Tag: novelette

Common Time by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Common Time by James Blish (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953) sees Garrard wake up in a FTL spaceship with the thought “Don’t move!” He struggles to open his eyelids, senses that something is very wrong, and does not attempt to move his body. Eventually, after further description of his physical condition and of his observations, Garrard realises that the infrequent “pock” sound he hears is the hugely slowed down ticking of the ship’s clock. He then counts seconds in his head and discovers that ship time is moving much more slowly than his subjective time—and that it will take him six thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri.
After Garrard gets over the intial shock, he thinks further about the physical ramifications (his body is subject to ship-time, and much slower than the speed his mind is working, so there will be a problem with co-ordination) and the possible mental problems (how will he occupy his time and stave off madness?) Then, as he deliberates, he notices that the clock is speeding up, and that the ship-time is accelerating. Soon, the clock is a blur, and he enters a state of “pseudo-death”.
The next stage of the story sees Garrard awake at Alpha Centauri, where he is greeted by aliens who speak to him in a incomprehensible language (although Garrard can make sense of it):

“How do you hear?” the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual.
“I . . .” he said. “Or we—we hear with our ears. Here.”
His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language. “We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,” the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the deck beside the hammock. “We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.”
“With all of love,” Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.

After another page or so of Blish channelling (I presume) his inner James Joyce, Garrard sets off for Earth, and once more he experiences pseudo-death.
The final part of the story sees Garrard awake near Uranus, and he soon makes radio contact with Earth. The story then ends with a conversation between Garrard and Haertel, the inventor of the FTL drive, about various scientific and philosophical matters (how personality depends on environment, time flow, etc.). When Garrard volunteers to go out again on a new ship, Haertel refuses, saying that they need to work out why the beademung wanted him to come back to Earth.
This story has an intriguing gimmick at the beginning of the piece, and an interesting (if somewhat unintelligible) first contact situation after that. However, all this, and the dull talking heads section at the end, doesn’t really add up to anything, and you very much get the impression that the author was merely playing with a number of pet ideas as he went along.1
There are also a number of matters that don’t make much sense: (a) the interior temperature in the ship is noted as being 37° C, far too hot to be comfortable; (b) the reason he enters “pseudo death” isn’t explained (if time kept on speeding up in the last part of the journey it would appear as if he suddenly arrives at Alpha Centauri; (c) if ship time speeds up so rapidly your normal speed mind won’t be able to feed your body sufficiently, and you will starve to death during the ten month trip.
Those who like literary, or more ideational or philosophical stories, may get something out of this, but I suspect many will be perplexed.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.

1. The story was commissioned by Robert A. Lowndes to accompany a previously painted cover:



The details of this commission are discussed in Robert Silverberg’s anthology, Science Fiction 101, where the he recounts what the cover suggested to Blish:

Blish, early in 1953, was handed a photostat of a painting that showed a draftsman’s compasses with their points extended to pierce two planets, one of them the Earth and the other a cratered globe that might have been the Moon. A line of yellow string also connected the two worlds. In the background were two star-charts and the swirling arms of a spiral nebula. Blish later recalled that the pair of planets and their connecting yellow string reminded him on some unconscious level of a pair of testicles and the vas deferens, which is the long tube through which sperm passes during the act of ejaculation. And out of that—by the tortuous and always mysterious process of manipulation of initial material that is the way stories come into being—he somehow conjured up the strange and unforgettable voyage of “Common Time,” which duly appeared as the cover story on the August, 1953, issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.  p. 282

If Blish were older at the time he would presumably have identified the exploding sun in the background as the prostate.
Silverberg adds:

I failed to notice, I ought to admit, anything in the story suggesting that it was about the passage of sperm through the vas deferens and onward to the uterus. To me in my innocence it was nothing more than an ingenious tale of the perils of faster-than-light travel between stars. Damon Knight, in a famous essay published in 1957, demonstrated that the voyage of the sperm was what the story was “really” about, extracting from it a long series of puns and other figures of speech that exemplified the underlying sexual symbolism of everything that happens: the repeated phrase “Don’t move” indicates the moment of orgasm, and so forth. Blish himself was fascinated by that interpretation of his story and added a host of embellishments to Knight’s theory in a subsequent letter to him. All of which called forth some hostility from other well-known science fiction writers, and for months a lively controversy ran through the s-f community. Lester del Rey, for example, had no use for any symbolist interpretations of fiction. “A story, after all, is not a guessing game,” del Rey said. “We write for entertainment, which means primarily for casual reading. Now even Knight has to pore through a story carefully and deliberately to get all the symbols, so we can’t really communicate readily and reliably by them. To the casual reader, the conscious material on the surface must be enough. Hence we have to construct a story to be a complete and satisfying thing, even without the symbols. . . . If we get off on a binge of writing symbols for our own satisfaction, there’s entirely too much temptation to feel that we don’t have to make our points explicitly, but to feel a smug glow of satisfaction in burying them so they only appear to those who look for symbols.”  pp. 282-283

