversed Bridge looked transfixed, as if he were falling in love. He whispered, “That is not her name.”
“What do you call her?” Rue asked.
“She is Even Glancing.”

After some more small talk, Bridge collapses. While they are waiting for help to come, he tells Rue that the painting spoke to him, and that the woman in the picture said she was lonely and wanted to return home—and see an Immolation. Rue explains, after Bridge recovers, the rules and regulations governing the return of artefacts are complicated.
The second part of the story sees Rue learn that the painting was “rescued” from an Atoka Immolation—apparently the tribe’s customs dictated they should periodically burn all their possessions and start again from scratch. Then Bridge tells her that the Manhu are going to court to reclaim the painting because “there is a ghost imprisoned in it”, and that they intend to release it by holding an Immolation.
The matter eventually ends up in court and Rue tells Bridge, just before the verdict:

“This is not an ordinary object. At some point, great art ceases to be bound to the culture that produced it. It transcends ethnicity and identity and becomes part of the patrimony of the human race. It belongs to all of us because of its universal message, the way it makes us better.”

The verdict is decided (spoiler) on a narrow point of property law, and the object is put on a slower than light ship that will take almost sixty years to get to Exile (it and the other reclaimed pieces cannot go by the faster wayport “because what would arrive at the other end would be mere replicas of the originals”).
Fifty years later, the ninety-five-year-old Rue decides to go to Exile to be there for the arrival of the painting and the other artefacts (ten years will elapse while she travels, although it will appear instantaneous to Rue). When she arrives she meets Bridge, who is now a grandfather and has built a huge dam in the hills to improve life for the Manhu.
Rue spends the night in his house, and the next day they go to unpack the painting. There is then a procession to the village where the painting is put on a pyre and all the members of the Manhu add possessions of particular value. Then (after a token back and forth about what is about to happen between Rue and Bridge), they light the fire. After the blaze starts to die down, the Manhu leave the village and Rue follows them. Once they have reached a spot on the mountain overlooking the village, Rue sees and then hears the dam being blown up.
The story ends with some suitable humbug about the past not feeding anyone, “only the future does that”.
This is quite well done for the most part, an interesting examination of the issues affecting archaeological artefacts that were created by one culture but are now in the contested possession of another. However, the final actions of the Manhu are so mind-numbingly and nihilistically stupid that I suspect many readers will be hugely irritated not only by those but by what is a dramatically unsatisfying conclusion. Apart from this the story’s other shortcomings are the unconvincing “ghost” idea, and reader realisation that the survival chances of a civilization that periodically destroys everything are probably non-existent (and what a legacy to leave your children).
A good story about stupid people, so a mixed bag.
** (Average). 13,400 words. Story link.

Child’s Play by William Tenn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz (Astounding, February 1955) opens with a fifteen-year-old called Cord anesthetising and examining bugs on an alien planet called Sutang. He is then interrupted by Grayan, an older female friend who warns him that, if he doesn’t start behaving in accordance with the colony’s rules and expectations, he is likely to be sent off-planet.
After this YA setup to the story, the next part sees Cord, Grayan, Nirmond (the regent of the planet), and a young woman called Dane (head of the visiting Colonial Team) set off on a tour of the Bay Farms. To travel there they use one of the planetary life-forms:

Three rafts lay moored just offshore in the marshy cove, at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugarloaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, gray green pineapple growing from the center of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the team’s interest in them went at present.

They then go looking for “Grandpa”, a bigger raft they’d rather use but, when they eventually find it, Cord sees that it has moved from where he last left it. They also find that Grandpa’s head (a cone shaped protuberance in the middle of the raft) now has red buds on the top, and has also sprouted vines. Cord attempts to warn the others about using the raft as they have never seen this phenomenon before, but he is fobbed off.
The rest of the story sees an uneventful passage until they pass a group of yellowheads (“vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better”) clinging to tall reeds when, uncharacteristically, one of them slips down into the water and swims underneath Grandpa. Shortly after this event they lose control of the raft (it won’t respond to the heat from their guns) and then there is a convulsion that sees all of them except Cord trapped by the vines. Cord is subsequently forced, after a brief conversation with Dane, to relieve their pain by using his gun’s anaesthetic darts.
The rest of the story sees Grandpa travel far out to sea while Cord observes the creature’s behaviour. Eventually (spoiler) Cord manages to distract Grandpa (it has been swiping at various forms of life that pass before feeding on the smaller ones), and he jumps into the sea ahead. Cord then swims underneath the creature and manages to access a hollow space inside the central cone: there he finds the yellowhead symbiotically attached to Grandpa.
After fighting and killing the yellowhead, Cord slips back into the water and emerges to the rear of a now stationary raft. When he gets on board again it responds to his heat gun and the raft heads towards the shore.
For most of its length this reads like a rather dull YA biology puzzle, but it improves with an exciting climax. I’d note, however, that there is little indication of what Cord is about to do before he goes into the water (I can’t remember any description of him thinking about the yellowhead, or what he plans to do). This is rather too straightforward a piece, I think (especially for its length).
** (Average). 9,050 words. Story link.

