Tag: short story

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld, December 2020) is set in a Galactic Empire future, and opens with Pinander at college reciting one of his set texts. After this, he meets his friends for lunch:

Pinander’s mind expands with activated Lore. He sits with Jain and Philo.
“Alright?”
A penitent Jain hunches over her steaming bowl.
Philo studies a scroll. “I’m not going to make it,” he says.
“Where are you?” Pinander says.
“The Temple Odes.”
Pinander explains the Temple Odes were songs. “Some verse lends itself to silent reading, but not the Odes. You should be reciting or singing.”
Jain giggles in her soup steam.
Pinander reckons Philo is doomed. Intelligence goes a long way in the imperial service exam, but shyness can hobble you. There are soundproofed study rooms for students like Philo, but to pass the exams you must study constantly: at meals, in showers, in the loo, to and from study groups, as you drift off to sleep. There’s a lot of verse like the Odes. If you don’t recite or sing, Lore will go un-activated, remaining useless noise in your skull.

We learn that the students spend several years in an aestivation facility dubbed “The Crypt” before they come to college, during which time a huge body of knowledge called the Lore is downloaded into them. Afterwards they have to activate it by reading or reciting or singing various texts.
The rest of the story sees Philo commit suicide, and Jain drop out, but only after she passes on the revolutionary idea that there was another context written for the Lore by a poet called Sinecure. Further academic and counter-revolutionary intrigue follows (a Professor makes a cryptic remark that takes root in Pinandar’s “activated mind”) and the story eventually proceeds to an ending (spoiler) where Pinander manages to track down a scroll written by Sinecure and uses it to gain a dual view of his Lore and the Empire.
The core idea of this story is a bit unlikely, and much that follows is either a hand-wavey development of that idea or a rather over-elaborate description of college students and parental pressure and revolutionary intrigue in a far-future Imperial Empire (i.e. too much description and not enough story). It also has an ending that seems a bit unfocused. Ultimately, I guess I liked this, but it takes some getting into, and I’d understand if people bounced off it.1
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This story got a mixed response in one of my Facebook groups.

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #373, 3rd December 2020) sees a young girl meet her lover in a deserted garden in the middle of a city; there, she gives them a pale red rose and they make love.
Later, as the young girl and her sister are getting magic lessons from their mother, the sister mentions that there are pale red roses growing in the deserted gardens, and that it appears like “the sort of magic a foolish young girl might make, if she were slipping away from her house to meet her lover in the middle of the night.”
The young girl continues to meet her lover there (the deserted garden is now full of roses) until, eventually, the Inquisition comes to question her about her liaison. The story then ends (spoiler) with the lover being hanged and the girl witnessing the event, whereupon her magic causes water to pour out of her and wash everything away.
This tale of forbidden and doomed love was too slight and too dreamlike for me.
* Mediocre. 1500 words. Story link.

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer (Uncanny #36, September-October 2020) is set in a world where text is never permanent but constantly changes:

In his Physics, Aristotle declared that textual transmutation accelerates over time, and that its rate depends on the length of the manuscript. No one questioned this doctrine until after Gutenberg, when it was found that even moveable type metamorphosed on its racks. Galileo Galilei was the first to test Aristotle’s assertion by rigorous experiment, creating multiple copies of manuscripts of various length, as well as printed books, and examining them against correctors’ copies repeatedly over a period of a decade. He determined, first, that all texts transmute at the same rate, roughly one word out of every fifty in a year; second, that this rate does not change with time; and third, that all changes are what he called “sensible,” meaning that they fit logically within the framework of the larger document and do not betray themselves by presenting apparent gibberish. Indeed, it was his assertion that the Holy Bible would be no less prone to sensible transmutation than secular texts that eventually led to his censure and permanent house arrest.
But it was Isaac Newton who demonstrated that textual transmutation was an inherent property of writing itself, devising his three Laws of Impermanence and describing mathematically the forces that make them inevitable.

Interwoven with the conceptual development of this idea are two other narrative threads: one is a story of a lawyer and a client family who have only two original copies of their father’s will (both of which have suffered 25 years of transmutation); the other concerns a letter from the estranged wife of Philip, the grandfather of that family, to her friend:

I’m writing this in a hurry and I’m going to put it someplace safe. I hope to God that you’ll never have to read it, that I’ll be able to tell you in person. But I thought I’d better get it down on paper in case the worst happens.
I’m frightened that Philip wants to kill me. He threatened to do it right after the divorce, and I almost went to the police, but he never repeated the threat, and I thought I was safe.
But today I’m not so sure. A neighbor on the island who’d been down at the port said she saw a tall man with a beard and a coat that sounded just like Philip’s, and I’m afraid he’s come here to do what he said he’d do.
I’m going to try to get away right now, to hide somewhere on the other side of the island. But if, God forbid, I wind up dead, remember: it’s Philip who killed me.

