Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.
AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui
AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld, April 2020)1 opens with a young man preparing for an “AirBody” job from a “Desi aunty” the next day (the client, a fifty-nine-year-old woman from Karachi called Meena, will use his body for a short period of time—like Airbnb, but using the person’s body rather than their house).
After this promising start the story pretty much goes into reverse: when Meena takes possession of his body the next morning he watches her (he is still mentally present for safety and facilitation reasons) cook dal and answers any questions she has—when he is not contending with her snarky comments about the cleanliness of his kitchen. We also get a chunk of backstory about his own family and a failed relationship with a woman called Karla.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees him drive Meena to a house where she attempts to give another women the pot of dal: she has the door slammed in her face. Later, the woman turns up at his flat—and then she and Meena make love (apparently they used to be lovers). This scene—where the woman makes love to Meena while she inhabits someone else’s body—did not convince (and that is before you consider that the AirBody is of a different sex, and its owner could be watching you in action).
This is pretty much a mainstream story about cooking and relationships (not my favourite themes) which has some SF furniture in it. The ramifications of the technology are barely hinted at beyond the convenience of not having to travel.
* (Mediocre). 4,950 words. Story link.
1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021.
The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore
The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) gets off to a cheery start with Michelle, the manager of a leisure attraction/conference centre called Ocean, thinking about her dead partner James while she eavesdrops on two marine biologists lamenting the near total destruction of the ocean’s ecosystems and the death of the last whale. As one of the speakers trails off into tears, Michelle gets a message that customers are complaining about one of the rides (again).
The rest of the story sees Michelle, and her assistant Helen Ali, troubleshoot the problem on the Living Water ride, and they begin by trying to observe the problem:
A whalelike mosasaur undulated past in the greenish darkness, circling the car. Its massive, toothed face cut sideways to snatch a passing fish. With Helen distracted, Camille was alone with the monster. Adrenaline twitched her muscles. The creature swept toward her in the slow-motion of enormous things, front flippers stroking, then back flippers, spine, and tail rippling to the rhythm of Camille’s breath. It came at her like inevitability, the same slow steady descending march of her marriage wearing thin, then the separation, then James’ terminal diagnosis, everything coming apart at once. He’d barely been back in Charleston for two weeks before he’d found out how sick he was. Maybe reaching out to tell her had been some kind of appeal, but how could she forgive so much, so fast? He’d left her. And then he’d wanted her to comfort him as he left her again. Before the mosasaur could reach the car, silver flashed overhead, a shiver of mercury: the bait ball, the out-of-place, rapidly orbiting school of small fish that wasn’t supposed to appear in the attraction—in the ocean—for millions of years. Heart in her throat, Camille pointed, but Helen had seen it.
They watched the bug duplicate itself again, again. The mosasaur swam through its edge, holographics glitching as they bounced through each other. p. 45-46
After the pair get off the ride (which is not particularly well described—I found it hard to visualise the physical and hologram spaces), various theories are advanced for the fault: a software bug; a disgruntled former employee; the spirit of the ocean haunting millennials for their complicity in killing the seas . . . .
The problem continues to rumble on throughout the story, accompanied by various other plot threads (spoiler): faults manifest in different attractions; media and celebrities arrive for a conference speech to mark the recent death of the last whale; Michelle continues to think about James’s death. Eventually this all comes to a climax when one of the biologists gives a speech and (unscheduled and unprogrammed) manta rays appear in the hologram slabs—and then leave that space and swim in the air between them. The story concludes with Michelle, as the centre is being evacuated, waiting for a huge, dark shape—presumably the last whale— coming towards her out of the hologram slabs.
This didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I’m not that keen on ghosts in the machine, i.e. fantasy events in a science fiction story; second, I didn’t understand the ending (what is Michelle “waiting to understand” as the whale approaches, and how does this connect to her thoughts about her dead partner?); third, the repeated mention of her ex-partner comes over as personal problem boilerplate (often mentioned but having little emotional heft); and, finally, I’m not a fan of nihilistic and pointless eco-doom stories.
* (Mediocre). 9,150 words. Story link.
Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester
Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) has an overly busy, data-dumpy, and not entirely clear beginning (an omen of what is to come in the rest of the story):
History gave the people of August little to look back on. Whenever a report came that one of them had been spreading their own version of it, one of us had to pay those storied steppes a visit.
The latest offender lived on one of the strewn fields left by a meteorite that came down centuries ago to give the place its name. Neighbors feared he had been in contact with visitors from alternate time strands, putting him in violation of laws enacted after the meteorite’s interlineal quality was discovered.
