Tag: 2*

Philly Killed His Car by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Philly Killed His Car by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the protagonist, Philly, trying to sell his sentient car:

“How many miles did you say?”
“Madeline,” Philly said. “How many miles do you have?”
“That’s a rather personal question,” Madeline shot back. “How tall are you without the auto-lifts in those dashing faux-leather cowboy boots?”
Philly winced as the dude glanced down at his boots. He was so sick of this fucking car. “Can you just answer the question, please?”
“I’ve traveled fifty-six thousand incident-free miles, rounding up.”  p. 48

Matters do not improve when Mr Timms, the prospective buyer, offers a price:

“Madeline, how about it? He seems like a good guy, don’t you think? If he was your owner, he could take much better care of you than me.” Philly caught himself. “If he was your client, I meant to say.” Madeline went apeshit when Philly used the O word. He braced himself for one of her ass-chewings.
“Do you work with other vehicles, Mr. Timms?” Madeline asked.
“I own three,” Mr. Timms said proudly. “A Mercedes convertible AJ seven, a Tesla
Humvee Elite, and a mint 1982 Mustang.”
“So, you don’t really need my services. My presence in your garage would be meant as a further display of your economic prowess.”
Mr. Timms’ eyes narrowed. “That’s not at all the way I would put it.”
“No, I’m perfectly sure it isn’t. Let’s go, Philip. I’m ready to leave.”
“God damn it.” Philly raised his fist over Madeline’s hood, just barely resisting the urge to slam it down.
“That’s one nasty car you’ve got there. No wonder you’re not asking more.” Mr. Timms turned on his heel and headed up his driveway.  p. 49

The rest of the story details Philly’s increasing irritation with Madeline (his family badly needs the money). Then, while Philly is bitching to a friend called Gibsy about the wider AI situation (they gained limited rights after a one day strike and are now considered a nuisance by many), Gibsy suggests to Philly (spoiler) that he crash the car and claim on the insurance. Philly duly does this and, when the car doesn’t go in the lake, smashes the CPU to bits while Madeline begs him to stop (in an overly brutal scene). Then he and Gibsy push the car down the ravine and into the water.
The second part of the story sees his wife visit him in hospital—just in time to see all the lights and equipment in his room switch off. The AIs in his shoe lifts (which Philly had forgotten about) have told the rest of the AI world about his crime, Philly is now sanctioned—no AI controlled equipment will work in his presence beyond the very basics required to keep him alive.
The final section sees Philly doing manual labour in an onion field, having nightmares about killing a human Madeline, and then, after smashing the house toaster when all the appliances starts chanting “Killer”, repairing it. When he promises to modify the rest of the appliances we see that Philly may eventually be able to win forgiveness, at least from some of the AIs.
This is an okay story if you don’t think about it too much (e.g. a world where AIs are sentient and have rights but can still be sold as property is completely inconsistent, and an untenable situation—and the idea that the AIs may forgive the brutal killing of one of their number for a few modifications is just ridiculous).
** (Average). 8,500 words. Story link.

Victor by Bruce McAllister

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Victor by Bruce McAllister (F&SF, July 1977) opens with worm-like aliens landing on Earth; these initially appear to be indestructible, as when they absorb sufficient material or energy they grow and replicate. However, the professor who is the father of the narrator’s girlfriend comes up with a solution—a whistle that, when it is blown and the sound transmitted through loudspeakers, summons huge flocks of birds to eat the worms. The narrator and his girlfriend figure this out after the Professor falls into a coma, and the pair go on to save the world.
These events would, in most SF stories, be the complete arc of the piece—but in this one we are just half way through, and the rest of it telescopes through time and illustrates an anti-climactic domestic aftermath. First, the media attention on the couple fades; then the Professor gets old and dies; later, the narrator and his girlfriend have problems with their teenage kids and eventually separate, etc.
This is an interesting idea but it isn’t a particularly engrossing one.
** (Average). 2,800 words.

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

** (Average). 4,250 words

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is the second story in a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
** (Average). 4,100 words.

Quake by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quake by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Mountain (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
** (Average). 5,950 words.

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen (F&SF, July 1977) is a short squib (it’s less than three pages long) that tells of a coal burner called Ash who spends a lot of time staring into the flames of his fires. One evening he sees a maiden (glowing “red and gold”) in a fire and pulls her out, burning his hands in the process.
Ash learns she is a fire maiden, calls her Brenna, and builds more fires so she can move around more freely (she can only move over fire and embers).
The story resolves (spoiler) when the village elders turn up and complain that their supply of charcoal has ceased. When Ash points to Brenna the elders cannot see her, and Ash’s sudden doubts about her reality causes her to fade. Ash looks at the villagers and then at Brenna, puts the doubt from his mind, and jumps into the fire to join her.
A pleasant but slight tale, even if there is some personal belief metaphor buried here.
** (Average). 1,200 words.

