Tag: 2021

The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Power of 3 by Anna Tambour (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) starts off with an alternative take on the Three Little Pigs story that ends (spoiler) with the pig beating the wolf to death. The other two fairy tales are also different versions: the second is a long and rambling Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Goldilocks is a ferret, and we get far, far too much family backstory about the bears; the third is an overlong and overwritten Aladdin story.
I initially thought this one must have come from the slush pile but apparently the writer is a World Fantasy Award finalist. You would never guess from the likes of this incontinent blather:

Mid, uh, Mama Bear knew more than she let on. She knew what he was doing, but sometimes this life was all too much for her who was now just a low-class sneaky nomad, by, she reminded herself, compassionate choice.
For after all, what did she need him for? Or any him? She’d always been as independent as her mother, and her mother’s mother, and all mama bears from the first to, as proper time would have it, eternity.
But she was a soft touch, and when he came a-begging with no malice in his eyes about her cub, she let him graze beside her in the blueberry patch.
And by the time she heard bushes rustle behind, and saw him chuffing the cub along in protective panic, it was almost too late.
When he told her his story in her all too easily found den, it was too late. Her compassion, that thing more useless to a mama bear than plastic wrap for freshness—that extraneous to needs and able to damage you if you don’t throw it away thing—that thing compassion had snuck into her heart and lodged there.  p. 47

Oh dear. The indignity of being rummaged (and the pathetic, hopefilled thrill). Lifted up high, my spout scoops air laden with fragrances—oatmeal soap, some supermarket shampoo; ohh er! a whiff of Terre d’Hermès perfume for men but always in a place like this, worn by a woman who wants to be seen as casually rich and certainly independent; its price is not just for the name but the story that it’s been created by a ‘great nose’. But trust me. My nose says—and do I have a nose!—it’s a mix of citronella candle and spray-on insect repellent with added pepper for irritation. The smell physically hurts my nostrils, tingles on my skin, and if I had a dog it would make my dog sneeze and run from me. And I’m quite convinced it would ward off swarms of bugs. No one should wear this, especially if you love dogs.  p. 48

Less is more.
– (Awful). 4,600 words. ParSec website.

Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first “Gunbelt Highway” passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6 (2052), Orbit 2 (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which in turn describe a stretch of road, two different songs, a space traffic route, a piece of malware, a TV movie, an account of the Biafran War, and a western adventure novella. As you read through these wikis, there are inconsistencies in the history they describe, something that is developed when the next wiki discusses a sentient meme:

Bentley (and others) also stress that the Gunbelt Highway Effect is far more insidious than the other described phenomena, in several key ways. One, its effect is often scattershot and piecemeal, rather than revolving around a single articulable fact. Two, it not only acts to change or invert verifiable historical details, it often seems to function retroactively, altering, mutating and even cross-pollinating the ‘prior strata’ of axiomatic information upon which any verification of said details depends. As such, the effect seems to possess an acausal property, which Bentley variously calls ‘quantum memetics’ or ‘memetic relativity’, behaving contrary to chronological or linear progression, with meaning and significance shifting depending on the objective position of the observer. Three, it not only affects a modification of collective psychology, but also of hard (usually digital) data.  p. 15-16.

Later on in the story this meme is traced back to science fiction in a droll passage:

In “The Primate Pool” (2098), Bell controversially traces the ideas of skeuomophic resonance and quantum memetics back to the pulp fiction mass produced during the 20th century. He suggests that the “heavy lifting” of human cultural development has occurred, not in the deliberate field of philosophy, with its “scrupulous laboratory condition”, but “in the wild”, without oversight or adequate containment, in works of science fiction and speculative fiction. While a significant portion of science fiction has been “purposefully prescient” and has often accurately predicted many aspects of what was deemed ‘the future’, Bell argues that the vast majority of works in the genre have been produced “like wildfire, almost at random, without peer review, and usually with a throw-away or wilfully disposable intent. Words were a base currency, squandered with spendthrift glee, with no thought for the exchange rate, or the infinite variations of idea they could generate”. Bell describes the authors of the genre, often producing frantically on demand to meet publishing deadlines and pay-by-the-word counts, as “toiling like the aphoristic infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, generating incalculable quantities of ideas purely for the purpose of escapist entertainment, without regard for the pernicious durability or half-life of those ideas”.
Bell draws a clear distinction between the small coterie of “responsible speculative authors” who conscientiously pursued the development of prescient scientific and sociopolitical concepts, and the “now largely anonymous legion of hacks and jobbing writers” who wrote “with flagrant abandon” to mass-manufacture prodigious quantities of consumable entertainment, the equivalent of “fast food giants churning out food substitutes that favoured short-term gratification over nourishment, or pre-regulation plastics manufacturers overstuffing cultural and mental landfills”.  p. 16