He stood a stone’s throw from his homestead, waving like a child as the inspector brought her flyer down. The vessel’s rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him, but he kept at it.
He had a meddler’s grin. It exposed his chipped tooth while failing to lift the bags under his eyes.
Even meddlers too young to have seen the August Meteorite come down had the grin—passed down through the same mutation that gave them immune cells most suited to Sanctuary 2’s biome.1
We subsequently learn that Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra has landed to interview a man called Timoh—who she refers to as a “meddler”—and to search the area for fragments of the August Meteorite, a substance that links different time-streams and allows people to travel between them. While Nu’Terra speaks to Timoh, her sweepers (“a canine-arachnoid hybrid”) search for fragments.
More background information comes into focus as the story progresses: Nu’Terra is the lackey of the totalitarian leader of Sanctuary 2, Forever Sovereign Cletus Nu’Dawn the Infinite, and, even after ninety years of his rule, interlopers from other timestreams still arrive with accounts of worlds where his invasion of Sanctuary 2 did not succeed.
The situation develops when (spoiler) one of Nu’Terra’s sweepers discover a half buried passenger capsule inside a disused rocket shed. She tells Timoh to dig it out. While this is happening, two identical twins, Suniwa and Caruwa, rush past her—so identical that Nu’Terra suspects one of them may be from another timeline.
When Nu’Terra subsequently interrogates Caruwa, she is told, after an enigmatic exchange, “not to run” and that “she is not completely across the bridge”. The story ends with Nu’Terra encountering her doppelganger in (I think) another timeline (and here the narrative changes from the third to first person, the doppelganger’s point of view). Then, in conclusion, we get a couple of pages of Many Worlds politics and intrigue.
This story has a couple of problems: first, the gimmick of meteorite splinters enabling travel between timelines is about as convincing as interdimensional travel by magic lamp; second, the political backstory adds a confusing and unnecessary level of complexity to the story (and in the last couple of pages descends pretty much into babble). All of this and more meant that I was, from the very first paragraph, constantly trying to work out what was going on.
* (Mediocre). 5,850 words. Story link.
1. I’d expect a more straightforward start to the story, unless you are one of those writers who has the talent to break the rules:
Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra landed her flyer near to Timoh’s homestead, in one of the strewn fields left by the August Meteorite centuries earlier. On her approach she had watched Timoh as he waved like a child, and keep at it, even as the rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him.
Now he stood there waiting with his characteristic meddlers’ grin. Despite this disarming demeanour, he had been reported by his neighbors for telling his own histories, something that suggested illegal contact with visitors from other timelines.
Nu’Terra was here to find out if this was the case.
Now, that’s pretty crap writing—but at least you know, after a couple of paragraphs, who the main characters are and where the story is going.
It Takes a Village by Priya Chand
It Takes a Village by Priya Chand1 (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) opens on a starship in orbit around a planet. An asteroid has hit the ship and the damage has affected the onboard facilities (the initial section takes place during a planned powercut). We later learn that the mothers have gone down to the planet to start a colony, and the fathers have stayed on board to take care of the children.
After a little more scene setting, the fathers decide to go down to the surface and join the mothers; then we find out (spoiler) that the “mothers” are actually men, and the “fathers” are actually women. The children are not what they seem either:
“I’m sorry,” Aparla said, shaking her head. “But you know you’ve been carrying around a frozen embryo, right?”
I hugged Callo’s ovoid, a hermetically sealed container full of clever tech that kept it at the same temperature as liquid nitrogen. “So?”
“So? Servain, you—none of you—had to bring them here. They’re frozen embryos! The comms aren’t working, for all you knew we were dead, killed by something down here! They would’ve been safer on the ship.”
“No,” I said, head shaking, holding Callo tighter. “The AI said we had to take care of the children. We’re the fathers.”
“And we’re the ‘mothers’?” Disdain seethed on her tongue. “Good Earth, Servain! That AI twisted some old-style naming convention and you’ve been going with it? Did you also forget you used to be my wife?”
Subsequently, the fathers start trying to settle into planetary life but, after an unhappy few days, they eventually decide to go back up to the ship (the fathers have a morbid concern about the safety of the embryos—which they carry about with them at all times—and a temporary generator problem is the final straw). The narrator and one other father are the only ones to stay on the planet.
