Tag: Asimov's SF

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
** (Average). 7,050 words.

Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts with Siob, a member of the far-future Dispersion of Humanity, remembering a faraway conflict before he arrives on a world where Thave (another member of the Dispersion) lives.
The planet is disguised to appear uninhabitable, and Thave lives through several host bodies in a futuristic underground city. Siob remonstrates with her about her choice (a dull section that seems essentially to be about cultural aesthetics).
Later, Siob asks Thave about other members of the Dispersion before he goes down to “Bedlam”—the final long stream of consciousness section of the book:

Outside the door, the city seethed, roiled, cacophonous. Brimming with people. Were they people? Brimming with dolls, brimming with shadows, brimming with monsters. I forced a smile, a monstrous gritted-teeth affair. “I can’t, Thavé. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have to go down.”
Thavé nodded (whatever that meant).
It was time for Bedlam.
There was a claw-hand of a moon, violent violet, digging down past my eyes, beneath the portal, the partial, the penetrating perorating peach perfection, capsized
capsized in an ocean of night.
That’s not right. Focus on the hands, on the hands—leather? of leather? Running through the heather.
(“I can see where I am, I can always see where I am. Dreaming with part of my brain. But how to interpret what I see? How to know if that—that—is a bed, a wall, a hand, a moon, a vault, a vertilex, a transix, a typhoon?”)
Cultural detox. Hallucenophenomenic aspects of.

I’m not entirely sure what goes on subsequently, but I vaguely recall a lot of memories and angst. And, of course, the two pages of blank verse, which were an especial treat.
There is a lot of surface glitter in this story but not, I think, much else.
* (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled/noir detective style:

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I’d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You’d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you’d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub’s grift.)

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the “war in heaven” is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman’s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour—someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the “Power”, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother’s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother’s underground bunker—for both Heaven and Earth.
I’m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis’s novel Something More Than Night (described as “Angel Noir” in the Asimov’s introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It’s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
** (Average). 8,200 words.

The Roots of our Memories by Joel Armstrong

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Roots of our Memories by Joel Armstrong (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2022) takes place in a strange graveyard of the future, where the memories of the dead can be accessed:

That morning I’m overseeing a burial. It’s going to be a scorcher, another record year, the meteorologists keep saying. For now a moist warmth hangs from the hemlock trees, the sky a foggy, rainless gray. I meet the cranial arborist at the open grave, where he’s exposed the roots and fungal mycelia needed to wire the body into the cemetery network. The things done to the body aren’t for the family to see, so we’re the only two present as we remove the corpse from the portable cryofridge and place it in the steel casket. Liam performs most of our corporeal insertions, and I’ve gotten to know him well over the years. I can never decide if it’s sacrilegious or fitting that we end up talking about family while he treats the roots with chemical binder and makes the incisions to thread the mycelia into the body’s brain stem and arteries. He asks how my daughter likes second grade; I ask if his wife’s finally found a new job. Liam injects probiotic and anticoagulant cocktails to encourage clean sap circulation, and then we seal the casket. He’ll return in a few days to make sure the insertion takes, but after that most corpses only need a yearly checkup.  p. 82

Into the narrator’s world comes Pamela, a young woman who initially wants to search her father’s memories but, when she is told they are embargoed for a year after death, decides instead to ask for access to her grandmother’s.
The rest of the story is a slow burn which sees Pamela, to the surprise of the archivist, repeatedly return to use the computers to access her grandmother’s memories. During these visits she is very tight-lipped about what she is learning, but nevertheless develops a growing friendship with the narrator and the regular researchers. We also learn about climate change effects which have caused an insect infestation threat to the hemlock trees that power the network (and if the trees die, her father’s memories will be lost).
At the end of the tale Pamela is more forthcoming with the narrator, and she tells him about her grandmother and the old woman’s attitude to life. There is no big reveal here, but it’s an engagingly strange and quietly effective piece.
*** (Good). 4,600 words.