This idea of a changing or tampered-with history is examined once more using the biography of the previously mentioned Biafran War writer but, by the time I finished the story, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. The central conceit, and the changing events, are also buried under far too many words—the story would benefit from being shorter and more focussed (especially at the beginning, where it takes far too long to get going).
** (Average). 7,600 words. ParSec website.

Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta

Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with an intriguing short hook before becoming a long description of the narrator’s friend Herbert, a childhood prodigy who is blunt to the point of rudeness with other people. We see this play out in various scenes from Herbert’s childhood, mostly at school, from which he eventually gets expelled. Later in life he gets married, but his wife subsequently divorces him because of the many experiments he undertakes at home.
After more than four thousand words of back-story about Herbert (about half the length of this piece) we eventually get to the science fiction, when he visits the narrator’s house and states that he has managed to make one of his mice disappear but can’t replicate the experiment. Then Herbert vanishes while the pair are in the garden.
Years pass. The narrator’s business thrives and his children grow up. One day, while he is looking in an old book, the narrator sees Herbert in a photograph taken in 1913 (fifty years earlier). Further investigation reveals the man in the photograph invented a revolutionary steam engine and wrote a treatise about time as a fourth dimension.
These discoveries drive the narrator to teach himself science and investigate Herbert’s inventions but, eventually, he realises that his intellect isn’t up to the task. Then a young schoolteacher arrives in town and takes an interest but, at the end of the story, he also vanishes.
I was a bit perplexed at why this story was selected for publication—it isn’t structured like a modern work (the long section at the start detailing Herbert’s character and history feels like something from H.G. Wells), the time-travel idea is unoriginal, and there is virtually no story beyond a couple of people vanishing. Or any resolution. Not only is the story set in 1963, it feels like it was written then too. All that said, I’ve read worse in pro SF magazines.1
(Mediocre). 8,200 words. ParSec website.

1. The writer is Ukrainian, so English is perhaps her second language, but the copy-editor should have asked her to get rid of some of those commas and simplify some of the sentences:

That morning when Herbert, a good friend of mine, came to me, again, the third time that week, was the most usual Tuesday morning one could ever imagine. His theories did not let him sleep at night, which happened pretty often, but this time everything was different. This time it was real.
Since early childhood, I was his only friend and the most appreciative listener—in all honesty, I didn’t always understand what he was saying and what he was even talking about, but, unlike other people, I didn’t have anything against it.
I met Herbert on my first day at school. Those huge thick glasses he watched the world through made his eyes look even bigger than they were and a little goggled. But even without them, he looked pretty weird, which did not do him any good in high school. He was different from all the rest of the children, too different to be part of the crowd and remain unnoticed wherever he went. Frankly speaking, it never mattered to him, just like everything else- everything but science.  p. 32

Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) is set in the world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (now out of copyright), and takes place five years after Winston Smith’s interrogation, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Thought Police. The story opens with Smith drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, and watching a news program about Number One (the leader of the enemy state Eastasia). Then he recognises a man sitting behind him, and realises it is Syme, who previously worked with Smith in the Research Department until Syme was unpersonned, disappeared. Syme begins talking to Smith, and tells him that he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Shetland but was released early.
During the pair’s subsequent conversation Smith finds out that Syme is going back to his old job (Syme notes his ex-colleagues are still working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary), before they are interrupted by events on the screen, which shows Eastasian people protesting against Number One—an unprecedented event. Smith, Syme and the rest of the café’s patrons join in with shouts of “Down with Number One!”, cries similar to those they would normally make during the Two Minute Hate.
After Syme leaves, Smith starts walking home, only to be accosted by the Thought Police and bundled into a car. Sitting in the back is O’Brien, the man who tortured and psychologically broke Smith in Room 101. Smith tells O’Brien to get it over with (Smith expects to be executed, and has done for the last five years) but O’Brien says a worse fate awaits him: Smith subsequently spends several days in a rubber cell withdrawing from his alcohol addiction.
O’Brien then sends for Smith (spoiler):