Knight’s analysis of the sexual symbols in the story can be found—if, like him, you appear to have too much time on your hands—in Chapter 26 of In Search of Wonder.

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi (F&SF, November/December 2020) opens with Mansour, a woman with terminal cancer, going to the Bahrain Underground Bazaar. There she experiences the deaths of others (these have been harvested by an internet like brain implant called a NeuroLync):

In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer — the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing.
The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing — I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me.  pp. 7-8

On this occasion she experiences the death of a woman who is leading a donkey down a cliff path, and who either jumps or slips to her death (there is a death-wish moment at the edge, but it is unclear whether the fall is intentional). Then, after the blackness that normally denotes death, Mansour experiences something else:

And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all. And then voices.
The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead?
But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it.  pp. 10-11

This is the seed for the story’s further developments, but Mansour’s desire to find out more about the woman and that post-death experience is derailed when she is intercepted by her concerned daughter-in-law outside the bazaar (“You don’t need dark thoughts — you’ll beat this by staying positive.”). Later that evening Mansour’s son Firaz also expresses his worry, but this doesn’t stop her going back to the bazaar the next day and asking the proprietor to show her the dead woman’s “highlights reel”. Mansour discovers that the women was a Bedouin mother who lived a largely unremarkable life, and then, even though Mansour doesn’t feel any particular connection with her, she impulsively buys a train ticket to Petra in Jordan, the area where the woman lived.
On her arrival in Petra (spoiler) Mansour hires a teenager with a donkey to take her to see the tourist sights. First they go to the nearby Treasury, and then she asks to be taken up the cliff-edge path to the Monastery:

“Do people ever fall?”
Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline.
“It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.”
My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story?
While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff.
“Can we stop for a minute?”
“Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge.
Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge.
“Please, sayida!”
Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now.
Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there — the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise.
But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change.  pp. 20-21

They continue up the mountain to the Monastery. There they eat and drink, and Mansour discovers that the boy is the grandson of the woman who fell to her death. She asks him about his grandmother, and listens to what he has to say, but does not tell him about the recording of her death. Then she asks him to use his NeuroLync to call her son (she has left her phone behind so Firaz and her daughter-in-law cannot track her).
The last part of the story sees her reconciled with Firaz, and her approaching death (or at least to the extent anyone can be).
I liked this story quite a bit. Afifi’s writing style is concise but conjures up a believable world and characters—and there is a plot here too, even though it is essentially a mainstream one (one slight quibble is that the writer went for a mainstream ending—reconcilement, acceptance—rather than doing a transcendent call-back to the post-death experience). If the ending had been stronger (i.e. melded the mainstream and SFnal endings), I would have probably given this four stars.
A writer to watch, I think (I had the rare impulse to check out her novel1), and a story that would probably appeal to Ray Nayler fans.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,600 words.

1. The Sentient, 2020, first in the “Cosmic” series (the next one, Emergent, is due any day now). “The race to stop the first human clones uncovers a dark secret.”

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard by Cordwainer Smith

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard by Cordwainer Smith (F&SF, June 1961) is one of the author’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” series, and takes place at a time1 when the Instrumentality has decided to dismantle, or at least partially dismantle, the stable society it has created:

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past.

We knew that all of this was make-believe, and yet it was not. We knew that when the diseases had killed the statistically correct number of people, they would be turned off; when the accident rate rose too high, it would stop without our knowing why. We knew that over us all, the Instrumentality watched. We had confidence that the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More would play with us as friends and not use us as victims of a game.