Unmasking Black Bart by Joel Richards

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Unmasking Black Bart by Joel Richards (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2022) starts off with 43-year-old Connor on his way to a class reunion in the near-future. As he drives there the story’s plot devices are revealed—holo-masks, and a robber called Black Bart:

Connor couldn’t wear a mask at work. He was a police psychologist [. . .] and cops weren’t permitted to wear masks on duty. Transparency and accountability in law enforcement had mandated that exception to the libertarian and libertine ethos of the times wherein everyone had the right to represent his/her self as they wanted.
And many did, playing what role they wished.
Fantastical figures abounded. Historical personages, too, so long as they were dead. It was unlawful to represent as someone else still living. . . perhaps while robbing a bank or assaulting a neighbor.
Not that bank robbers had stopped robbing banks. Some who did masked themselves as John Dillinger or Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde. A recent and active robber in these parts presented as Black Bart, augmenting his flour sack mask with Bart’s long duster coat, billycock derby hat, and penchant for leaving poems at the scenes of his exploits.  pp. 88-89

The rest of the story is basically a readable, if long-winded, piece about going to a high school reunion and all that entails—personalities, relationships, success, ageing, etc. Embedded in this is a thin plot thread which sees Connor socialise with another of the attendees, Harry, and (spoiler) sees him discover evidence that Harry may be Black Bart. The story closes with a third party account that makes this more probable.
It’s all a bit pointless, and this feels like a mainstream story in SF drag.
* (Mediocre). 6,300 words.

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2022) opens with the wife of an artist watching him at work:

As Elaine harvested plums, carrying them from the garden to the kitchen, she glanced through the large windows of Barnaby’s studio. She could barely see her husband: only a blur as he moved with superhuman rapidity, augmented by the Alipes system. He flitted between three separate canvases, executing portraits simultaneously in watercolors, oils, and pastels. Today’s client sat at the far end of the studio, her stillness emphasized by the contrast with Barnaby’s whirlwind. Elaine disliked these Alipes-assisted commissions, but many customers appreciated the shorter modeling time.  p. 124

It turns out that the husband, Barnaby, has some sort of time-acceleration device fitted (similar in effect, I guess, to Gully Foyle’s commando wiring in The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester).
His wife is not happy, however, for two reasons, (a) he isn’t using the time saved to spend more time with her and (b) she fears that, with so many using the Alipes system, the market will be saturated with artwork. After discussing the latter problem with Barnaby (she is his agent), he decides to head off to the Birmingham Wipe (the site of a nanotech accident that has turned a large swathe of terrain into glass) to see if an artists’ collective he knows of can produce something special—and saleable—before the art bubble bursts. After he leaves Elaine goes to see her sister, who is living as a refugee in a half-drowned London.
So far, so good: there is a novel SF gimmick, interesting characters, and an intriguing background. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the story sees Elaine head up to Birmingham to find her husband (Barnaby is spending too much subjective time away from her), at which point (spoiler) all the Alipes time-acceleration stuff is jettisoned and the story devolves into a bland fantasy adventure in a virtual reality populated with charismatic queens, dragons, etc. (and this latter part is not much improved by worthy discussions about art or mentions of Picasso’s Guernica). Very much a game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,100 words. Asimov’s SF store.

Miracle by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Miracle by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1991) gets off to a leisurely start with some office chit-chat about Christmas between the protagonist, Lauren, and one of her office colleagues, Evie, and this lays out most of the elements that will feature in this tale: two of their co-workers, Scott Buckley (“too cute to ever notice someone like me”), and Fred Hatch (“the fat guy in documentation”), and the movies Miracle on 34th Street and It’s Wonderful Life.
The final character in this Unknown-like fantasy appears when Lauren gets home, and she is door-stepped by an irritating young man saying he is there to give her a Christmas Present. Despite her shutting the door on him twice, he appears in the apartment:

The young man was sitting on the couch, messing with her TV remote. “So, what do you want for Christmas? A yacht? A pony?” He punched buttons on the remote, frowning. “A new TV?”
“How did you get in here?” Lauren said squeakily. She looked at the door. The deadbolt and chain were both still on.
“I’m a spirit,” he said, putting the remote down. The TV suddenly blared on. “The Spirit of Christmas Present.”
“Oh,” Lauren said, edging toward the phone. “Like in A Christmas Carol.”
“No,” he said, flipping through the channels. She looked at the remote. It was still on the coffee table. “Not Christmas Present. Christmas Present. You know, Barbie dolls, ugly ties, cheese logs, the stuff people give you for Christmas.”
“Oh, Christmas Present. I see,” Lauren said, carefully picking up the phone.
“People always get me confused with him, which is really insulting. I mean, the guy obviously has a really high cholesterol level. Anyway, I’m the Spirit of Christmas Present, and your sister sent me to—”
Lauren had dialed nine one. She stopped, her finger poised over the second one. “My sister?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the TV. Jimmy Stewart was sitting in the guard’s room, wrapped in a blanket. “Oh, wow! It’s a Wonderful Life.”
My sister sent you, Lauren thought. It explained everything. He was not a Moonie or a serial killer. He was this year’s version of the crystal pyramid mate selector. “How do you know my sister?”
“She channeled me,” he said, leaning back against the sofa. “The Maharishi Ram Das was instructing her in trance-meditation, and she accidentally channeled my spirit out of the astral plane.” He pointed at the screen. “I love this part where the angel is trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he’s dead.” pp. 143-144

After this he tells her that he is there is give what she really wants for Christmas, “her heart’s desire”, before going on to criticise her computer addressed cards, store wrapped presents, etc. Then he disappears, along with her cards, and leaves a Christmas tree growing out of her kitchen floor.
The rest of the story sees Lauren recruit Frank to help her deal with her spirit problem, and the two of them work together to try and get rid of him, as well as cope with various other changes Chris the spirit makes, such as Lauren’s off-the-shoulder black party dress—bought to impress Scott—being changed into a Yanomano Indian costume (Frank helpfully suggests she could wear last year’s pretty red number).
At this point (spoiler) I could see that Lauren was going to end up with Frank and not Scott, and so it materialises (dates with Scott are thwarted by Chris, Frank and Lauren have to come up with last minute gifts for everyone at the office when only Office Depot is open, Fred arrives at the party with the cheese puffs Lauren was meant to bring, Evie arrives wearing the black dress, etc., etc.). Finally, Chris arrives at the party dressed as Santa Claus.
This is an entertaining fantasy rom-com that gets off to a very good start, but I thought it tailed off towards the end (I’m not sure if this is because of pacing/padding problems, or because I guessed where it was going). I also thought that the two movies are referenced too much—but this is maybe a function of describing enough about them to those who aren’t familiar with them. Overall, though, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good, or, more accurately, Very Good to Good). 14,000 words.

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is a “companion piece” to last year’s Dream Atlas (Asimov’s SF March/April 2021)1 and, by the by, also has similarities with Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999).2 All these (spoiler) involve people from the future interfering with the past.
In this story that intervention comes in the form of a young schoolboy called Gallagher, who turns up at an Irish archaeological site because he wants to write an article for his school paper. The team he visits are using an experimental machine to recover historical sounds (“A stone contains within itself the diminishing vibrations of every sound that ever bounced against it”), and Gallagher “accidentally” damages it on two separate occasions. On his third attempt to do so, Finn, the local fixer/bouncer, intervenes, and Gallagher reveals he is an agent of (not from) the future. He explains he is there to stop development of their new technology because, once they progress, they will find that they will be able to recover sounds from the future as well as the past (there is some waffle about the “quantum realm” here).
After Gallagher disappears in a puff of dust, the team leader, Dr Leithauser, decides to continue with their work, and the story concludes with the revelation that Finn is also an agent from the future (from a faction opposed to Gallagher’s). The team then recover the sound of a harpist playing at the coronation of an Irish king.
This is okay, but the the not entirely convincing plot is formulaic time-traveller material—and tarting it up with bits of Ireland, old and new, doesn’t disguise that.
** (Average). 3,400 words.

1. My review of Dream Atlas.

2. My review of Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick

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A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1988)1 opens with a far-future soldier, who is trying to seduce a woman, tell her a tale about his childhood:

That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.  p. 24

There are other exotic details:

Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye, I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.  p. 25