This odd story never really convinces: why did only the men go to the planet; why has there been such a huge change in the father’s attitude to risk in such a short period (they have only been separated three years)?; why do the fathers endlessly carry their frozen embryos around (arguably less safe than leaving them somewhere secure)?
Perhaps this story is a comment on the risk-averseness of modern mothers but, if so, that is buried under the story’s odd and not particularly interesting events, and the piece doesn’t seem to offer any particular commentary.
* (Mediocre). 6,350 words. Story link.
1. The first line made my heart sink (“misery memoir”, I thought):
A generation of traumatized fathers was raising a generation of children with trauma in their bones.
Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas
Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm—the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we have a near-future society that is sophisticated enough to fit high-tech prosthetics to injured people, but where they are still doing manual labour in factories that apparently have no concept of health and safety. In short, the arm is from the 2050s, the factory setting from the 1970s.
Jacob then returns to his home town for his father’s funeral. He is greeted by his brother, to whom he hasn’t spoken for years, and then learns that that his mother has turned into a bed-bound vegetable:
Ma, who was only fifteen years older than me, but whose hair had already turned gray. Ma, who joined the plant soon after she had me, where she got a job at the head table. They called it that because that’s where pig heads ended up. After noses and eyes and ears and cheeks and jowls and snouts were removed, the brains got scooped up. The Company sold the slurry to canned goods producers. It made soups thicker.
Back then, it used to be that one had to work through the skull with a meat saw, and then cut the brain out. One day, the Company figured it was faster firing compressed air into the skulls, then siphoning the remains.
Ma inhaled pig brain for years. Her own body, going into overdrive, started destroying itself. Who knew pig brains and human brains shared so much biology? Not something they taught at my school. Built and paid for by the Company.
The rest of this piece is an equally miserabilist, anti-capitalist tract that has (spoiler) the brother try to convince Jacob to come back to work in the company-run town. Jacob refuses (obviously). Then, after their father’s funeral, Jacob’s brother reveals his plan to keep his father’s prosthetic arms and have them attached to himself after having his arms surgically removed (the company are looking to recycle the—ten, fifteen-year old?—prosthetics onto another maimed worker, but the brother has a plan to trick them). Jacob becomes complicit with his final words, “Let’s talk to the doctor tomorrow.” This latter development doesn’t really flow from what has occurred previously, but it is maybe suggesting that “you take the boy out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the boy”.
As I’ve suggested above, this is a rather backward looking story (and the arms plot at the end makes it an unlikely one too), and I couldn’t help but think that this would probably have worked better as a straightforward literary small press piece—where the writing and characterisation wouldn’t have been hobbled by the unconvincing premise.
Finally, even if factories like this are still around today (it’s hard to believe such appalling Health & Safety would be tolerated in Western countries), the robots are coming.
* (Mediocre). 5,000 words. Story link.
Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose
Sentient Being Blues by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with “Asimov was a Bigot” graffiti, as seen by an A&R man called Thom on his way to see a blues-playing mining robot in deepest Siberia. We learn that the robot, XJB, was involved in an underground mining incident:
There are robots that sing and play instruments. There are robots that dance, paint, sculpt. They do it because they were programmed to. What made XJB special, maybe even unique, is that it made its art spontaneously, as a consolation for dying men. It’d never been taught; it taught itself, out of desperation, to give the last moments of those men’s lives some scrap of kindness. It knew that it couldn’t dig an escape before their time ran out. p. 152
One wonders why, if robots can do all those things, there is still a requirement for human miners.
Moving swiftly onwards, XJB breaks out of the manager’s office after talking to Thom (who has told it that a bootleg of its songs has gone viral). Soon XJB is on tour performing to mixed human and robot audiences. However, when a pair of active shooters start killing robots in the audience, XJB intervenes and kills one of them.
The next part of the story is about XJB’s trial and how, even though robots are sentient, they don’t have the same rights as humans (more story illogic—if they are only machines, why is XJB being tried in court?). Then, after XJB is sentenced to deactivation, Thom visits and we get some melodramatic and contrived bonding between the two (Thom’s daughter died when he refused to have her transferred to a cyborg, “What you do in life can be undone, but what you sing can never be unsung”).
The final section (spoiler) sees Thom and his boss Freddie ambush the police convoy taking XJB to be deactivated. However, just as it seems that they are on the cusp of freeing XJB, they are intercepted by police drones which cut its head off. All ends well when we find that XJB’s brain isn’t in its head but its hind quarters. XJB’s consciousness is later hidden in a railroad engine. The music company continue to receive and promote its new music.