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman (New Writings in SF #26, 1976)1 opens with Karangetti and Ana sailing to an island. The beginning is typical of the story’s descriptive prose:

Putting out from Grey Havens in the early morning rain, after Karangetti and a smiling canvas-crawler acquaintance of his had raised up the swelling orange sail, he had steered his sea-craft to the south and east, then she had begun to flee before the wind. Time passed. And while they were eating the bread and cheese and the ripe, tangy citrus fruits that Ana had prepared, and mockingly raising toasts in the vitriolic spirit Richard poured from a wickerworked bottle, they found the softer hues of afternoon all around them: somewhere, their Goldberry had ran out from the later brightness of morning.
About this time a ship appeared out of the distance; he recognized her, a bluff ungainly paddle-cruiser on picket duties off the coastal waters of Mancontinent, all military camouflage greyness and raw, unnatural straight lines, with a single stack trailing a white scarf of smoke; fore and aft were rocket-launcher bundles and light steam cannon. She had hooted twice, three times, as she crossed their course; tiny figures of men waved back at them. Then, she was past, and receding, and soon there were again only the sun and some ghosts of cloud hanging in the vast blueness of the sky, and the darker, mirroring blueness of the sea, with somewhere a horizon sandwiched between.  p. 165

They arrive at an island where there is a dilapidated house that is familiar to Karangetti, and we get a hint that Ana has been sent on a mission to seduce him, and then . . . well, nothing much happens for the next twenty pages or so. They look at the flowers in the garden; we get hints about Earth and Exile; they make love; they look at the ruined cottage; there is more canoodling, and music, etc. etc.
In between all of the above, Karangetti generally moons about like a Romantic poet, and the writers of the story take the opportunity to give us the benefit of (I assume) their English Lit. degrees—we get quotes from William Wordsworth, Blake, the Corpus Christi Carol, and mentions of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Tolstoy, etc. (and in the background there is a musical soundtrack of Maple Leaf Rag, Clair de Lune, Moonlight Sonata, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, etc.). At times it feels like the occupants of Pseuds Corner2 having a day out on an alien planet.
Finally, at the end of the story, Karangetti shows Ana several graves, one of whom was his lover Margueritte:

‘As to what happened here, I will tell you.’ There, on the hill-top, with the wind freshening and the sun sinking, dying and bathing the sky with its blood, Karangetti swept horizons with his grandiose hands.
‘There, to the north, lies Mancontinent. There, far over in the south and east, is where the Loct came down…
‘It was a day in October, iron-skied, lightly raining. I was called away from our few weather eyes and installations and such on this place, to Beachead, which was then still a base rather than a city. Marguerite was alone in our house. It had happened before but she told me she didn’t mind . . . Anyway—the Loct had been quiet for a year or two, but they chose that day to make an exploratory raid.’  p. 189

Can you have “grandiose hands”? No matter: although I like the initial descriptive passages, the rest of this has far, far too many words, and virtually nothing in the way of a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,550 words. Story link.

1. I was a bit disappointed with this story as I originally rated it (and the other two works* they published in New Writings in SF) as good.
* The other two stories were The Banks of the Nile (NWISF #28) and Amsterdam (NWISF #30, by Smith alone).