During the story (spoiler) this letter metamorphoses into one that is more vague (this second version suggests that, if anything happens to her, Philip is “morally responsible”) and then, finally, into a suicide note.
This is a conceptually clever piece of ideation that is well developed (I liked all the scientific references to scientists we know for other discoveries) and has a neat twist ending. I suspect it will appeal to, among others, admirers of Ted Chiang’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,100 words. Story link.

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

Posted on by Paul Fraser 3 Comments on The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #311, 27th August 2020) sees a geomancer returning to the magical university where she studied twenty years after a disaster that occurred there. She meets her former tutor/advisor, and they go to the walled up “Vault of Potions”—the site of two recent deaths—with the with the aim of opening it and forcing the university to deal with the contamination that has been festering inside ever since:

I’d handed those very stones to the professors who were standing in the entrance walling up the Vault, me and Ev Minor, shin-deep in the floodwaters with that eerie pink glow from the spilled potions’ ill-fated summonings getting brighter every second. That was the night everything I owned washed away and it was the least of my troubles. That was the night we lost Alden Glasshand, my first-year Incantations professor, and two students whose names I’ll never forget but whose faces I can never remember, pulled under the waters by the vortices that had suddenly surged beneath their feet when the powerful magics in the potions were accidentally combined. That was the night we slept on the top floor of the Library and didn’t know if we’d get down in the morning.

The only complication in this otherwise straightforward account is (spoiler) an alchemy professor who intervenes and stabs the narrator’s tutor as they are in the process of opening the vault (the alchemist wants them to leave it alone so the university can continue on as before). The narrator subdues her, and then makes what I presume in the story’s point:

“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you anymore. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

The setup/resolution structure of this piece is too simple,1 and seems constructed with the sole purpose of delivering the story’s message. That said, the setting and events are evocatively described.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I’ve found that a lot of BCS stories feel rather fragmentary.

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison (FIYAH #16, Autumn 2020) opens with an unaccompanied young boy going into a diner. Tammy the waitress offers him some apple pie if she’ll tell him who he is and who looks after him. He replies that he is on his own, and then she gets ever more enigmatic answers to further questions, including the fact he is studying “how this world ended”. Then, when Tammy asks the boy what game he is playing, he tells her this:

“Susan Culpepper. Eighth grade. In the lunchroom. You made fun of her clothes in front of a group of girls. You said she looked poor and homeless. All of you laughed. At the end of lunch before class, you were in a restroom stall and saw her come in crying. She sobbed for a solid two minutes. Then she left. You wanted to apologize and didn’t. The next week she transferred schools. You never hung around that group of girls again, and to this day you regret never telling her you were sorry. You looked her up on social media more than a dozen times.”
Tammy’s eyes are the size of the saucers sitting behind her on the counter. “I—I never told anymore that story.”
“You told it to me. Susan is married now with two children in a lovely brownstone in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She’s a wealthy author married to an anesthesiologist. Funny how life works. Writing about the abject poverty she survived as a child made her a millionaire. This world loves its irony nearly as much as it does its war.”

The rest of the story details Tammy’s reaction to the above, further personal information about her (apparently the man who comes into the diner every day is secretly in love), and (spoiler) that the boy is an alien being from far, far away.
We finally learn that Earth will be destroyed the next day by two mad dictators, one of whom will fire a burrowing thermonuclear device which will fall into the ocean and tunnel into the Earth’s crust, destroying the planet. This will cause a rift in space-time that creates a thirty-six hour time loop, which the alien/boy will then repeatedly use to visit Earth before its destruction so that it can study humanity. The story closes with the alien saying that this will be its last trip, and Tammy responds (uniquely) by going to track down the man who is in love with her.
This has an intriguing first half, but the more that is revealed the less engaging it becomes. Not bad overall, though.
*** (Good). 4,700 words. Story link.

Egoli by T. L. Huchu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Egoli by T. L. Huchu (African-futurism, 2020) is an autobiographical piece about an old Shona1 woman which is told in an almost stream-of-consciousness second person:

You remember [Grandfather Panganayi] was proud of that house, the only one in the compound with a real bed and fancy furniture, whose red floor smelled of Cobra and whose whitewashed walls looked stunning in the sunlight compared to the muddy colours of the surrounding huts, just as he was proud of the wireless he’d purchased in Fort Victoria when he was sent there for his training. Through his wireless radio with shiny knobs that no one but he was allowed to touch, the marvels of the world beyond your village reached you via shortwave from the BBC World Service, and because you didn’t speak English, few of you did, the boys that went to school, not you girls, Grandfather Panganayi had to translate the words into Shona for you to hear. In one of those news reports, it was only one of many but this one you still remember because it struck you, they said an American—you do not remember his name—had been fired into the sky in his chitundumuseremusere and landed on the moon.