This story is something of a kitchen-sink piece (blues-playing robot, a future where sentient robots don’t have the same rights as humans, the court case, the future-tech prison break, etc.), and the internal logic of the story is non-existent in places (see above and below). I also didn’t care much for the affected, musically-referenced writing style. Or the derogatory cracks made at Isaac Asimov’s expense:
If there were a residue of human decency left, wraithlike, drifting in the oily substance of the U.S. legal system, it never caressed the aghast faces of the robots drowned in it.
XJB was a dead bot walking. It had killed a human, in a concert hall filled with witnesses, recorded by thousands of its own assaulted fans.
The law had grown new limbs to reach bots, but grown them only from the diseased stumps of Asimov’s original, arbitrary, uncaring three rules. More evil had been done in this century with his “laws of robotics” that that scrofulous sci-fi writer could have ever imagined. They are explicit that robots—if confronted with such a choice—must sacrifice themselves, to save humans. As if human lives were somehow more important. p. 156
Apart from wraiths drifting in oil, and the personal comments (“scrofulous”), what we have here is more story illogic. If XJB has killed a human then how are human lives more important than those of robots? The three laws obviously don’t apply here or, perhaps, as anyone who has any familiarity with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics might suspect, they have metamorphosed to the point where robots now consider themselves “human”. (The goalposts were always moving in Asimov’s robot stories—didn’t The Bicentennial Man become human?)
A complete muddle of a story, in multiple ways.
* (Mediocre). 6,950 words. Story link.
Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau
Bread and Circuits by Misha Lenau (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021) begins with a sentient toaster (also described as a “toaster oven slash bread machine”) turning up on the doorstep of the Nadia, who runs an orphanage for abandoned, self-aware appliances (which she calls “quirks”).
After trying to communicate with the toaster, Nadia eventually takes it to the basement where she keeps the other quirks. There are then a few more scrambled conversations before the toaster asks Nadia to reset it (essentially commit suicide, as its self-awareness will vanish if it goes back to the default software).
It later becomes clear, after Nadia makes further efforts to talk with the toaster, that it has lost its friends. We then learn that, because of a debilitating illness that restricts her movements, so has Nadia: she resolves to make friends with the quirks.
There isn’t much to this really, but I suspect it will appeal to those who are fond of stories about sad and/or lonely narrators which have a sentimental ending.1
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words. Story link.
1. More SF readers like this sort of thing than you might think—this was one of the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll short story finalists from 2021 (although those stories are, admittedly, a weak bunch).
Ransom by Edward Wellen
Ransom by Edward Wellen (F&SF, July 1977) has a good hook:
First the finger, then the ear, then the nose.
But before them, the tape. The tape came in the mail that caught up with the traveling mansion of Peter Kifeson. The tape showed a trembling Junior Kifeson in a limbo shot—no background visible, no furnishings. A two-shot, with the light on Junior and the masked man holding him at blaserpoint, and darkness all around them. You had the sense, however, that this scene took place in a small room.
Old Peter Kifeson watched, listened, and chuckled. Twenty-five million credits, indeed. But at least and at last Junior was thinking big, showing drive. About time. After all, Junior must be all of sixty. p. 92
When Kifeson later receives a finger in the post he publicises the fact but refuses to pay the ransom (he still thinks his son is behind the extortion attempt). When an ear and then a nose arrive, Kifeson changes his mind about his son’s involvement but continues to hold out.
The police (spoiler) eventually find the blackmailer and a dead Junior. Kifeson decides to clone his son, and the last couple of paragraphs make an unclear point about parenthood and filial love.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words.
Re: Bubble 476 by A. T. Greenblatt
Re: Bubble 476 by A. T. Greenblatt (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) sees two characters (who are working in two different “bubble universes”) exchange emails. Geo works as an astronomer on an abandoned space station looking for habitable planets for humanity, and Deni as an admin assistant/writer/video monitor on, presumably, one of the planets that NextEarth has discovered.
After some back and forth between the two characters that gives background and character information as well, as describing their current locales, temporal anomalies start to occur: this becomes apparent when some of the emails they receive are from the future.
While this latter event is unfolding, Geo also notes his station is detecting an increasing number of supernovas and (spoiler) eventually it becomes obvious that all bubble universes are breaking down (violent sandstorms become a feature of Deni’s emails). Both characters experience catastrophic events (although it seems like Geo survives but Deni doesn’t).
This story didn’t really work for me as (a) the bubble universe/temporal problem seems a bit contrived and (b) the story peters out at the end.
* (Mediocre). 5,100 words.