2. The wiki for Pseud’s Corner.

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney (F&SF, August 1976) is set in his “Peninsula” series, and opens with Joe Sagar on Flambuoyant, the hydrofoil of the former 3-V star Carioca Jones. Sagar is thinking of a girl he once knew and loved called Joanne, an ex-prisoner who seems to have made a particular sacrifice in this dark future world of prisoner bondage and organ transplants:

I’d been reminded of Joanne by the sight of Carioca’s hands, white and smooth beside mine as they gripped the rail. Recently she had taken to wearing long gloves, but today the skin was bare, and I could see the thin pale lines around her wrists—the only physical reminder of the grafts.  p. 112

The rest of the beginning of the story is equally busy, and sees mention of a forthcoming 3-V film festival, The Carioca Jones Revival Season, a protest march by The Foes of Bondage to the State Pen demanding that the organ pool be disbanded (which, paradoxically given the above, will also feature Jones), and Jones’ order from Sagar of a pair of long gloves made from slitheskin (an emotion-sensitive material).
We are also introduced to Carioca Jones’ pet:

The afternoon had turned to chill early evening as we made our way towards Carioca’s mooring at Deep Cove. I helped her onto the landing stage and dutifully returned to the boat for the unwieldy Nag, her moray eel. Nag is a normally comatose beast and very little trouble—a welcome change from the unpredictable, defunct [land-shark] Wilberforce. I placed the fish on the landing stage, and he undulated slowly after Carioca like an evil black snake, the oxygenator pulsing near his gills. He wore a jeweled collar; Carioca always dresses her pets well.  p. 114

The next part of the story is equally busy, and sees an official from the State Pen ask Sagar for his help in stopping the march by the Foes of Bondage. Sagar tells him he is unable to help. Then, when Sagar later goes out to visit Jones, he is introduced to douglas sutherland, an ex-con with metal hands. It materialises that sutherland was a bonded man who received a reduced sentence after his freeman (owner, essentially) took his hands after the freeman had a farming accident. Sagar also learns that Sutherland was previously a surgeon, but now operates a sculptograph, a device that rejuvenates skin, and that he will be treating Jones before her appearance at the Revival to make her more youthful looking.
When prompted by Jones to demonstrate the machine to Sagar, sutherland gets rid of Nag the eel—the creature has been pestering sutherland and he obviously detests it—and he puts a lump of raw fish in the sculptograph. Sutherland then removes a wart on Sagar’s hand, leaving the treated part blemish free and less aged. He tells Sagar that the rejuvination effect should last for around three days, and adds that, to achieve a permanent change, he would need to use human meat. . . . Three days later, the skin starts sloughing off of Sagar’s hand in a most unsightly manner, but the wart does not reappear.
There are (spoiler) another few pieces put in place before the story’s mousetrap ending, and these involve (a) Sagar going to a sling gliding competition1 and picking up a young woman who he takes for a drive and later starts kissing—only to find out that she is, of course, the much younger Carioca Jones (this part of the story does not really convince); (b) the State Pen official giving Jones human flesh from the organ pool to get the Foes of Bondage march cancelled; and (c) sutherland seeing the scars on Carioca Jones’ wrists just before he treats her backstage at the Revival . . . .
The climax of the story sees Sagar discover how the State Pen official managed to get the march cancelled shortly before he hears screaming from backstage. Then Jones appears:

The curtains slashed down the center, and a creature appeared, blinking at the light, her screams dying to whimpers as the brightness hit her and illuminated her old, old face, her leathery wrinkled skin, her vulture’s neck of empty pouched flesh. . . .
She stood slightly crouched, her fingers crooked before her; but there was nothing aggressive in her stance—it was more as though she was backing away from an attack.
She wore a plain black dress which accentuated the pallor of her legs, her arms, her face. She was Death incarnate; it seemed impossible that a creature so old, so ugly, should possess the gift of life. Slowly she raised her hands until they shadowed her face and the spotlight picked out the white graft scars on her wrists. She gripped the folds of the curtain above her head while a trickle of spittle glistened at the corner of her slack lips, and the most terrible thing was her breasts, high and pale and full and youthful, voluptuous, as they rose from under her dress when she arched her back as though in terminal agony.
For an instant she stood rigid; in the dazzling light she couldn’t have seen us, and it was just possible she was not aware of her audience, or even of her whereabouts. Her single final scream died away into a croak, and she sagged; her arms dropped to her sides; her ancient eyes grew slitted and cunning as she glanced quickly from side to side, seized the curtain and whirled it about her like a cloak. We heard the echo of a cackle of laughter. The folds fell back into place, the stage was empty. She was gone.  pp. 128-129

Wonderfully over the top.
Sagar goes looking for Jones and finds she has tried to commit suicide (she thinks that sutherland has used the human flesh she provided and that the changes will be permanent), but then, as Sagar phones for an ambulance, he finds Nag’s empty collar and no sign of the land-eel. . . .
This is a highly entertaining piece with a brilliantly twisty plot and characters that are, to a greater or lesser extent, wonderfully flawed: Jones is obviously a narcissistic and amoral villain, and Sagar is no angel either (even if he does model “normal” most of the time).
**** (Very good). 8,400 words. Story link.