The central episode of the story occurs when Flip, the narrator, gets bored with a procession outside and returns to the Stone House; while he is at the fireside a larl, a large predatory beast indigenous to the planet, comes out of the shadows and, to Flip’s surprise, starts speaking to him.
The larl begins by telling Flip how his kind pass on their memories by eating the brains of their dead, and how “he” was eating his grandfather’s when humans first came to this planet (presumably this is one of those inherited memories). The larl goes on to tell him that, after a period of peace between his people and the new arrivals, one of the larls killed a human. The man’s wife, Magda, pursued the larl on her snowstrider, even though she had her young baby with her, and chased the larl to his people’s sacrifice rock (the larl realised he could not outrun the woman and her machine, so decided to pass on the information he had gathered about how to evade her—temporarily at least—to his people).
Magda catches up with the larl at the rock, and watches from a distance while other larls kill and eat her quarry. She notes (spoiler) how they react when they absorb the creature’s flesh and knowledge—and then sees them turn towards her. They hunt her down, a long process that eventually forces her, after she loses the snowstrider, to circle back to the sacrifice rock. There she lays her baby down and offers herself up: when the larls kill and consume her, they become more than animals:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.  p. 37-38

The larl goes tells Flip that his people took the baby back to the humans’ Captain, and how the two groups lived in peace thereafter. The larl adds that they didn’t tell the Captain about the woman, and that they take a human every now and then to maintain their closeness to humanity. He then tells Flip that, if he is good, then maybe it will be him they eat.
The last section returns to the soldier at the beginning of the story (indentifiable now as the older Flip), where we see him try to complete his seduction. This part artfully makes the older Flip’s world more real while making his childhood world more doubtful: was it something he imagined, something that was real, or was the larl telling him a story?

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cavebears by playing the oldest winter games there are.
You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?
Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives.
That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.
All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.2

This is very well told story, rich in detail, and even the possible ludicrousness of the memories-from-brains gimmick didn’t register for a couple of days. A deserving winner of that year’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll.
**** (Very good). 5,950 words.

1. The 1989 Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll Winners at ISFDB. It is worth comparing this list with the Hugo nominees and the Nebula nominees. They are all quite different that year.

2. I note that this section (I haven’t checked the rest of it) is rewritten for the Spirits of Christmas, 1989 anthology version. Original in normal font, revision in italics:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed.

[No change]

“Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant.

“Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension.

Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

[“all” deleted]

“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it.

“As the woman had hoped I would be. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind.

She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.”

[No change]

The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.

[“smooth” changed to “velvety”, “hooded” changed to “sheathed”]

NB The first two quoted sections are from the reprinted version I read (but have the Asimov’s page reference); the third quoted section is from the Asimov’s version.

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fermi and Frost by Frederik Pohl (Asimov’s SF, January 1985)1 opens in the TWA terminal at JFK airport after a maritime military exchange leads to an imminent nuclear war. Initially the story focuses on a young boy called Timothy, who has lost his parents in the crowds trying to flee New York, but we are soon introduced to another character, Harry Malibert, a SETI astronomer sitting in the temporary island of calm that is the Ambassador Club. The two are flung together in the increasing chaos at the airport and, when Malibert gets the offer of a flight to Iceland just as the nuclear attack warning sounds, he takes Timothy with him.
The central part of the story sees the two arrive and settle in Iceland (just as Reykjavik is accidentally nuked by a bomb meant for the US airbase at Keflavik), and details, in graphic and precise detail, the nuclear winter that encompasses the globe—killing off nearly all of the remaining survivors:

The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapor. Drops formed. Rain fell torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled.
The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.
And the darkness stayed.
The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.
The missiles went off on the 11th of June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on the 30th of August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.  p. 87

During this period Malibert parents Timothy and works as a geothermal engineer (Iceland’s constant supply of hot water provides its survivors with heat and electricity, which means artificial light for crops), and Malibert later has time to run an informal SETI club—this is where the “Fermi” of the title enters the story, from Fermi’s Paradox: if there are aliens out there, why haven’t we met them?

“One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.  p. 92

Shortly after this the story—which had been interesting, detailed, and well developed—comes to an odd ending where Pohl goes all meta, stating in an authorial voice that in one ending sunlight returns too late to save the Icelandic survivors, but that in another ending they survive and, generations later, aliens finally arrive. (“But that is in fact what did happen! At least, one would like to think so.”)
An irritating finish to an otherwise good story.
*** (Good). 6,200 words.

1. Pohl won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Story for this, an achievement which hugely overrates the piece. Perhaps 1985 wasn’t a particularly strong year in this category—the other Hugo finalists, which I haven’t read but haven’t heard of either, were: Flying Saucer Rock & Roll by Howard Waldrop; Snow by John Crowley; Dinner in Audoghast by Bruce Sterling; Hong’s Bluff by William F. Wu.)