‘Why have you brought me here?’ Winston asked.
O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose, and looked at Winston with the intense, unspoken sympathy of their first exchanged glance, long ago. It was as if the arrest, the torture, the long interrogation and indoctrination, and the room that Winston could—with some effort—avoid thinking about, had never happened.
‘I am engaged,’ said O’Brien, ‘in a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the Party in Airstrip One, and hopefully in the whole of Oceania. You have a small but important part to play in this conspiracy. Will you join me?’
Winston’s mug rattled as he put it down. A cold sweat broke from his every pore. It was possible that this was a test of his loyalty. It was also possible that O’Brien—the manipulator, the torturer, the inquisitor, the provocateur—was after all an enemy of the Party! In either case, it was best to play along. If he did not, he was unlikely to leave this place alive. He could always gather what information he was able to, and denounce O’Brien to the Thought Police at the first opportunity.  p. 22

In the rest of this long section, O’Brien unveils a conspiracy which involves many of the Thought Police, and he also provides Smith with an account of what life was like under Socialism at the end of the WWII. He then reveals that Smith is one of the Windrush generation (a black immigrant from Jamaica). O’Brien finally adds that there are other people who can remember what it was like at the end of the war, and takes Smith to meet some soldiers.
The last part of the story sees O’Brien and Smith go to an underground shelter where members of the military are in the process of mounting a coup. During the visit a black officer called Haynes gives Smith an account of the various flash points and insurrections in Oceania before the pair ask him to be the Minister of Truth in the new provisional government (“political reasons in the Americas [mean] that at least one of the Ministers in the new [Airstrip One] government should be a Negro.”) Then, during this conversation, there is an attack on the bunker by forces that are still loyal to Oceania. After the shoot-out Haynes is dead, and Syme appears from the smoke as the leader of the rebels who have saved Smith and O’Brien from the loyalist attackers. The revolution succeeds, and Smith then becomes Minister of Truth.
The first half or so of this is quite well done, but the later insertion of contemporary political issues (Windrush, racial strife in America) completely derails any suspension of disbelief, and seems like little more than a facile black-washing of Orwell’s novel (racial conflict is mentioned in the story but is not addressed in any meaningful or significant way).
A game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,000 words. ParSec website.

Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) has as its narrator a woman called Mercedes, who lives beside a stargate on a future Earth:

This part of the world is a landscape of steps, a white stone hill two miles wide and one mile high. Eight thousand steps with a hundred flights and platforms. At the bottom lies a human city, a ramshackle shanty thing.
At the top are the sky-high silver pillars of the Tannhauser Gate, the beautiful gate, the one we Earther soldiers tried so hard, so very damned hard, to reach.
How I hate that gate. Yet here I am, living in its shadow. Most visitors climb the centre regions of the steps. The aliens come down and the replica men go up, because now they are free they can do what they want. Them, but not us.
Cytheran guards keep everything peaceful, which is nice of them considering they made us rebuild the place when the war was over.  p. 4