1. The sling-glider launch mechanism in Coney’s “Peninsula” stories always confused me a little, but this piece has a good description:

Presdee’s turn came. I watched the spray trailing silver from the distant hydrofoil as it raced for the Fulcrum post; some distance behind followed the figure of Presdee on waterskis, the dartlike glider harnessed to his back. As the speed increased, Presdee rose into the air, kicked off the skis and tucked his legs back into the narrow fuselage. I could just make out the thin thread of the rigid Whip connecting him to the speeding boat. He angled away, gaining height as the boat slowed momentarily and veered to bring him on a parallel course. The Whip was locked into position, now projecting at right angles to the boat, rising stiffly about thirty degrees into the sky where Presdee soared. Then the Eye on the other side of the boat engaged with the Hook of the Fulcrum post and snapped the hydrofoil into a tight turn at full speed.
The flailing Whip accelerated Presdee to a speed which couldn’t have been far short of three hundred miles per hour; he touched his release button and hurtled across the sky, heading northwards up the Strait. p. 121

One of the stories in this series is titled The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip (Galaxy, March 1974). There is an ISFDB list for the series, and I would add that I am at a loss as to why none of these “Peninsula” stories (bar one atypical piece) ever made it into the “Year’s Bests”.

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gioconda Caper by Bob Shaw (Cosmic Kaleidoscope, 1976) opens like a hardboiled detective story, but quickly becomes something else:

It was a Thursday morning in January—stale and dank as last night’s cigar butts—and my office phone hadn’t rung all week. I was slumped at the desk, waiting out a tequila hangover, when this tall, creamy blonde walked in. The way she was dressed whispered of money, and what was inside the dress hinted at my other hobby—but I was feeling too lousy to take much notice.
She set a flat parcel on my desk and said, “Are you Phil Dexter, the private psi?”
I tipped back my hat and gave her a bleak smile. “What does it say on my office door, baby?”
Her smile was equally cool. “It says Glossop’s Surgical Corset Company.”
“I’ll kill that signwriter,” I gritted. “He promised to be here this week for sure. Two months I’ve been in this office, and. . .”
“Mr. Dexter, do you mind if we set your problems on one side and discuss mine?” She began untying the string on the parcel.

The woman, Caroline Colvin, then unwarps the parcel and shows him a very good copy of the Mona Lisa—but the hands seem in a slightly different position and, when Dexter touches it, he gets an impression of great age, hilly landscapes, and a bearded man standing in front of a carousel-like contraption. Dexter rapidly comes to the conclusion that the painting is by Da Vinci himself.
Dexter then learns that Colvin inherited the painting from her father, who had visited Italy the previous spring. When he touches the painting again, he senses that her father recently travelled to Milan—the pair are soon catching the noon sub-orbital to the city.
Once they arrive in the city, it isn’t long before Dexter’s psi abilities enable him to track down a man called Crazy Julio, something Dexter manages with the help of a highly dodgy waiter called Mario (who, when he isn’t trying to buy Colvin from Dexter for the white slave trade, is gouging Dexter for money and rewinding the speedometer on the car he has borrowed from his mother).
The last part of the story sees Dexter and Colvin drive the last two miles to Crazy Julio’s without Mario as Dexter doesn’t want the waiter to get wind of the Mona Lisa, or the potential money involved (Dexter comments to Colvin, “If that poor boy isn’t in the Mafia, it’s because they gave him a dishonorable discharge.”).
When the two of them finally arrive at Julio’s farmhouse he greets them with a shotgun, but Dexter soon overcomes his resistance:

“Come on, Julio.” I got out of the car and loomed over him. “Where is the cave?”
Julio’s jaw sagged. “How you know about the cave?”
“I have ways of knowing things.” I used quite a lot of echo chamber in the voice, aware that peasants tend to be afraid of espers.
Julio looked up at me with worried eyes. “I get it,” he said in a low voice. “You are pissy.”
“P-S-I is pronounced like ‘sigh,’ ” I gritted. “Try to remember that, will you? Now, where’s that cave?”