The story continues with the narrator Paul pairing up with the French-speaking Virginia, who, during their conversation, reveals that she has previously visited the Abba-dingo computer located half-way up the twelve-mile-high Earthport. As Paul quizzes her about the experience, they follow a ramp down into the underground, where he is unsettled by the homunculi and hominids that work there tending their society’s machines. In particular, a female d’person (dog person), gives him a provocative look. Shortly afterwards, a drunken bull-man charges at them, and they are only saved when a cat person called C’mell lures the bull-man away with a telepathic projection. C’Mell shows the couple to a stairway that leads to the surface. Virginia tells Paul that he will see C’Mell again and, when he asks how she knows this, Virginia tells him it is a good guess, but also mentions her visit to the Abba-dingo computer again.
The rest of the story sees the couple travelling to Abba-dingo, the journey beginning when they go to a café and meet a man called Maximilien Macht, who “can take them to God” (this offer is made after he overhears an upset Virginia protesting to Paul that she does not know how much of what she feels is genuine, and what is predestined by the Lords of the Instrumentality). Macht adds, after his offer, that the Abba-dingo said he would meet a brown-haired girl, and then Virginia says that her aunt heard also heard the couple’s names from the Abba-dingo some time ago.
Macht says they can get there by using Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, a processional street in the sky which leads to Earthport. When Paul asks the point of such a journey, Virginia tells him:

“If we don’t have a god, at least we have a machine. This is the only thing left on or off the world which the Instrumentality doesn’t understand. Maybe it tells the future. Maybe it’s an un-machine. It certainly comes from a different time. Can’t you see it, darling? If it says we’re us, we’re us.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’re not.” Her face was sullen with grief.
“What do you mean?”
“If we’re not us,” she said, “we’re just toys, dolls, puppets that the lords have written on. You’re not you and I’m not me. But if the Abba-dingo, which knew the names Paul and Virginia twelve years before it happened—if the Abba-dingo says that we are us, I don’t care if it’s a predicting machine or a god or a devil or a what. I don’t care, but I’ll have the truth.”

There are (spoiler) various incidents on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard: Macht stands on some bird eggs and Paul hears a telepathic distress message from the parent (there has been lots of telepathic communication thus far)—and when Macht does not desist, Paul, prompted by the bird, strangles him till he falls unconscious. Later, the three of them get on a high-speed walkway at the side of the highway but, when they encounter a break in the bridge, Paul and Virginia make it over the gap while Macht falls onto the cables below.
They leave Macht behind and proceed to the Abba-dinga. When they get there it prints out a message for Virginia which says, “You will love Paul all your life”, and then, after Paul fights off a bird man attempting to stop him using the machine, he gets one which says, “You will love Virginia twenty-one more minutes.”
The pair set off back down the road as the weather deteriorates. Eventually, in the middle of a wild lightning storm, they reach the gap in the road: there, both Macht, who has been climbing up the cables, and Victoria fall to their death; Paul is saved by C’Mell, the cat woman from earlier in the story.
There are a lot of fascinating scenes and ideas in this story, as well as a lot of exotic background detail about the world of the Instrumentality, but ultimately this piece does not amount to much: the questions raised earlier about free will and predestination do not appear to be addressed.
Perhaps this is best read as an exotic and bizarre piece of future myth.
**+ (Average to Good). 11,250 words. Story link.

1. The timeline of the Instrumentality of Mankind is as follows:

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin (Orbit #5, 1969)1 gets off to an unclear and confusing start with the androgynous “King” Argaven of Karhide (referred to as “she” rather than “they” for some mysterious reason2) apparently having a breakdown or delusional episode. Argaven repeatedly says to the surrounding figures, “I must abdicate.”
It is only much later in the story (for those that are lucky; myself, I had to go back a reread it after finishing the piece) that it becomes apparent that Argaven has been kidnapped and is being mindwashed.3
The story then cuts to the point where it should probably have started, with a harbour guard challenging a drunk figure and, after administering half second of stun gun, inspecting the body:

Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the finger joint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone.