The story opens with Mercedes meeting a woman called Riay coming back through the gate (we later find out she is physically altered, two elbows on each arm, three fingers on her hand, etc.). She tells Mercedes she has come back to help, and Mercedes refers to her as a “priestess” at one point. We also get some back story about the war against the aliens, and some detail about the Cytheran guards that now patrol the Tannhauser gate (such as the fact they float just above the ground as they move around). We also learn that few humans are allowed to use the gates, although this does not stop many travellers coming to petition the aliens.
We later learn more about Mercedes and Jonni’s relationship (including that she is emotionally dependent on him) before three aliens arrive to see the site of the battle at the gate. Mercedes is on the point of telling them that she was a combatant when a man called Blascard arrives demanding a minnesang from the aliens—a key that will let him use the gate and travel to the thousand worlds on the other side. When he continues to make a nuisance of himself, and subsequently gets too close to the aliens, a Cytheran guard teleports him away. When Blascard later returns to the gate, he demands a key from Riay instead (one of the few humans who has been allowed to use the gate), but she offers him only the chance to learn from her.
The penultimate part of the story (spoiler) sees Jonni offer water to a group of petitioners making their way up the steps to the gate. Mercedes speaks to the group and identifies herself as Sergeant Mercedes Gantl, the last survivor of the Fighting Ninth, the military unit that attacked the gate. Then she realises that the group are Neos, ex-military who intend doing the same. Mercedes and Jonni watch their attack: Jonni gets caught in the crossfire and is badly wounded. After all the Neos are killed, a Cytheran comes over to Mercedes, who is holding a dying Jonni in her arms:

I heard a furious static burst and a hundred voices spoke in my mind.
—this was never our intent
Never.
Unforseen
—we know the difference
Unwished
Unwanted
All our <untranslatable> weep with you
He was never—
—he would ever have been—
Welcomed
A final Cytheran slid aside like a leaf on the wind and I was at the gate. The pillars went up forever, the space between a silver-grey curtain like soft rain. Beyond it lay everything we had been denied and now they were letting us through. Jonni was his own minnesang, and today, somehow, he was mine too. If I wanted, I could go through.
—no, he is only himself—
You are your own song—
Changed now.
—each becomes their own minnesang.
If you want— p. 9

The Cytheran then takes the dying Jonni out of her arms to take him through the gate, and tells her to come back when she is ready.
The last section of the story shows a changed Mercedes, no longer resentful but someone who now helps others. A year later she goes back to the gate and passes through. She spends a thousand years travelling on the other side of the gate before returning to find she has been gone for three days. She discovers that Blascard is really a teacher, helping those left behind to get through the gate. Mercedes and Blascard and Riay team up to work to that end.
There isn’t really much of a story here—it is more a series of events—but it has an intriguing setting, convincing description and characterisation, and a transcendent ending. Stock stuff maybe, but well put together. I thought this was a pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Parsec website.

The Lichyard by Harrison Valley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lichyard by Harrison Valley (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with a man called Emil carrying the corpse of a man called Taff to the Lichyard. They squabble along the way:

“Why’re you complaining? You paid me to get you to the Lichyard as fast as possible!”
“I didn’t realize I’d be staring into the sun the whole time.”
“What do you want from me? It’s evening, and the Lichyard’s in the east.” There are two voices but one set of footsteps. “Besides, the sun can’t hurt you. You don’t even have eyes.”
“Yet it is blinding.”
“And?”
A man walks from an alleyway, talking over his shoulder.
Lashed to his back, a grey and dusty burden bounces limply with each step. A human skull lolls over toward the man’s ear, and from between decayed teeth come the words, “I’m dead. Don’t I deserve compassion?”  p. 29

En route Emil loses the three coins he needs to put on Taff’s eyes and mouth when he buries him, and so he comes up with a plan to steal those from another corpse when they get to the graveyard. However, when they arrive, matters play out differently (spoiler): Emil buries Taff without the coins but, when the undertaker arrives, he changes his mind. However, when Emil digs down to retrieve the body he finds it has disappeared. Then the undertaker is shot by an old person in a tree, and Emil is told to take the corpse back to where he lost the coins.
There are a couple of good images and scenes here (the quarrel at the beginning, the Lichyard, etc.) but these haven’t been turned into a coherent whole.
* (Mediocre). 2,500 words. Parsec website.