This is the first of many cultural and technological changes that we see her live through, and in the rest of the piece we see her get married, have children (who later go to work in the egoli, gold mines, of South Africa), and eventually get a mobile phone—something that opens up the world to her (she learns English through online comics, and receives weather reports and farming advice that help her make the most out of her crops).
The story (spoiler) finally morphs from a contemporary piece to an SFnal one when she looks up at the southern night sky and sees a steadily moving dot of light—a spaceship taking her grandson to mine the asteroid belt.
An absorbing story of generational social and technological change, told from an African viewpoint.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.

1. According to Wikipedia most Shona people live in Zimbabwe.

Ocean by Steven Utley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ocean by Steven Utley (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the female narrator, who has “flippers and gills now”, poisoned by the spines of a sea urchin—but she escapes its effects by surfacing and becoming a flying creature.
The next section describes an ongoing struggle she is having with a man who is either (a) interfering with her (possibly prosthetic) body, or (b) operating her controls (she may be a spaceship), or (c) she is a personality living in a ship’s computer. Later we learn (spoiler) that it is the latter, and that she is on a generation ship where everyone died apart from her. When she got old she uploaded into the ship’s circuits/memory, and at that point sensed a malevolent entity.
The story ends with some sort of reckoning.
Trying to work out what was going on while reading this story was like wading through mud.
– (Awful). 2,700 words. Story link.

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the death (“the inexorable termination of his earthly existence”) of the necromancer Avalzaunt, and his subsequent entombment:

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again into the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection.
On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorem that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life.
After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.  p. 83

I guess you’ll either like this mannered, discursive, and droll stuff (as I did) or you won’t. If you are in the former group then the rest of the story will treat you of an account of how Avalzaunt waits for a ghoul pack to break into his tomb to release him, swears them into thraldom, and then seeks out the sustenance his post-life body now requires—human blood and gore. During these depredations Avalzaunt becomes more and more swollen as the undead can neither digest nor excrete “the foul and loathly sustenance whereon they feed”.
Eventually, after working his way through several of his former apprentices, and preying on the fat monks of Cambora, he is (spoiler) finally stopped by the silver knife-wielding abbot in an Grand Guignol ending that sees everything Avalzaunt has consumed spew out of his body (think of a bloodier and messier version of Monty Python’s Mr Cresote sketch).
I suspect many will find this an overwritten and ridiculous story, but I thought it was an entertaining pastiche of Smith’s work.1
*** Good. 3,600 words. Story link.

1. Ted White’s introduction states:

Lin Carter, working from Clark Ashton Smith’s extensive legacy of notes, outlines, lists of titles and story-fragments, has collaborated posthumously with Smith (who died in 1961), creating new stories—two of which appeared in the briefly-revived Weird Tales, and the third, “The Scroll of Morloc”, here (October, 1975). Here is the fourth.

I suspect the whole (or most of the) story is probably Carter’s apart from the plot idea.

Tooniverse Telemarketer by Rudy Rucker

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tooniverse Telemarketer by Rudy Rucker (Asimov’s SF, January–February 2022) opens with Dora Schreck, (who is married to Max) dealing with the most recent of a number of irritating telemarketing calls the house AI has let through. We then learn that (a) Max is suffering from Axle-8, a disease that apparently originated in sub-space, and (b) the house AI has budded a daughter who, while working for the neighbours, sent their dog to sub-space. The daughter AI later turns up in the form of a dog house after Dora trims her own house AI’s tendrils to reduce its consciousness.
Further wackiness follows, including the death of Max, during which he oozes ectoplasm (“smeel code”) that enters Dora. This brings Max’s consciousness back to life inside of Dora, and the daughter AI then takes them to sub-space where they find the dog. There they learn that the irritating telemarketer who features throughout the story is hiding inside the dog, and is an alien recruiting Earth folks for a Galactic Congress.
These events are so bizarre, and the story told in so larky a tone, it is hard to sustain any interest in what is going on.
– (Awful). 4,250 words.

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can’t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I’m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can’t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don’t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.

That’s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark is headed to Gog’s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a crèche run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:

I won an astronaut’s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don’t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, “NO!”
Without fail. Every time. And I’m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn’t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can’t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal/fish/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground—to their death—seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them—they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla’s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla’s father wake them up—their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus’s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.