Argaven wakes up in the palace (the real one this time), and starts a period of recovery. During this it becomes apparent that, due to the limitations of Karhidian technology, no-one local can determine what changes the mindwashers have wrought, or what they have programmed Argaven to do. Argaven abdicates, and arranges with Mr Mobile Axt, the Ekumen ambassador on Gethen, passage off-planet in one of the their near-lightspeed spaceships. Argaven later visits their firstborn, and leaves the royal chain in the baby’s crib before departing.
The second act of the story sees Argaven travel to Ollul (Earth), a trip that only seems to last a day but, because of the relativistic effect of travelling at near-lightspeed, has her land on Earth twenty-four years later. On arrival Argaven is given a summary of events in Karhide (the regency of Lord Gerer was “uneventful and benign”) before commencing treatment for the mindwashing episode. The doctors discover that Argaven’s mind was changed to make them become, over time, a paranoid tyrant. After the treatment is completed, Argaven subsequently decides to attend Ekumenical School on Earth (“She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert”).
As the years pass, the Ekumen train the ex-King to be of use to them in the future, and this time comes (spoiler) when the current King of Karhide (Argaven’s child) terrorizes and fragments the country. This eventually sees Argaven return to Karhide sixty years after their original departure—but only a twelve years older—and, on arrival, meet children who are now older than them.
After learning of the country’s further deterioration over the last twenty four years, and the revolt of some Karhiders, Aragaven leads a rebellion, and the story finishes with the ex-King standing over the body of their child, who has committed suicide.
This story has a poor start, good middle, and perfunctory ending (the idea of a parent standing over a child who is chronologically older than them is a good one—but there is no development or confrontation, just the image). I’m not sure that this piece is much more than an intermittently well-written gimmick story.
** (Average). 8,000 words.
 
1. I read a revised version of this—apparently there are differences between the original Orbit version and those in subsequent publications (or perhaps just post the author’s collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters). Rich Horton has written an article about the differences at Black Gate.
 
2. This piece is a “Hainish” story, and one set on Gethen, the same planet that featured in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In that work the Gethians were referred to as “he”. There is more about the pronoun switch at Wikipedia.

3. Apart from the cloudiness of the first two pages, I couldn’t work out if the palace scene that follows (after the guard discovers Argaven’s body) was a continuation, or not (not, as I concluded later).
I would also suggest this is a terrible first paragraph:

When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sublightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.

I’m not sure starting with whirlpools and moving smartly on to snapshots is a winning opening sentence. Then we get a data dump about radios and spaceships. And who is Plenipotentary Axt? (He turns up pages later, by which time I had long forgotten his name.)
Winner of the 1969 Random Musing Award.

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn (Galaxy, June 19511) opens with an exchange of letters between the FBI and local police about the death of a Dr Bannerman—and which also discusses his diary, an unsettling (or possibly crazed) account of the days and months before his death: this opens with a brief mention of a possible flying saucer sighting before reporting on the annual nesting activities of Bannerman’s favourite hen, Camilla:

This year she stole a nest successfully in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window—she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout she was sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was nothing of hers. It was a deep blue and transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla’s own. There was an embryo, but I could make nothing of it. I returned the egg to Camilla’s bare and fevered breastbone and went back to the house for a long, cool drink.

Later the egg hatches to reveal an “angel”, a tiny female humanoid covered in down and with wing stubs on her shoulders. Bannerman brings the angel inside that evening and, over the next few days, Bannerman discovers that it can communicate mentally with him while they are touching (when he holds her in his hands, etc.). To begin with this is takes the form of vague feelings, but she is soon sending him images of her home world and then, days later, more complex information:

It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind: my clumsy brain really suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across. I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner—“recruiting,” “collecting,” “saving.” The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle.
I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world.

Later (in amongst material that provides more background information about her people, how they travelled through space, their biology, and much more), she reveals that there are others like her on Earth (including her dying father). We eventually learn (in an oblique narrative) that they are here on Earth to help steer mankind away from self-destruction.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees the angel’s father die and, when Bannerman asks what she is going to do next, she presents two choices: she can stay with Bannerman, and teach and counsel him (and, when the angels learn more about human biology, possibly greatly improve his health—Bannerman has a spinal deformity2). Or he can have his life memories recorded and stored by her, and used by the angels to better understand and help humankind:

It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any unresisting living subject whose brain is capable of memory at all can experience a total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past that psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes; but you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail that has ever registered on the subject’s brain; and the end result is very different. The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it: quite the opposite. The end result is death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it and record any or all of it if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls it, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true “remembering” but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulfment of a flood time, until finally the waters close over.

Bannerman chooses to have his life “saved” (a term puzzlingly used by the angel to describe Camilla the hen when she dies earlier in the story), and the last part of the story see his memories stripped away over a three week period (during which Bannerman’s old dog Judy is also “saved”):

For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect (she, without condescension, calls us very advanced) because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning!—hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes. I am merely wondering how much of my life (if I choose this way) will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” that I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.