Tesla on the Grass, Alas by Esther M. Friesner

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tesla on the Grass, Alas by Esther M. Friesner (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) appears to be about a man who talks to a woman called Gertrude before (spoiler) turning some sort of ray gun on himself—but I’m not entirely sure (it is written in prose that, from the opening paragraphs, verges on the impenetrable):

What there was in her that was beautiful was what I saw. No ray that I could make could be her elegant equal yet I knew the one I made would be the equalizing force that was forced between us, between her and me. She was my taunting point of equilibrium, reached and unreachable. Her mass obeyed the Newtonian law that thus far in my life I had risen above in all things except the shackling demands of gravity. It drew me to her, helpless once I wandered within her field and found that I was drawn despite me to that quality in women which I previously found myself unable to stomach, their stomachs, the rolling terrain of mountainous flesh that offered me the threat of avalanche–inspired entombment with each embrace.  p. 40

– (Awful). 1,050 words. Parsec website.

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tick Bit by Matthew Goldberg (The Arcanist, June 2021) opens with this:

The ticks dropped down from the trees thick as sleet. I’d been out hunting with my brother, Paul, when it happened. They fell in great heaps, burrowing into us, tangling themselves up in our hair, our clothes. We had to shake them from our boots. Out they spilled, endless grains of living sand scouring our toes for blood. We found them days later under our armpits, the backs of our knees, the crannies of our earlobes. And then the telltale bullseye would emerge, hot and red. I’d gotten tick bites before, but never like this. I was a feast for an entire generation.

Subsequently the brothers are repelled at the thought of eating meat (or diary), and their similarly affected father—who persists—ends up in hospital due to a physical reaction.
We then see that ticks have spread all over the world, as has the condition that has affected the narrator’s family. The resultant rejection of animal products causes the collapse of those industries and a forced shift to a vegan diet.
The story finishes with the two brothers at the local creek. When they hear a rustling noise they don their ponchos as they think it is an approaching swarm of ticks, but (spoiler) it turns out to be a female moose and her calf coming down to drink—the first time that animal has been seen in the area for decades.
This is quite good as far as it goes, but it’s a very slight piece—an if-this-goes-on SF story compressed into a literary vignette. If this idea had been used in an genre SF story it would probably have been much longer, had multiple point of views,1 and would telescope through time from the beginning of the change to the end.
**+ (Average to Good)

1. The Grand Guignol version would have a thread which has an abattoir worker killing animals, being laid off, hitting rock bottom, and then returning to the factory to shoot himself in the head with a bolt gun.

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler (F&SF, January-February 2021) opens with the narrator recounting a childhood memory of the day that the king and queen came through his village; the narrator’s sister was given a disk with the king’s symbol, a red dragon, on one side.
The story then moves to the current day, where we get some brief information about the village and the narrator’s marriage plans before learning that the king has gone to war. The army subsequently passes through town, and the narrator and his friend Henry are recruited.
The pair endure a long, hard march to the sea and at one point the company shelter in a cave. When the narrator goes to relieve himself he finds a passage that takes him back to the surface. He sleeps there and, when he wakes the next day, he sees the skeleton of a dragon (“the king’s dragon”) embedded in a nearby rock face. The commander sees it as a sign.
When they finally arrive at the coast (spoiler) the narrator decides to desert and go back to his village. En route, he wonders what he’ll tell his family and neighbours on his return:

I would have to explain to the village why I was back and everyone else gone, and it couldn’t be a story that made me a coward, a deserter, and a man who didn’t love his king. I wasn’t yet sure how this story would go, but I wasn’t really worried about that. I had twelve whole days to work it out and I could already see its bones.  p. 256

I can understand why a departing editor (who is off to write his own tales) might use this as the final piece in their last ever issue, but the arc of this story seems pointless: young man goes to war, changes mind, goes home. Littering it with dragon images doesn’t much improve that.
* (Mediocre). 3,000 words.

Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2021) has a scientist studying dreams meet her future self while having one. She is subsequently told that the dream continuum stretches through space and time and can be used to see the past and future. Future scientist then tells her the eighteen principles she needs to complete her work and earn a Nobel Prize, much wealth, and fame. However, (spoiler) before future scientist can finish her spiel, far-future beings1 interrupt the process and tell the present day scientist it would be too hazardous for the people of her time to have that knowledge.
This is an entertaining enough squib but it is slight, and doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it too much: how would the future scientist come into existence if the far-future beings intervene?
** (Average). 2,100 words.

1. The far-future beings sound like the same kind of deal as The Unchanging in his story Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999), reviewed here recently.