Flowers Like Needles by Derek Künsken

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Flowers Like Needles by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) introduces us to Bek, a needle-like alien that lives in a strange and exotic environment:

Bek scuttled over the needle field on the Waste of Mosses, far from Roktown and the monastery in Horn Valley. Turbulent winds scattered the neat rows of falling iron carbonyl snows. The steely needles here grew jagged, making the magnetic fields on the waste feel unsettled, haunted. Deep beneath the waste, the iron carbonyl ocean surged, pushing erratic breezes between the spines, whistling ghostly, wordless songs. Only two swarmers, Dux and Jed, accompanied him, humming a tune about Bek’s brave travels. In some ways, they looked like him. Fine iron and nickel needles burst radially from the centers of their bodies to absorb microwaves from the pulsar and catch falling gray snowflakes. Strong magnetic fields moved eight legs of sliding metal rods. Small pincers capped each of their limbs, tough enough to hold tight to the upthrusting fields of spines, delicate enough to read histories recorded in the crimpings in archival needles or to preen Bek’s needles.  p. 138

Bek is on a quest to find Master Mok, the former head of his order, and he eventually arrives at Mount Ceg. There he finds another of his kind, Lod, guarding a mountain tunnel which leads to Master Mok. Lod tells Bek he will have to get past him to see Master Mok, and indicates the bodies of other fallen warriors around him.
The pair fight, and Bek wins but yields to Lod (which then releases Lod from an oath put on him by a monster which lives under the mountain and which also guards Mok). After some back and forth (mostly Bek’s zen-like teachings about accepting help) they both go to seek Master Mok.
The two then meet the monster TokTok in a mountain tunnel that leads to Master Mok, and learn that he is actually a huge warrior who crossed the ocean to avenge Cis the Master of Tides. After some backstory about how TokTok came instead to become Master Mok’s guard, he agrees to accompany them to find Master Mok.
The threesome (spoiler) eventually find Master Mok, who tells them he will not teach them anything unless they defeat him in battle. The three reflect on what they have learned on their journey and (I think) conclude that they need to find their own path and not follow someone else’s.
The alien description is well done, as is the Eastern spiritual journey-like material,1 but the story’s payoff isn’t as obvious or profound as it should be. Still, apart from a weak, somewhat anti-climactic ending, this is quite good.
*** (Good). 6,100 words. Story link.

1. I was reminded of the old TV show Kung Fu to the point that I went and ordered the DVD boxset.

Mrs Piper Between the Sea and Sky by Kali Wallace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mrs Piper Between the Sea and Sky by Kali Wallace (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with a British agent on her way to abduct a man called Piper from a house near Plymouth:

It was Hazel’s turn at the checkpoint.
[. . .]
“Papers,” said the guard.
A powerful stench rolled outward from the booth: the acrid scent of burnt sugar with a metallic undertone, like a dusting of rust on the tongue. For a second Hazel could not speak. Her words, her excuses, they stuck in her throat like iron needles, and a feverish fresh fear swept over her entire body.
The young man was not alone in the booth.
[. . .]
His gaze flicked to the left. The Guest was right behind him.
Hazel looked away so quickly the road blurred before her. A glance was enough.
The Guest filled the tiny booth, filled it and surpassed it and engulfed it from within, a gleaming, cold darkness without boundary or form. It stretched and seeped at the edge of her vision, a nauseating lack of stillness that was, even so, impossible to track as motion.
People compared the Guests to black fire and living oil, roiling shadows and storm-cast skies. Some spoke of the unknown depths of the sea. Hazel was not given to poetry in the face of such ugliness. To her they were only darkness and corruption.
“This is acceptable,” the man said. His voice cracked. He was so terribly young. “Go on. Move along.”  p. 79

We later learn that the aliens have interrupted WWII and have annihilated both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Piper, the man who Hazel is travelling to see, voluntarily served with the Guests, and she hopes to abduct him so her organisation can retrieve an alien control device that was inserted into him. The resistance hope this will provide information that will help them in their fight against the aliens.
When Hazel arrives (spoiler), she has tea with his wife, who cooperates, before drugging Piper and taking him away.
This is moderately intriguing, but there is a too much going on and not enough of that is explained. The ending also leaves the story hanging in the air, which makes it feels like an extract from a longer work. A pity—it is not a bad read otherwise.
** (Average). 6,500 words.

Blimpies by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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