In Bannerman’s last moments the other angels visit and let him “see” (a vivid memory of the father if I recall correctly) the two moon night on their planet; then Bannerman gives up his final memories and dies.
Overall, this is a noteworthy piece, but the first half of this story has its problems: the angel material is, at times, a little on the fey side (occasionally the angel seems more like a fantasy fairy) or it is just plain clunky (we get a lot of genre detail about the angel’s world and biology—space travel while encysted, etc.—than we really need) and, around the midway point, it starts becoming dull. That said, it picks up again when the angel’s father dies and Bannerman is presented with the two choices, and the ending is very strong—a long and reflective section, profound even, on the shortcomings of humans individually and as a society.
I’d note that, even given all the genre elements in the piece, this feels like more of a mainstream piece (it is quite descriptive and introspective), certainly when compared with other SF stories of the period. I’d also note that there is also a noticeable religious subtext to the story (angels, sacrifice, saviours, the flood, etc.).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 15,300 words. Story link.
 
1. Damon Knight made these comments about the first publication of the story in his essay, Knight Piece, in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss:

Gold had an incurable habit of overediting stories: as Lester once said, he turned mediocre stories into good ones, and excellent stories into good ones. He bought Edgar Pangborn’s beautiful ‘Angel’s Egg’ and showed it to several writers in manuscript, then rewrote some of its best phrases. He changed the description of the ‘angel’ (a visitor from another planet) riding on the back of a hawk ‘with her speaking hands on his terrible head’ to ‘with her telepathic hands on his predatory head’. According to Ted Sturgeon, when the issue came out and the story was read in the printed version, three pairs of heels hit the floor at that point and three people tried to phone Gold to curse him for a meddler. Sturgeon got in the habit of marking out certain phrases in his manuscripts and writing them in again above the line in ink. Gold asked him why he did that, pointing out that it made it difficult for him to write in corrections. ‘That’s why I do it,’ Sturgeon replied.  p. 132

I read what looks like the non-Gold version in The Arbor House Modern Treasury of Science Fiction.

2. I wonder if Bannerman—which can also mean “standard bearer”—is a metaphor for humanity, and whether his twisted nature (the spinal deformity) is a metaphor for the human condition.

The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.

The Hazmat Sisters by L. X. Beckett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Hazmat Sisters by L. X. Beckett (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) sees a man approach three teenage girls in the wild, who quickly mount a hi-tech defence:

“Unknown interloper.” Text from the hot scrolls across her augmented display.
She flicks the warning away with a gesture, linking to Tess’s dragon and zooming with its cameras. It feeds a view of the brush direct to her goggles. No coyote this time. The man’s scrawny, but a man nonetheless. Not as big as Fee, but full-grown.
He’s creeping toward them. Not blundering, not snuffling about for shelter, and moving superslow. Bidding to fool their motion detectors? Not good.
Wilmie checks the charge on Pony—three quarters—then side-steps, fighting a sneeze as she crouches beside her twin, Tess, and puts a hand over her mouth. Tess goes from slack to electric under her hands. She joins the Dragon channel, takes one look, and sends, subvocally: “Someone’s coming, Fee.”
Wilmie’s earbuds make the utterance seem loud.
Fee, their fearless leader, rolls deeper into the culvert they’ve claimed for the night’s camp. “Secure the mule.”
Wilmie obeys, triggering a clattering furl of shield over Mule’s chest-mounted solar panel. Pony collapses into a pile of dull silver spaghetti, camouflage mode, pretending to be broken chain-link fence, scattered in grass. Dragon rises another three meters, propellers whirring lustily as Tess, emitting a cheerful spray of happyface moji, queues up a trank dart.  p. 74-75

The man is eventually confronted by the girls and slinks off. Afterwards, the three suspect that he may be a Dixie deserter up to no good (the Dixie militia is one of the factions in an ongoing American civil war that has reduced—along with corona superviruses—much of the country to a post-apocalyptic landscape).
The rest of the piece provides some backstory as well as further trials for the three as they try to walk to the DMZ, their mother/stepmother (I forget the family details), and safety. This involves: the man reappearing on two further occasions; potentially weaponised tree-planting drones appearing while they are queueing with others to buy supplies; a man with a wife and baby who helps them out; and much bickering between the three.
During all this the mother is monitoring the girls remotely, and conferences with them every night (one of the gimmicks of the story is that the mother gamifies—D&D, I’m told—their journey to try and make the three more co-operative).
This is alright, I guess, but the (spoiler) final fight scene with the man isn’t as clearly described as it could be (the problem is continually having to describe what various pieces of future tech are doing), and, overall, the story feels like an extract from a longer work rather than a self-contained piece.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,350 words. Story link.

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.