In the cave (spoiler) Dexter and Colvin discover that they are another fifty or sixty Mona Lisa paintings loaded on a merry-go-round-like device with a viewing lens attached. Dexter realises that it must be some sort of animation device, and gets Julio to turn the crankshaft while he watches:

On top of everything else that had transpired, I was about to have the privilege of actually viewing Leonardo’s supreme masterpiece brought to magical life, to commune with his mind in a manner that nobody would have thought possible, to see his sublime artistry translated into movement. Perhaps I was even to learn the secret of the Gioconda smile.
Filled with reverence, I put my eyes to the viewing holes and saw the Mona Lisa miraculously moving, miraculously alive. She raised her hands to the neckline of her dress and pulled it down to expose her ample left breast. She gave her shoulder a twitch, and the breast performed the classiest circular swing I had seen since the last night I witnessed Fabulous Fifi Lafleur windmilling her tassels in Schwartz’s burlesque hall. She then drew her dress back up to its former position of modesty and demurely crossed one hand over the other, smiling a little.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Oh, God, God, God, God!”

The last scene has the complication of Mario turning up at the cave and getting the drop on them. Initially he is only interested in the immense wealth that will be his but, after viewing the animation, burns the paintings and mechanism out of an upwelling of national pride.
An amusing story with a clever (and certainly different!) central gimmick.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
**** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer (Worlds of If, November 1967)1 opens with a woman rescued from a wrecked spaceship barricading herself into the engine-room of the experimental FTL craft Sleipnir. She then accelerates the Sleipnir beyond light speed.
When Grettir, the captain of the ship, learns that the woman will only talk to him, he goes down to speak to her. He gives instructions to MacCool, his engineering officer, to blast his way in if he is incapacitated or killed. Grettir then talks to the woman, during which she confuses Grettir with her dead husband Robert (she has been delusional since she has been rescued) before shooting at him. When Grettir recovers consciousness he discovers that MacCool has blasted his way in, and that the woman stripped off all her clothes and went out the airlock. Grettir also learns that they are now in a strange, unknown zone of space.
After this fast-paced and Van Vogtian start to the story, it becomes something much more weird and trippy. Grettir sees that they are in a grey space filled with grey spheres and, after much speculation, he concludes that they have entered a “super universe”, and that the sphere behind them is their universe (there is some 1930s-ish atom-and-electron-worlds hand-wavium at this point). As they manoeuvre back to where they think they entered the super-universe, they fly past the woman’s now huge dead body.
The next part of the story sees the various attempts made by the Sleipnir’s crew to re-enter their own universe, during which, on one failed attempt, they have burning coal-like objects shoot through the bridge:

Grettir picked up his cigar, which he had dropped on the deck when he had first seen the objects racing toward him. The cigar was still burning. Near it lay a coal, swiftly blackening. He picked it up gingerly. It felt warm but could be held without too much discomfort.
Grettir extended his hand, palm up, so that the doctor could see the speck of black matter in it. It was even smaller than when it had floated into the bridge through the momentarily “opened” interstices of the molecules composing the hull and bulkheads.
“This is a galaxy,” he whispered.
Doc Wills did not understand. “A galaxy of our universe,” Grettir added.
Doc Wills paled, and he gulped loudly.
“You mean . . . ?”
Grettir nodded.
Wills said, “I hope . . . not our . . . Earth’s . . . galaxy!”

The story becomes even more bizarre when they later fly into the woman’s body, start overheating, and only just make it out again (you get the impression that in a more permissive age they would have been birthed out of her womb/vagina, but, if I recall correctly, they come out of her mouth). After this they prepare for a final attempt to get back into their own universe.
This has a fast-paced start, but the bulk of the story, although sometimes entertaining, is arbitrarily bizarre and goes on too long. The ending also fizzles out.
** (Average). 10,200 words. Story link.

1. From the Philip José Farmer website:

Farmer tried to sell this as a possible Star Trek episode (before the show ever aired I think). He later decided that it would not have worked. Just what is waiting for us at the edge of the universe?